 Hello, and welcome to this special episode of The Peace Frequency. I'm your host, Darren Cambridge. For those of you who are newcomers, The Peace Frequency 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. This past Monday, Martin Luther King Day was recognized and celebrated across the United States. And for the next three days, from 11.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m., we will be broadcasting this podcast live on Facebook, exploring the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and how the strategy and—that he and others in the civil rights movement employed to win rights and seek justice can and has been used by other movements across the world. We have an outstanding lineup of peacebuilders and activists who, in their work and stories, will reveal to us how the six steps of nonviolent social change, sometimes referred to as the six steps of kingian nonviolence, show how civil resistance and peacebuilding can work together. So, I want to bring up this first image for you all to check out, because there are sometimes competing views of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. represents. On the one hand, as you see in this photo, we hear about the I Have a Dream speech king. We hear about the Nobel Peace Prize-winning king, the MLK whose words and actions sought to build stronger and healthier relationships between blacks and whites in a country suffering from the indignities of racism and segregation. Now, let's show this other image, because, on the other hand, we hear about the radical activist king, if we can bring up that slide. This is the king who was surveilled and tracked by the FBI. This was the agitator king who helped lead mass protests, demonstrations, sit-ins, acts of civil disobedience, and other nonviolent actions that challenged systems and institutions at the highest levels of power throughout the United States. So though these views may seem somewhat opposed to one another, they are, in fact, complementary. Dr. King and the movement he helped lead was both of these things. He was, in effect, the embodiment of how the skills and approaches of a nonviolent activist and the skills and approaches of a peace builder can come together to create sustainable social change. So, we're going to take a look at these six steps of nonviolent social change. And we're going to speak with the authors of a forthcoming guide for organizers and movements called Synergizing Nonviolent Action and Peace Building, or SNAP. And we'll also speak with a retired revolutionary, an activist who helped bring down Slobodan Milosevic using nonviolent action. And throughout this episode, as you watch on Facebook, you are invited and encouraged to share your questions and your comments by typing them in the comment thread below this video. And my colleagues, Nick Ziremba and Stephen Ruder, who are just off-camera here, they're going to be monitoring the discussion, and they will notify me and our guests when a question has come in. So without further ado, let's meet our three guests. And we'll begin with Dr. Lisa Scherke, who is Senior Researcher at the TOTA Institute and Director of Human Security at the Alliance for Peace Building. Lisa, thank you for joining us. It's a pleasure. And I'm going to start by asking you a question that I also encourage folks who are watching online to think about and respond to as well in the comment thread. And this is a question that I'll ask to all of our guests, so our other two guests, you can start thinking about this as well. And here's the question. Lisa, when you were growing up and first learning about Dr. King, what portrayal of him were you exposed to? Was it one of the ones that I just described? Was it a combination of the two or was it something different? And how did your perception of Dr. King change at all as you grew up? Good question. So I grew up in a Mennonite community and going to Sunday School in a Mennonite church. And the first exposure I had to King was a Sunday School lesson where we read the letter from Birmingham Jail in which he's directing his response to the white Christian leaders who felt he was going too fast and cool. And that, you know, these white moderate leaders didn't really understand nonviolent direct action of the need to what Martin Luther King said is kind of pull back the curtain or uncover the wound to really look at the deepness of the wound and that the wound of racism wasn't going to heal until things were exposed. So I feel like the letter from Birmingham Jail is a great example of King's writing where he uses metaphors of a meaning to actually intensify conflict and heighten public pain to the reality of a group that's experiencing oppression so that you can actually get to the root causes of the pain and the conflict and address and heal it. So I think I saw both sides of King both preaching love and he was writing with love to white moderate leaders, but he was being very tough about the need to expose conflict and that it's not going to be an easy process to uncover the roots of racism in this country. That's great. Thank you, Lisa. And actually, could we perhaps post a link to the letter from a Birmingham Jail in the comment section for folks who haven't had a chance to read it? You've got to read it. And I'll also say that the collection of King's works and writings are held at Stanford University, I believe, and there's a recording of Dr. King reading letter from a Birmingham Jail. So if reading it isn't enough, you can also hear him speaking in his own words and it's incredibly powerful and a great thing to listen to as we as we remember Dr. King. So let's move on to our second guest is Nadine Block, who is a training director for Beautiful Trouble, which is a book, web toolbox and international network of artist activist trainers, whose mission is to make grassroots movements more creative and more effective. She is an innovative artist, nonviolent practitioner, political organizer, direct action trainer and puppeteer. Nadine, thanks for joining us. Oh, thanks for having me. And I put the same question to you, Nadine. What