 Hello, and welcome to this special episode of The Peace Frequency. I'm your host, Darren Cambridge. For those of you who are not familiar with The Peace Frequency, it is a podcast series brought to you by the United States Institute of Peace, where we tap into the stories of people across the globe who are making peace possible and finding ways to create a world without violence. You can learn more about The Peace Frequency. Check out previous episodes at ThePeaceFrequency.com. As you also probably know, this past Monday, Martin Luther King Day was celebrated and recognized throughout the United States. And this—and on Tuesday, we launched a special three-episode Facebook Live series exploring the legacy and the strategic insights of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., more specifically the Six Steps of Nonviolent Social Change, sometimes referred to as the Six Steps of Kingian Nonviolence, that King laid out in his 1963 book, Why We Can't Wait. So our three guests for today, our final episode in this series, our guest are David Jensen, who is a veteran of the U.S. civil rights movement, co-creator of the Kingian Nonviolence Curriculum, and chair and founding trustee of the Institute for Human Rights and Responsibilities. So, David, I want to thank you for joining us on today's episode. Happy to be here. Second, we will be joined in a little bit by Abdullah Handawe, who is an Egyptian activist and political commentator. So again, just in a few minutes, he'll be joining us. And then, third, we're also going to hear from two dialogue experts from USIP, Alison Malofsky and Ariana Barth, both of whom are the main instructors in USIP's online course Designing Community-Based Dialogue. And then, finally, I want to welcome all of our viewers who are tuning in on Facebook Live. We welcome your questions and comments throughout the show. So at any time that you have something that you want to share, you can just type it in the comments section underneath this video. And then, two of my colleagues who are here off-camera, Nick Zaremba and Stephen Ruder, they're going to be moderating the conversation. And when a question is posed, they're going to let me know, and we'll be able to ask it on your behalf. Also, there may be some questions that I ask to our guests, but I'd also love for you all to respond to as well. So we'd like to see that sharing happening amongst you all as well. So those of you who've watched the last couple episodes, you know that on Tuesday and Wednesday, I provided a brief overview of what these six steps of nonviolent social change are that King and others champion during the civil rights movement. But, as I mentioned, one of our guests was a co-creator of the King and nonviolent curriculum, worked directly with King and other civil rights leaders in using the strategy towards success in the civil rights movement. So, David, I actually want to hand this over to you for today's episode. And could you explain to us what are these six steps of nonviolent social change that King articulated and that you and others employed during the civil rights movement? Well, there's two tracks in this story. The first track is that the popular notion by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and most peace groups in the United States in the 1950s was four steps that Gandhi had articulated. And when Dr. Lafayette and I began to analyze Dr. King's books and our experiences with him, we began to see that there were six steps and that one of the things that separates nonviolence from many other, not all, but many other instances of conflict management is the fact that reconciliation is a major step. And just as in surgery, the surgeon provides sutures and stitches and so on to help heal the wound, the nonviolent movement does the same thing. And we'll illustrate that at some point during the discussion today. But the second thing is that many of the efforts to use nonviolent action and at toppling the dictatorship and leave nothing in the way of capacity building to build a new society or a new social order to replace the unjust order. And so Gandhi and King both emphasized the need for this kind of reconciliation step and it kind of took two dimensions, the constructive program which was building up what ought to be and secondly the direct action program which was more political and confrontational about the issues and frame the issues and formalized them. So we look at the six steps as a methodology and a strategy that in fact some would say you could be armed with nonviolence naked in a shower because you have this methodology of six steps in your head and in your heart and in your emotional and psychological being where you can react and respond according to what's required in that moment and that it doesn't require instrumentalities and extensions and equipment and so on. You have the capacity as a human being to develop this utilization of the six steps. So I'm really excited about it because reconciliation differentiates most of the other methods of conflict management from the six steps but very quickly an overview of the six steps are first information gathering which is the quality of the information you start a campaign determines the quality of the outcome. Secondly is the education step which has also a dual track one is the developmental leadership and the third and the second is the preparation of the community and the broader society for understanding what's coming. See very often we'll have people take direct action without any preparation of the society in terms of what to expect from this and so what we're trying to do is say that 90% of the conflicts can be settled in information gathering and education stage 10% are going to have to go further in terms of preparation. So the third step is is what we call a personal commitment. Now there was a time back in the 50s that this was termed largely through a misinterpretation of Gandhi's meaning of self-purification but that had a very significant self-righteous tone to it and that was not consistent with the Kenyan movement especially as it developed in Montgomery and then later in Birmingham and so on so forth where it became known as long-term preparation. Preparation for the long-term struggle and we could go into that in quite detailed but we can't do that in this form. The fourth step has to do with negotiation. Now many people in our society are oriented to negotiation as an adversarial process. In non-violence negotiation is where we have to understand the opposition's point of view so that we could almost argue their pace better than they can and different people play different roles in negotiations in the civil rights movement with the Kenyan non-violence philosophy and it was very important that they have this capacity in fact we train people to prepare social drama for negotiation and at the last minute we have them switch sides to see if they can to see if they can argue the other side