 Hello. We're lucky to have Professor David Wood with us today. David Wood is a professor of practice at Seton Hall University and you are a senior researcher at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Thank you so much for coming. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Can you first start by telling us what was your pathway as a peace builder, some of the places you've worked and the projects you've worked on over the years that brought you to where you are today? I think for me a very formative experience was I learnt Russian in the Caucasus during the Second Chechen War and saw the way that the Russian public was prepared for acts of violence within Chechnya during that military mobilization. I was quite young at the time and it took a while for that experience to really resonate and for me to understand what had happened and once that had occurred then I joined the peace building field but working initially on arms control, looking at how to reduce the flow of weapons into places of violence, then moving from that to looking at community safety and justice mechanisms when you have a dispute over who governs the territory and then from there I shifted focus towards the Middle East, founded an international peace building organization that's called Peaceful Change Initiative and really look at this complex mix of both peace processes, how aid influences peace processes and how we can also look at wider national reconciliation beyond peace processes. We were talking off camera, you have sort of an interesting perspective on the peace building field today. Tell us a little about your views there. I suppose peace building like any field is quite a broad one and you have different ideas around what it means in practice but I think we're certainly going through a bit of a generational shift in approaches towards peace. You'll see a lot within United Nations documents, within those developed by member states, by peace organizations, this focus on the root causes of conflict. There's a sense that if we can identify what is driving people's move towards violence, then we can put in place measures to stop those driving factors. This works to a degree, but it also treats conflict almost like a mathematical puzzle, something that can be worked out through logic and I'm very much of the part of the field that feels that conflict is also an emotional experience and one where we have to deal with the morals and ethics of those who go to war because you see this shift in people in conflict where they conduct very inhuman acts towards another person, often based upon stories around the past and you have this almost disruption of people's moral compasses and I think one of the key tasks of a peace builder is to help try and reset those moral compasses. Ultimately, everyone, when they're moving towards violence, they have to make an ethical decision to do so or not and from my perspective, that's what we should be targeting, supporting people to make ethical actions so that in spite of any injustices they may have experienced in the past, they're not willing to do so. I think that brings us to your most current research. Like I said, you have this book, it's on the ethics of political commemoration and I know the big theme throughout the book is how history plays a role in conflict and you've alluded to it here but if you talk to us more about how important history is in conflict and give us some examples of what you mean by that. Again, the world of peace building is expanding. I think previously, if we look back 10, 15 years, there was this real focus on dealing with the interests of conflict parties, negotiating a solution, whether that's over who controls government or who controls land. We've shifted slightly towards understanding that we need to also protect the relationships between people and that's why we have trust building, confidence building, social cohesion work. But from our research, there's still this absence around how to deal with conflicts where the groups in conflict have different memories, different driving ideas around what's good. So what does that mean in practice? So if you look at, say, tensions in the South China seas, you might think that that is about China looking to project its interests economically, security within the South China seas, and that's partly correct and so you need to deal with that. At the same time, there is also a genuine belief inside Chinese society that this is their historical territory. If you look at a map that's taught within schools of the... The Chinese line. Yes, exactly, of China and the South China seas. It goes very high north and it goes very far south. If you look at Russia's invasion of Ukraine at the moment, again, you can think of that through a geopolitical lens. Russia wants to control sufficient territory up to the Carpathian Mountains so that it can protect itself from future invasions because that's been the history of how Russia has been invaded. It could be because they're opposed to a movement of places like Ukraine towards European values and economic area. But it's also in Russia, some people genuinely believe that Ukraine is part of Russia. And so, yes, you have to deal with the interests, yes, you have to build relations, but you also need to find a way of accommodating different stories about the past in a more positive manner. Could you be accused of a relativist sort of justification for some parties like the Russians or the Chinese who are, and we see it throughout time, who are absolutely stitching a narrative that is so far from objective reality and unfair, or do you say that everyone does this? And so, I mean, how do you deal with that sort of relativism argument? Yeah, no, it's a good question. I think that the approach that our research demonstrates is that we don't have the tools available to manage when groups like Russia, for example, or the leadership certainly within Russia, misuse and abuse history for their political ends. So what we're looking to do is create a framework or a set of international norms that can help us better regulate how memories, how histories, especially how traumas are used in the present. So it isn't about being relativist, it's about really trying to put in place the kind of norms that apply, for example, in the humanitarian sector, or when we get to trying to prevent wars, for example. And I don't think it is moralistic. So if we look at one of the crises of just the last month in Nagorno-Karabakh, you've seen the sense of injustice of the Azeris over the displacement of Azerbaijanis