version of Dr. King were you first exposed to and how and why did that perception change over time? Yeah, I definitely think as a child, whether it was from Sunday school or I'm not sure where we learned about it or in public school where I went that we learned about the Dr. King of the preaching love variety. And I think as I grew up, and certainly as I became an activist and conscious around inequalities around me, really appreciated and remember at some point understanding when Dr. King, that the reason Dr. King, in my understanding at the time, was murdered was because he made the connections between racism, militarism, and greed or economic exploitation. And I think that those, that critical piece still today is very much downplayed in his legacy. People are focusing, as Lisa mentioned, on the preaching of the love, particularly whether they're white or other colors, the folks who are preaching going slower or are advocating for less conflict, not understanding that the value of actually putting your body on the line. And so I do think that this understanding about the necessity for the, what he called the radical redistribution of economic and political power is really that was the critical piece of understanding why he did the work that he did in the way that he did it for me. And as a nonviolent activist myself, I really greatly appreciated his ability to articulate that the conflicts existed and still exist in the communities that we live in and that our job was not to, was not creating the conflicts, but our work was exposing those conflicts to light. So as an activist, one of the principles that I know that we have to function on is often starting with making the invisible visible. And I feel that that was a key piece of what Dr. King brought to the work. Great. Thank you, Nadine. Thank you for that. And our third guest is Yvonne Marovic, who was one of the leaders of Otpor. And this was the student resistance movement that played a critical role in the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in 2000. As one of the leading practitioners of civil resistance, he has also been involved in the design of video games that teach nonviolent strategies. So Yvonne, thanks for being with us. Thank you. And I pose the same question to you. What version of Dr. King were you first exposed to? And how, if at all, did that perception change and evolve over time? Oh, it definitely changed and evolved over time, because I was growing up in socialist Yugoslavia. And so my perception of Dr. King was somewhat different. It was influenced by the retelling of the story by the, how should I say, the official government in social Yugoslavia, which was sympathetic to the plight of the American Plex and was kind of viewing the situation in the United States through a more critical lens. So the way we were told and the way we experienced Dr. Martin Luther King was as a great leader and a visionary who was killed because of the, because people in power were afraid of his ideas and what he was proposing. Only later did I actually learn that he was leading a movement and that there were some really powerful actions happening at the time and that actually changed the kind of power of balance, especially when we talk about race relations in the US. That part wasn't really emphasized back then. So when I was growing up, I didn't know that whole detail. I didn't see him as an organizer, as a leader and as somebody who was a strategist, let's say. But then I managed to find out later on and actually I was impressed with what I read and I was fortunate enough to be able to meet some of the people who directly worked with Dr. King. And so I got to know more about that aspect. Awesome. Thank you, Yvonne. And again, it posed a question to our viewers online as well. When was the first time that you were exposed to Dr. King? I think it's a really key question because how we are taught about Dr. King, what he represents, the movement that he helped lead, how accurate is that? And do we have a full picture of what Dr. King kind of represents, not just for this country in the United States, but also for nonviolent movements around the world. So thanks, Lisa Nadine, Yvonne. Welcome to all of you again. And I want to first jump into the guide that I mentioned in the introduction, the synergizing, nonviolent action and peacebuilding guide that both Lisa and Nadine, the two of you, are authors of this forthcoming guide. And so, Lisa, I want to turn to you and explain to us what was the impetus for writing this guide. So the two fields of nonviolent action and peacebuilding actually started out very much tied together with people like Martin Luther King and Gandhi and early peace studies scholars like Adam Curle, who was a Quaker activist and conflict resolution author. At the beginning, these fields were more connected, but as they developed, they really have grown apart. And at Eastern Mennonite University, I started teaching a course that was tying them together, looking at the synergy and the necessity of having both negotiation, dialogue, communication skills, processes that the peacebuilding field is really emphasized, as well as the skills of strategic nonviolent conflict, how to choose your nonviolent tactics, how to sequence them. So the course that I was teaching was bringing those together, but I realized there wasn't any place in print that was doing that in a way that was really evolving over time from the original work of Adam Curle and John Paul Lederach, which was 20, 30 years ago when they were connecting the two fields. So we wanted to sort of create a training guide that would highlight the kind of synergy that Martin Luther King absolutely understood was necessary from a strategic point of view. If you want to have a successful movement, you need to be able to dialogue with your adversary, engage them, really understand their interests and their needs, as well as know when there's no rightness for negotiation, that a negotiation or a dialogue isn't going to get you to the place that you want to be to meet your own interests and needs of a group. And so you go to the