is articulate as they want to argue the proponent side. Interesting. So because we have to help people see that there's a larger understanding going on in negotiation and it's not adversarial which also incorporates the fact that all of the six steps are intertwined like the pistons and the V6 engine they're all firing at the same time and in negotiation you're doing information gathering you're doing education yes you're doing personal commitment you're doing education and negotiation etc etc so then the fifth step which is the sixth step which is reconciliation and the fifth step which is to understand how to assert yourself in direct action not in reaction to the opposition but in response to what the issue is you're concerned about so the direct action step actually comes in the fifth step of a six step process and so often we will see people in our society who will have the direct action step but they skipped over the first four steps and therefore they don't know why it doesn't work well they didn't spend any time with their people I once had an experience I took a group of ministers concerned about Cuba to a republican congressman my republican congressman at that time and we were scheduled for a half hour and we spent two hours and some other very progressive ministers said how did this happen how did they get an appointment well they had spent 10 years cursing right the representative and blaming him for all the problems and we all know that the history 50 years with Cuba is is is cloaked in all kinds of problems but you see they couldn't communicate with a congressman and yet who's your representative in Congress if you don't educate them if you don't spend time with them and you know you're not able to talk with them so this group of 10 people learns some very important things but then finally the reconciliation step and that's what's so significant and we're going to talk further about that as we go along today but I would have to say that the sex steps are the methodology and the strategy of non-violence and that you can be equipped with the skills and information related to those functions so you can handle conflict and violent situations great thank you David that was great I really appreciate you kind of walking us through those steps and you articulated really well how this is an approach to engage in all types of conflict it's not just something that if you are part of a nonviolent movement that it's relevant it's just personal conflict all those types of things I think these steps as you say can apply to that which is really really helpful if you can now zoom out for us a little bit and share with us how the kingian non-violence curriculum came to be I've heard a story perhaps from you perhaps from some others that I think on King's last night of his life at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis he was having a conversation with some of the other organizers and activists obviously were part of the movement and there was a desire to quote institutionalize and internationalize what had been learned during the civil rights movement about creating social change and that that conversation may have been the start of the impetus for okay well how do we do that and I like that concept because I think in many ways USIP is an embodiment of that these principles that you are these steps that you just talked about and how to manage conflict without violence but could you tell us the kingian non-violence curriculum that you and Bernard Lafayette have put together and advanced over these many years how did it come to be well again it's a two-track process first of all Bernard Lafayette at the time that Dr. King was assassinated was also the national program director and director of the Poor People's Campaign and that has significance which hopefully we'll talk about a little bit later but he was leaving a staff meeting in Memphis flying to Washington DC and Dr. King said to him Bernard we have to our next movement has to be beyond the Poor People's Campaign to institutionalize and internationalize non-violence and by the time Bernard landed in Washington DC Dr. King had been assassinated and so that took things another direction and the second track has to do with when Bernard Lafayette and I started working as a team in 1964 in the summer when we made a decision that our job was to what we call leading from the rear our job was to develop leadership who could step forth now there were other people on the staff who had more interest in media presence and out front charismatic leadership and those people can be valuable too but we decided our role was to develop leadership to train people to do educational leadership development and to help these persons young people high school students etc become assertive for the movement and that way they would be in charge of their own goals and so the two tracks of that are basically on the one hand our choice to lead from the rear and secondly the decision the announcement by Martin Luther King that this is what we need to focus on in the future you see we wanted people after the assassination to have something to talk about and speak to other than just I have a dream speech while that's important and the celebration represented by the march in Washington was important it was not in and of itself a protest march and we could differentiate between protests and movement and so on and so forth in another venue but what we wanted to do is make sure people had access to his philosophy and then the six steps his methodology and his strategy and also we're not making an icon on Martin Luther King he was a leader of an era and there were many many people too many to list right now who contributed to his development Reverend Abernathy's development the leadership team's development of understanding non-violence and its application but the difference is and this is why King Ian is very important was that Martin Luther King was a quick learner and he had poetic skills and he had capacity to speak and articulate things almost beyond the reach of many people and so he characterized what we call the King era and it's funny when we brought out the term King Ian on violence a lot better than I know 30 some years ago there were people in high places who really kind of objected to that and we had to point to the book strength on love after we tried to argue all the rational points of why this was important to the fact that Martin Luther King himself used the term King Ian in the strength of love when he wrote a kind of correlation to Paul's letter to the Corinthians Christians and he said please forgive me if it sounds more King Ian than Paul the Indian well that pretty much settled it because we said we thought we were on solid ground to call it King Ian on violence without at the same time making an icon of a Martin Luther King interesting fascinating story thank you for that speaking to folks who want to learn more about King Ian on violence