from Nagorno-Karabakh at the end of the Soviet period being used as a rationale for really inappropriate acts in the present. So this mass mobilization over 24 hours that we saw last week and the fear that that's generated amongst the Armenian community. The ethnic cleansing. Yes. Well, now we're seeing that 40% of the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh has fled because they're in fear. And in social media in Azerbaijan, in the papers, there is a lot of revelry. This is writing the wrongs of the past. You don't write the wrongs of the past by creating new injustices in the present. This framework that you proposed here in the book, tell us about it. You've built off the Just War principle of Just War theory and you're really drawing from that. So firstly it's important to say that I've been working as part of a team. And this idea of the potential to take the Just War approach and apply it to commemoration has really been led by Hans Gottfroder, Ilya State University out in Georgia in the Caucasus who was the first person to try and apply this framework to commemoration. And it's the co-author of the book. And really the idea is that within the Just War theory, it's an old theory that goes back to Aquinas and others. But the idea is that we should try and make better decisions about when to start a war and if we make that decision to start a war, how to then act within that war. And it might sound quite loose idealistic, but the principle idea is that we should try and act in a way that is restrained and is directed in the best possible means. And those principles have actually integrated themselves into international norms in a way that people aren't often aware of. So for example, they're in the Geneva Convention in International Humanitarian Law and the principles and operational procedures of the ICRC. So they're there. They influence how we act in the present. The laws of war that is. Yes, the laws of war. Now obviously people break those laws all the time, but then we have a reference point to go back to around how they're breaching those norms. And so we're trying to create the same approach, I think, within commemoration. So what is worthy of commemoration and also how do we commemorate when we've decided something is worthy in a way that is restrained and is more likely to make a peaceful future possible? When it is appropriate or legitimate to commemorate, and we're talking in a post-conflict period, commemorating one side or the other, or both sides together, we can get that into the how. But give us some examples of when it would be legitimate under this framework and when it wouldn't be and maybe some real-world examples from that. So when you're looking at, what is right to commemorate? What should we commemorate? We often and correctly focus on injustices and especially mass traumas, the displacements of people, massive human rights abuses. These are things which we need to commemorate. But when we're making that decision, we've also got to bear in mind what's the intent. Are we there to hurt a whole group, some of whom may not have been responsible? Are we there to build a better future? We need to make sure that we have people who are responsible leaders for that commemoration. So in just war, if you start a war, you should be able to stop it. You should have the authority, the legitimate authority to be able to stop it. And we need the same kind of legitimate authority within commemoration that people can control the outcomes of a commemorative act. And similarly, though, we need to be able to judge that it's successful. Are we likely to have success here? And to give an example, you can see in a place like Libya, for example, that after the fall of the Gaddafi period, the commemoration that was taken was one that wasn't likely to lead to a better future. The people who enacted it didn't necessarily have the legitimate authority to do so. And the cause that they selected were one of very few. So you had those people, for example, who suffered during the Gaddafi period and then who suffered during the violence that Gaddafi brought against its people during the revolution. But equally, you have people who were supportive of the old regime, who also suffered injustices and violence, and whose experiences also deserved to be recognized and commemorated. And so when the new revolutionary government started to commemorate, you had changes in symbols. So, for example, the Gaddafi, one in our note in which he was sat, like lords on the floor, was replaced by a symbol of young revolutionaries wearing baseball caps. For many, these young revolutionaries were the people that tore their country apart, and so were very symbol of their insecurity in the present. So it wasn't successful commemoration in that sense. It didn't help to bring people together. And there's actually a chance in Libya at the moment because national reconciliation process is restarting, and I know USIP is providing some support to that, and there's an opportunity to have a better form of commemoration that looks at the individual experiences of all sides. But also that commemoration isn't just about the symbols we put up or tear down. It's also reflected in legislation such as lustration. That, for me, is an act of commemoration equally as powerful as a memorial. How do organizations like the United States Institute of Peace and others working on peace building take what you've offered here and put it into practice? If you're looking at preventing violent extremism programs, for example, often people who move towards violent extremism hold these negative stories about the past. They have these mythologies of angels and heroes, and they're on the good side fighting their good cause. I suppose commemoration can be brought into those attempts at preventing violent extremism to help young people understand also the suffering of the other side. So you can actually practically embed that into programs to prevent violent extremism. You can do this actually within political negotiations because you have to set the parameters around what is recognized within a transitional justice process, for example. So making sure that all sides, different perspectives on events are brought in, that you're not focusing on the suffering of just one group, but on a range of different groups. But I suppose you need to be mindful that we have to understand the history, how it's used by political leaders to drive violence and put in programming to really address that use. Well, Professor Wood, thank you for coming to see us today. Thanks, Sander.