Seeds of Peace is a long-standing non-profit organization that brings together young people from conflict zones to engage in dialogue and learn leadership skills. Eva Armor is its Chief Impact Officer and Vishnu Swaminathan is its Chief Operating Officer.
In this highly polarized era, so many of us seek but struggle to find healthy and effective ways to engage colleagues, classmates, or even family on deeply divisive issues—from Israel, Gaza, and campus protests, to abortion and immigration.
We often focus on the arguments without thinking about the part that is just as important (if not more so): how we interact with each other. How we engage communicates our values, defines our culture, and may even determine how successful we are in advancing the issues we care about.
This is especially true, and also most difficult, when the stakes are high — and when lives are on the line and we are confronted with horrific images, it is seemingly impossible. At times like these, anyone who disagrees with us is not only wrong but fundamentally insufferable. However, this is the time when we need to stay more connected to each other's humanity.
Otherwise, the only path is deeper disconnection, dehumanization of the other, and violence. We cannot build institutions or societies based on care and community by shaming or screaming at each other. We cannot expect others to see our full humanity when we deny them theirs.
For this Seeds of Peace for more than 30 years, it has brought young people together across diverse lines from the United States and more than 25 other countries. More than 8,000 of these young leaders have spent part of the summer at the Seeds of Peace camp, engaging face-to-face in the hard work of dialogue.
Dialogue is a way to better understand ourselves, each other and the world. It is not discussion, negotiation or group therapy (although it can be therapeutic). Perhaps most importantly, it is also not an end goal in itself, but rather a first step and then an ongoing process for taking informed action.
For those of us looking for ways to engage others in our lives productively on difficult topics, here are three proven strategies to help you build bridges and make interactions more constructive and less destructive.
Find ways to make a connection.
Connection is an antidote to division and violence. Instead of avoiding or attacking those you disagree with, look for opportunities to dig deeper. Do your own work first. Enter conversations with genuine curiosity and practice ways to regulate your body and emotions in order to remain open to listening, even when you encounter viewpoints with which you strongly disagree. Watch out for defenses and deflections. look for ways to align, even when you disagree. And do all this without fear: you will either validate your perspective or hear something new that pushes you to a deeper understanding.
The hard work of remaining in dialogue with those with whom we share little in common and sitting with our deep discomfort builds empathy and connection that prevents demonization.
Move beyond the sides.
Polarization usually results in pressure to take sides: being “for” one group requires being “against” the other. The goal of dialogue is not to validate all sides, but to increase our ability to hold multiple truths and redefine “sides” altogether. It enhances the way we act without diminishing the gravity or urgency of the moment. How can we align and organize around shared values, drawing on the strength of our diverse identities? How can this bring us closer to creating safer and more just communities?
Use your imagination.
Any path forward will require us to first imagine beyond our current reality. Seeds of Peace creates spaces like our camp that allow us to imagine and practice a version of the future that has yet to be born. This is messy and often challenging, but it also expands our ideas of what is possible and inspires people to work to make it happen in their communities. As our graduates stated when they returned home after experiencing life together, “We refuse to accept what is when we know what could be.”
We are in a moment that defines character and values. How we interact now will set the course for what comes next, and solutions have the greatest chance of success when they are based on dialogue and mutual respect.
“The desire not to have to face the other is an illusion,” wrote one of our Middle East graduates recently. “And I hope this realization becomes a source of strength rather than weakness. That inevitably, we have to find a way to make this work for all of us. Otherwise, it won't work for any of us.”
from our partners at https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/seeds-of-peace-dialogue-op-ed-1235018580/