not just more about the six steps but there's six principles there's pillars of King Ian on violence there's the history behind it there is a free webinar that's being offered next week on January 25th and we're going to send a link out through the Facebook feed for those of you who are interested it's a free 90-minute webinar provided by the organization on earth peace one of the best places to go to learn more about this so if you want to dive deeper into the curriculum into the history that is a good place to start now David before Abdullah joins us in a little bit you talked about King's desire to institutionalize and internationalize non-violence and I alluded to this a little bit earlier that at least I see and others the United States Institute of Peace as part of that vision becoming a reality we have a nonviolent action program here at the U.S. Institute of Peace that works with folks who are fighting against injustice and oppression all over the world and applying different strategies learning from each other so that effort has has begun but you also David were an integral part and voice in putting together the vision for this institute could you tell us a little bit about that story how did the U.S. Institute of Peace come to be who are some of the voices and actors that put forward this vision to make it a substantial part of what the United States seeks to to represent around the world well it certainly is an exciting story and my version it's not the only version I'm sure but I was a graduate student working on my qualifying paper at a cabin 200 miles north of Boston in the winter with eight below zero and Bernard Lafayette called me and he had been a board member of the Peace Academy nonprofit group that advocated for it and he said David the Carter administration based on a bill from Ambassador Young has appointed a commission and they needed a director or deputy director and I can't do it but I recommended you well 24 hours later I'm in Washington DC having driven all night and closed up my friend's cabin and all this kind of stuff and I'm interviewed by the Commission Chair and the Vice Chair Senator Spark Montenaga from Hawaii and James Lowey from St. Louis, Missouri who worked with Bobby Kennedy and we knew from the Community Relations Service but I said when would this start they said well we're going to meet as a commission in the morning so they called me in 9 and 15 in the morning and said you've been hired as a deputy director and I said well when does this start they said yesterday and so on December 20 I'm trying to set up a federal commission with Bill Spencer my colleague who has chosen as executive director during the holidays in Washington DC which was nearly impossible I think it was six weeks before we got paid and anyway the short story is that the first thing we did between Christamson New Year's is gather about 15 people that Bernard Lafayette and I knew as King and Novelis organizers or people who were consistent with the values of those organizers to convene for two days and develop a vision of how this commission could be successful now you have to understand that this bill had been introduced to create a national academy of peace ever since the George Washington administration and of course I have mentioned or I should mention that many of the characterizations of it was a West Point for peacenicks on the Hudson which was kind of a hokey idea and it didn't really pass muster in the Congress so we decided we had to educate the commissioners as to what broader concepts of institutionalization would be and secondly we had to bring together people from so many divergent views to debate and discuss this concept we couldn't just talk to the choir so to speak so we envision instead of traditional congressional hearings 27 public seminars in all parts of the country we've retained these organizers as I forget what we call them associates with a nominal fee of $1,500 to be the organizer of the event in their region and to take the seven questions that the Congress had asked us to respond to such as is this trainable what is the history of this concept etc and to select people from something we grew from the king in the violence movement which was the seven categories of public opinion now some people refer to that today as a spectrum of allies but we had seven categories of public opinion that came from a Catholic layman in the 1850s according to Gandhi in Ireland that represented on any issue you'd have these seven categories so we asked these organizers to bring in the people who were dangerous to this idea and what their opinions were the people who were hostile the people who were unfriendly the people who were negatively neutral the people who were positively neutral the people who were friendly and the people who were our friends so often in the peace movement and the nonviolent movement people only talk to the choir they only talk to the four percent of their friends and maybe to the other four or five percent of their friendly but they don't engage other than in adversarial terms the opposition we applied this concept from that we learned in the civil rights movement so that we had these seven categories as one structure and the seven questions from Congress as the other structure and we put together public seminars that produced 25,000 pages of testimony and by having people some of the most conservative people and some of the most progressive people engaged in this process we created a different kind of dialogue which we're going to talk about later yeah over the question of what should this nation's be in terms of peacemaking and so that is how we succeeded and of course the final bottom line was 52 senators were co-sponsors of the initial legislation and 137 house members and it passed with four abstaining votes I believe in 1984 and president Reagan signed it also interesting is president Reagan's staff had never seen the final report to the commission I had to give him the copy wow wow what a great great story and totally connected as you said to what we want to focus on during today's episode which is this concept of dialogue which is a critical peacebuilding skill that we work on here at usip is a critical skill and various nonviolent social movements and the way that I want to grapple with this idea of dialogue particularly as it pertains to step six and reconciliation is not just an an actual dialogue a community based dialogue process but also the principles and elements of dialogue and how those principles and elements of dialogue are also embodied in the the spirit of a nonviolent movement the the ways in which we act and behave when we engage in a nonviolent movement and before I do that I want to give a nod to our other guests who has joined us now Abdullah Handawi welcome thank you for joining us glad you could be here thank you for inviting me did you get a chance to hear any of the story of usip that david just shared I just heard the very last part of of david's story okay great great well um as you probably heard we're going to jump into the the focus of today's show which is dialogue principles of dialogue and how they relate to nonviolent social movements and I actually want to start off with a quote from dr king's letter from a birmingham jail which if you have not read folks who are watching please read it please listen to it it's an amazing um piece of writing and the quote goes like this too long has our beloved southland been bogged down in the tragic attempt to live in monologue rather than dialogue and quote and so this ties with what you were saying david earlier about how too often people want to speak only to those who already agree with them they want people to be receptive to their monologue and may not be interested in any dialogue and so taking this quote when king talks about monologue versus dialogue what exactly is he talking about when we're talking about dialogue what are we talking about it's a term that I think gets thrown around a lot to describe a lot of different things many of which are not actually a dialogue or a dialogue process and so one of the best ways to wrap our heads around what dialogue is to is to actually contrast it with debate or discussion forms of communication that we may be more familiar with or more comfortable with so let's take a look at a video from one of usip's online courses called designing community-based dialogue and this is a video that contrasts dialogue with other forms of communication like debate and discussion and I think that's going to provide a nice introduction to all of you watching about what we mean here at usip when we talk about dialogue one of the ways to understand dialogue is to compare and contrast it with other engagements around controversial or divisive or divisive topics like discussion or debate let's first look at debate think about a debate you have seen or experienced this could be a presidential debate on television or an informal debate over a meal what's the goal of a debate informal debates the goal is to win in informal conversational debates over controversial issues the goal might be to convince the person with whom you're speaking or those who are listening that you're right what is the goal of dialogue there are different kinds of dialogues that seek different outcomes but generally the goal of dialogue is to increase understanding between groups to find common ground and improve relationships there are no winners and losers in dialogue and because there are no winners and losers you listen and engage differently what do you listen for in a debate if you're trying to win a debate you might listen for holes gaps or weaknesses in the other person's arguments what do you listen for in dialogue if you're trying to increase your understanding you listen for strengths in other perspectives you listen to be truly informed by what another person says so how do you do that well it's not easy it requires active listening and efforts to hear another person as they want to be heard it requires that you silence your inner monologue which leads you to analyze and interpret what another person is saying sometimes forming judgments it's hard work and it requires incredible intentionality you have to want to understand and you have to be open to the possibility that you can learn from another person listening in this way relates to another distinction between dialogue and debate in debate there's a tendency to invest in one's own beliefs dialogue however involves temporarily suspending your beliefs this idea often poses a challenge for participants in dialogue how could I possibly suspend my beliefs that would mean denying who I am and what I hold dear the idea of suspending one's beliefs is really about acknowledging the various filters through which we see the world when we listen information has to pass through our own layers or filters of values and ideologies etc so when we invite participants to suspend their beliefs we're not asking anyone to deny who they are or forget who they are rather we're inviting them to set aside or to open the filters temporarily so we can hear what someone is saying as they want it to be heard the filters will close again because they're a part of who we are we've discussed a few of the many distinctions between dialogue and debate so where does discussion fit discussion is somewhere between dialogue and debate discussion is a process through which participants share different perspectives but it does not necessarily involve the deep listening of dialogue discussion often involves serial monologuing in which a number of people share their perspectives on an issue from this one might leave a discussion feeling more informed saying okay I understand that there are a number of opinions in the room I respect all of these opinions and at the end of the day we can agree to disagree dialogue asks you to dig deeper in dialogue you open yourself to the possibility of being truly changed by what someone shares with you you may leave a dialogue with the same opinion you had when you came but you leave changed by the encounter with others by the stories and the lived experiences shared in the dialogue space unlike debate or other intellectual endeavors dialogue invites emotion and experience dialogue moves you out of the cerebral space of facts and arguments asks you to see the humanity and others connecting through empathy great so that was one of our videos from usip's online course designing community-based dialogues and now I want to turn to you Abdullah first give us all a little bit of a background of yourself you identify as an Egyptian activist I'd love to hear when you gave yourself that identity you feel like you could identify as an activist was there a specific experience where you started wearing that label and then the second question is based off of what we just heard about what dialogue is how it's different from debate and discussion and what the experience is like having been part of a dialogue is dialogue something that as an activist you feel like you've actually been a part of well so a couple of things here first I mean usually the title of the label of an activist is is is is a tricky part because you don't know where your activism really starts and where it ends and if it will end or not my understanding of activism is really committing big part big chunk of your time to help commit your time to help your cause to fight for something you believe in I mean when I say fighting I mean the nonviolent fight of course the idea of committing your your time to a cause but here's the thing I mean now we're talking a lot about dialogue which is an extremely important part of activism when when we talk about dialogue especially in this line of political activism dialogue is really overshadowed unfortunately many parts of I would say many activists and many parts of the world do not really engage in dialogue when they should I think there is a stage at least in my experience back in Egypt when we started the revolution back in 2011 there was a time where we were talking at each other we were not just engaging in dialogue there was no constructive agenda in where do we want our activism to to go if we had understood or valued the the value of dialogue at the time maybe we'd have a better chance but I think many of the Arab Spring revolutions have missed valuing and appreciating dialogue per se did we discuss yes we did we discussed a lot we have thought a lot we talked a lot but mainly we weren't really talking to discuss future or engage in constructive debates unfortunately and and this is self-criticism to many activists and who were taking part in the Arab Spring we weren't engaging in dialogue as it should be we weren't listening to each other we weren't we were not looking at a future in which every one of us is taking part of it many of the political parties including activists maybe because of the lack of experience maybe because of their own agendas maybe for a political aspiration despite the the reason they still at the end of the day did not engage in dialogue as it should be and thus we're seeing lots of of backlashes against these activist movements in the region interesting David what about you reflecting on your experience in the U.S. civil rights movement and the work that you've done with other movements campaigns and activists around the world is dialogue as it's defined in this video something that movements experience whether it be within the movement itself across various allied actors or between the movement and their opponents absolutely one of the things in the king and non-violence course is we teach about the fact that Martin Luther King and others in the movement were Hegelian in their philosophical orientation and that is that they were dialectical and that Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had a research committee that meant monthly over 15 years in New York City and during that set of deliberations there were 10 or 15 people that were part of all of these conversations who differed greatly on every issue and Dr. King's position was to set on the side of the conversation and listen and he would try to identify the different truths that are on this continuum between the dialectical process of the thesis and the antithesis and then at a certain point he would raise the fact that we should analyze this particular truth because in this situation it's a truth and we should look at it and understand it better and from that they would develop a synthesis of the thesis and antithesis and the analysis which became the nonviolent solution to this problem for example it wasn't just an issue of voting rights it was an issue of the right to participate in government and framing it that way provided a very different characterization for the public for government that if you couldn't guarantee the right to participate in government how could you be a democratic society and so this Hegelian process was very important the second thing is this concept interestingly enough has become the most important learnable concept by teenagers being awaiting trial for murder as adults in U.S. prisons when they learn this skill of analyzing conflict and analyzing problems from the dialectical point of view they conclude that they wouldn't have ended up committing murder if they had understood how to do this before so there are great many examples in the civil rights movement the human rights movement of how this was adapted to the street level by people to look at and listen to the various truths in the situation and select those that that were most present in the situation of injustice right right so it's absolutely excellent excellent so there were a couple things that Alison talked about in the video that strike at the kind of spirit of dialogue the elements of dialogue that people are asked to embrace and embody if they want to participate in in a dialogue process and I want to touch on a couple of them dive deeper on a couple of them and I want to provide an analogy to kind of prompt some discussion and so one of the first concepts that she brings up is this idea that dialogue seeks to find common ground amongst the parties who are part of that process and the analogy that I like to use that some of you are probably familiar with is the analogy of the elephant and the four blind people and the way the analogy works is that you have four blind individuals and they're each each asked to approach this thing that is in front of them so the first person walks up and approaches the elephant and touches the tail and when they're asked what is it that is in front of you that person says well it's a broom the second person walks up to the elephant and touches the ear and they're asked what is it that is in front of you and they say oh well no it's a giant thick piece of paper that's what's in front of us the third person approaches the elephant and touches the leg and says no what's in front of us is a giant tree trunk and then the fourth person approaches the elephant and they're asked what is it that is in front of you and they touch the trunk and they say no it's a giant snake that's what's in front of us so they're all touching the same thing but they're feeling and experiencing something very different and in dialogue it's oftentimes referred to as a process or a conversation with a center as opposed to with sides and if these individuals can communicate they can realize that yes it's the same thing that we're touching but we're experiencing it in a variety and feeling a lot of different things from this and conflict is very much the same way that people approach it and touch it in different ways so that they're what they feel and what they experience from that conflict is fundamentally different from somebody else who is actually touching the same the same thing and so how can a conversation and in this case a dialogue be used to help people see the entire elephant as opposed to only the parts that they are able to to touch so Abdullah I want to turn to you using this analogy and this concept of finding common ground that in your experience as an Egyptian activist being part of the revolution and then everything that has followed since then when it comes to the conflict in Egypt are there new perspectives that you've come to learn over the years to get a fuller picture of the conflict so the thing is I agree entirely on bringing up this excellent example the elephant room but the thing is that with with many millions in the street many of them are sporadic the whole movement becomes continuous and the critical mass that once mobilized the movement becomes only an elite for them and and so you see that there is a gap between the leadership of the movement and the actual constituency in the street the protesters the people who have a certain grievance or an injustice and and it is very difficult for these people to get together with them and convince them that they have to see the whole side of the elephant and the center of the concept it is a very exhausting process especially that at the same time you're trying to communicate with your constituency you're also trying to negotiate other alliances and partnerships in the society and also trying to fight a battle with the ruling regime or an elite or your opponent no matter who is it so it becomes a very very exhausting process what do we learn from that I mean obviously how many revolutions do we have to go through in our lives it's it's not something that you would do every year or every at the end of of the quarter so what do we learn here is that there there is there are there are more efforts that has to be exerted in in public education particularly about the ideas of of listening to the other because every one of us as we eloquently explained every one of us so only one angle of the story we didn't have the whole story there was no information available there was no space available for us to talk the only space was available for us to talk was only that the Harir Square in Cairo and that is a pretty small space considering the fact that we had so many topics to cover was very short to define there are many things that we have to talk about but who isn't going to have a chance there were other powers that were more organized than us who were able to seize the chance and were able to I wouldn't call use the word hijacking the revolution or hijacking activism but I would say that they made excellent use of it for their own for their own interests now to go back to your question what do we learn from that I think again we have to exert more efforts and in understanding we have to put a lot of efforts in in in really reversing the process of polarization that happens in society in mass mobilization in cases where a whole country or a whole society is mobilized on something it is always expected to see this case of extreme polarization and labeling and it's either white or black you're either with me or or against me and tensions arise and if people do not really see dialogue as the only way to go then it can turn into a violent scene and and unfortunately that's what we see now in many of the post-Arab Spring societies the violence has prevailed to a big extent because people did should dialogue again it was not their choice it was the way things things flowed and so had we exerted more efforts in trusting each other in building better alliances and partnerships within within the society if we had had more chance to collect better information about our importance if we had better chance to understand our future our agenda our plan for the future building this is an important thing also building a political alternative what many many of the social movements nowadays have a problem is that they they know how to oppose a certain actor whether a state or a non-state activist but unfortunately not all of them do have the ability to provide an alternative at least an alternative vision to how to how to proceed forward and that's what many activists and and movements fold into the not able to articulate an alternative vision for the future so if we have had these elements prior to 2011 I think we would have a better better chance yeah yeah so David you know I think the challenge that Abdullah has articulated for us is not unique to Egypt or the Arab Spring or this moment in history it's probably a challenge that's been shared by many movements and when we're talking about dialogue bringing together various individuals actors perspectives to a conflict parties to a conflict amidst all the other things that are going on all the other emotions all the other things that are required of movement organizers it's really difficult and so in your experience again through the civil rights movement working with other movements how can movements overcome some of these challenges and barriers to actually being able to bring together people in a space that allows for dialogue to actually occur well I think it's a very good description of the dilemma that many movements face the civil rights movement face this as well and in fact what they refer to as a raccoon in fact the story of the elephant was what prompted Lafayette and I to put a module in the training curriculum called framing the issue because who frames the issue determines two things one is the context for dialogue and secondly who can support your issue and so framing the issue rather than voting rights but guaranteeing the right to participate in government changed a whole society's perception of what a democratic society should be but we had as a movement to take that responsibility so I would say that the most important thing is to learn how to reframe the issue so that you have a broad enough context in which to have dialogue and secondly that you can attract a broad base of support because people believe that what you're doing is at the heart of what's in the interest of the country and the society thank you another thing that Allison mentioned in the videos this idea of suspension and suspending our beliefs and an analogy that I like to use when it comes to this concept of suspension is a sword and a shield and I think our opinions our beliefs our assumptions are oftentimes used as swords or shields are used as weapons to try and defeat and attack an opinion that is different than ours that somebody else holds or it's used as a shield to protect ourselves from another differing opinion that is in some way trying to dismantle our own and so we have these beliefs assumptions they're very much part of our identity but we are trained in many ways are used to using them as shields and as swords and as weapons and in a dialogue process and this idea of suspension is we're not asking people to pretend like they don't have a shield and they don't have a sword and that they don't have opinions beliefs or assumptions and let go of their whole identity but instead it's saying you have your shield you have your sword but let's just lay them down on the ground all of us together in this dialogue process lay down your shield lay down your sword and let's observe and look at each other's swords and each other's shields together with one another your shield looks like this your sword is this length it has this type of handle it has this type of cut or chisel in it your shield has this type of emblem on it but we are experiencing the swords and shields of other people not as weapons that we're trying to overcome or defeat or that we feel threatened by we're just simply observing them and when the dialogue is over we can pick them back up and use them as we will but at least that space was provided to lay down that sword lay down that shield and observe them alongside those of others so what kind of work needs to be done for members of a movement to be able to do something like this that's a lot of work that's a lot of work has to go into not only providing that space but then getting people in the right mindset to feel comfortable to actually put down or suspend rather their opinions assumptions and beliefs and not feel like they need to be defended or used to attack another person's were there elements of this at play in the civil rights movement David what did those spaces look like that provided that container that atmosphere that made people feel comfortable that they are able to at least for this moment suspend their beliefs assumptions and opinions well very much so it was very present different modalities of non-violence have different language to describe this our description in the king in nambana's curriculum is doubt your first conclusion that's the way we do the suspension process maybe i'm wrong and maybe i could learn something about what the whole picture is like if i listen and probe and dialogue with you so it was very very present and i wish we had time to give the number of illustrations there are that actually were instrumental in the formation of the u.s. institute of peace because i remember ambassador young describing the negotiations that took place at five in the morning at a back door of an old guys house in charleston south carolina during the 1199 movement for health workers after dr king was assassinated and that was where the real negotiations took place and that was where they worked out the nuances of doubting your first conclusion and what might be acceptable to the leadership of the community etc etc so this is one of the exciting parts of non-violence for me is that we have to challenge our assumptions it doesn't mean we abandon them it just means we have to challenge and think through and probe deeper we have a concept of differentiation in non-violence where we have to look at the difference and i've mentioned framing the issue where we separate the symptoms from the core it's like peel an onion to get to the core and we have to go through that process and we can't do that if we don't suspend or down our first conclusion because our first conclusion might be totally erroneous yeah yeah let's turn now to one of our viewers on facebook who has a question nick who do we have yes we have a question from sara who asks in the process of immobilizing those who are experiencing the quote elephant in different ways how do you coordinate all the different groups who come with different levels of power strengths needs and perspectives the need for intentionality in organizing groups and leveraging leveraging the diversity seems tricky in this context yeah abdulla can we turn to you to address this question can you take us to tahrir because as you said this is one of the few places where a diverse group of individuals could come together and have these conversations and potentially experience dialogue in some form what was that like in tahrir to address her question so i think there were two elements in that sense first the common cause second the common space the common cause basically that people social movements emerge when there is a common sense of injustice or grievance towards one thing and that's how it worked in many of the upstream countries uh countries that movements were brought together for one fair cause and that fair cause was political change social justice many of the basic needs that many people uh were looking for so first many people even those who were not politicized even those who did not have a political affiliation or a history of activism or a history of resistance or anything and everyone wanted to live a decent life everyone was angry everyone was upset and that was the main motive that we had the plan we we didn't approach minakas and jindan did not approach the socialist group or a leftist group or an extremist group and we told them like let's sit together and talk about anything no we we basically it was basically very spontaneous we had to address the needs the concerns the grievance that these people have not really their ideological backgrounds despite if you're an extremist or you're a liberal everyone suffered in in Egypt everyone suffered the the political arrest the the murder the torture that everyone suffered the same thing so if we all have the same fair cause then let's talk about it let's get together for that and the second thing was the common space we started to create spaces back in 2011 the primary space was not just the Harir Square at the time but also was the online sphere we were blogging a lot I remember using boxpot and and my space as an important platform for for discussions it was not that available at the time it was not as common as it is today but at that time it was it was a big deal it was something that that we've been looking for and it represented it had represented a chance for us so many people were going there to v blog and to talk the government was not as much active as in this online space as it is now so we had an opportunity to to do that so the fair cause the the common space and then the third one I would say was the plan forward so what are we going to do about that and when people see that they all share something and then they have a space to do something and then there is a plan to commit an action to take an action towards these grievance they join they join despite their own ideological differences or challenges or threats or risks that they may face it's challenging it's difficult it's not easy but it could happen it's possible that's great we're coming to the end of our time here but I don't want to end our conversation until we touch on this concept of the beloved community which is something that king talked about time and time again wrote about time and time again was a critical part of the civil rights movement and how it's tied to this concept of humanity because that's another governing principle of dialogue is this concept of humanity so I want to end our show with a king quote another short video from ariana barth one of the again main instructors in the designing community-based dialogue course that we have here so we'll start with the king quote and king said that quote an individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity and so this means that we must be able to see the humanity in others in order to comprehend their concerns so let's take a look at this video from ariana to get a deeper dive into this complex concept of humanity one of the critical problems that dialogue addresses is that we may learn from a very young age that those who are different from us are somehow inferior we are exposed to overt and subtle messages that people who look think speak pray and act differently than we do are less than fully human one of the goals of dialogue is to ask people to critically reflect on how we view other people and if we can to use that information to change how we treat them in dialogue we also identify and explore messages we've received that put our own humanity into question the governing principle of humanity dictates that empathy must be part of the dialogue process when we hear an opinion or an experience from another participant that doesn't align with our worldview instead of rejecting it we are asked to try and understand where it came from empathy is the act of seeing the world through another person's frame of reference by emphasizing empathy in the dialogue process our hope is that people will begin to see others as equally human a problem comes about however when there are unequal power dynamics in a dialogue sometimes in a conflict context one group's humanity has historically not been questioned by society while another group's humanity is constantly put into question to go into dialogue then and ask both sides to see the humanity in the other can feel unjust this is something facilitators should be prepared to address and i've said this a couple times now as we've had our conversation that a lot of these things these concepts are hard work for people particularly when you're in context of extreme violence or conflict oppression injustice this concept of suspending one's beliefs and assumptions this idea of empathy and trying to put yourself in somebody else's shoes and understand their frame of reference it's very very difficult but also an essential part of creating what king referred to as the beloved community and i bring this full circle because a lot of that is what we do here at usip is what are those skills how can people be trained how can they develop a practice so that we have the capacity to engage in a dialogue process we have the capacity to engage in a negotiation with a counterpart in a way that leads to positive outcomes for all parties how do we teach ourselves prepare ourselves to see the humanity in somebody else or another group so david i want to start with you to share with us what is this concept of the beloved community and then amdallah will end with you to hear about what are some ways in which you have been able to practice over these last few years to see the humanity in other people that you fundamentally disagree with that you may see or had seen as as oppressors but what are the skills that you have to draw on to be able to see that humanity so david let's start with you the beloved community what is the concept what does it mean such an important concept is so integral to the practice of nonviolence beloved community is to recognize that the nonviolent concept is an overall effort to achieve a reconciled world by raising the level of relationships among people to a height where justice prevails and persons attain their full human potential this involves a a constructive program and a direct action program b and understanding of the ends and means concept confronting social change advocates and see to relate the intrinsic values of nonviolence to one's own faith and to the concept of one's personality and community these are contextualized by a larger frame which first deals with injustice and second producing a positive force in society to prevent the problem from ever reoccurring wonderful wonderful thank you and so obdala this concept of the beloved community and thinking about your experience in the egyptian context my first question was when do you feel you've been able to develop those skill sets that mindset to actually start seeing the humanity in in other people that maybe at one time you didn't and then also what's the path forward for creating this sense of the beloved community particularly in egypt i think a conversation was one of the um uh law enforcement in Egypt who was tasked and assigned to disperse our demonstration was the key in that um i had a long conversation with him he and i believe he was really sincere about doing his job he thought social movements are evil he thought all activists are bad people and that they're here just to destabilize the country and to undermine national security um i mean it's obvious he he believed in it and i believed in what i'm doing he's not a bad guy i'm not i believe i'm not a bad guy uh and one thing i've learned at that time is to put myself in his shoes and try to understand and try to think the way he does uh what is his background how did he grow up what is the kind of education he received and what kind of indoctrination do he receive in the law enforcement institutions in in Egypt and and these similar countries and when i do i start to understand why is he behaving the way he does and why he believes that democracy is not the best solution and why that uh actors could really represent the threat to him and his his institution and when i start to think this way i start to understand why is he acting this way and i started to even think that well to oppose him there is no way that we take this fight to the street and and and that we would expose our muscles to each other and just see who is gonna do better demonstrations than the other in fact this reversal has to happen in in education it has to happen in more compassion and more empathy and more trust to each other and and try to understand why do we behave the way we do and why the others behave the way they do and as the video explained just because someone acts differently doesn't make him less of a human being and the same even though law enforcement or police or the dictator regimes are essentially bad in my opinion um i think they nobody is born bad nobody is born evil nobody is born to kill the others they they have gone through an experience just as i did and the only difference is that they experienced was different than mine and that's why it produced two different human beings with two different causes and that's to reverse that process we have to go beyond that we have to go to the root causes and understand that and reverse that if we really want to have faith in this community and and to have faith in the good being in this community right well that brings us to the end of our time abdallah thank you so much for joining us and sharing aspects of of your story and david thank you so much also for sharing um aspects of your story and your expertise i think it was a great way to kind of end this um special facebook live series of of the peace frequency podcast and i also want to thank all of you who tuned in on facebook um today and in other parts of the series um you have been listening to watching the peace frequency which is a podcast series brought to you by the united states institute of peace where we bring together and we tap into the stories of people across the globe who are making peace possible and finding ways to create a world without violence you can learn more about the peace frequency at thepeacefrequency.com i have been your host and you can go to that website to see previous episodes um from over the years um and and hear some other amazing stories until then keep building supporting and learning peace