streets or you have a boycott or you use some kind of nonviolent tactic to shift power. So the training guide that we're creating really emphasizes and highlights the synergy between these two fields, how there's actually a lot of overlap from the origins. And so both fields kind of know about each other, but the advancements in each of the fields now need to be brought together so that we have some common language and ideas for conceptually how to go about a strategic movement for social change. Awesome. Thank you. And Nadine, who is the intended audience for this guide? And maybe it's forthcoming, so it'll be out soon. Maybe you could help paint a picture and how it's organized and set up and how it's intended to be used. I think the most important thing about the guide, and we were calling it a training guide because we really want it to be in the hands of people who will use it. And so just to put it right out there out front, we focus a lot on strategy. The guide is actually organized in a somewhat loose strategic path that you might follow to develop an effective campaign. And also it is not inclusive. We're exclusive in the sense that we're not trying to include everything, but key tools and understandings that can be immediately trained and used by social justice activists. And we're really interested in helping people be more effective at integrating whether you call it a peacebuilding tool of dialogue or negotiation or whether you call it a resistance tool of nonviolent action tactics, but helping to understand when you would use these things, how to sequence them, and how to be more effective across the whole spectrum. So we're looking for if there's a peacebuilder who has ended up at a negotiation table, but they actually haven't done anything to equalize power between the people who are sitting around that table. We all know that that negotiation is likely not to go very well and deliver the outcome for the folks who are at the table who need change. And those people might be actually interested in understanding how nonviolent activists shift power. And from that they might understand how to integrate that back into their campaign. And at the same time, we might have nonviolent activists. We've seen this in lots of places all over the world who are really effective at toppling dictators or making massive change, but haven't actually or don't want to or don't have the skills to think about transition in the next steps. How do you actually sit at a negotiation table once you've gotten some power shifts to actually then get what you want and transition to beyond the conflict that you're experiencing to another place, to the goals that you have laid out? So those are sort of two extremes about the kind of camps that might find this useful and that we hope will find it useful in strategically thinking about how to be more effective at mobilizing and, you know, change the conflict transformation overall. Great. Thank you. So Nadine, you mentioned the, you know, movements that have toppled dictators. And there's actually a documentary film called Bringing Down a Dictator. Perhaps we can share that in the Facebook feed for folks who aren't familiar with it. But it looks at the outpour movement in Serbia. And so, Yvonne, I want to turn to you. When you were helping lead the outpour movement in Serbia, you were clearly a nonviolent activist and folks who watch the documentary will see that prominently. Yvonne, did you view yourself, though, as a peace builder at that time? If you could take us back to the late 90s, 2000, did you see yourself as utilizing the skills of a peace builder when you were, at the same time, a nonviolent activist? Well, I mean, if I can, I don't know if the peace builder is the right word. I kind of was my main motivation to get involved in politics as a very young age. I mean, it's like my first protest was when I was still in high school, but like, like more kind of, I was more engaged as a student. So this is like in my early 20s. My main motivation was the war. And it wasn't one, it was four wars that I had to go through since my late high school and throughout the university, avoiding drafts and, and, and, you know, dodging the army and, you know, like worrying about friends and people who were affected by the war and all that stuff. So that was my main motivation. Another thing on top of that was that, you know, we knew that Milosevic is going to fall at one point. It's just like nothing lasts forever. But what we were worried is that that bloodshed that we saw in, in, in Slovenia, Asia and Bosnia and Kosovo will come home. The chickens will come home to roost and that when Milosevic falls, it's going, it may be bloody and who knows who is going to suffer as a consequence. So our main motivation was not to get rid of Milosevic per se, but rather to ensure that this transition is done in a peaceful way. So we actually never used the term nonviolent. As a term nonviolent, we always were talking about the peaceful change, a peaceful transition, a peaceful process of transfer of power. And this was our kind of main focus. So I think that, you know, what ended up happening is that with the fall of Pirovich and the dismantling, which wasn't complete to be, to be honest, but it was this, the structure that he set up was dismantled to an extent, it did create a more peaceful region. And even the political disputes that are happening in the last 17 years in Serbia are, are not done the way they used to be in the 90s. So in that sense, I guess I could call myself some sort of a peace builder or something. That's great. That's great. Thank you, Yvonne. And I want to remind our viewers on Facebook, if you have any questions or comments for any of our guests, feel free to type it in the comment section below and we'll do our best to bring that into the conversation. So I want to dive now into what I referred to earlier as the six steps of nonviolent social change that King laid out in his 1963 book Why We Can't Wait. Another great thing to share on Facebook, King wrote many books, as many of you may know, Why We Can't Wait is one of his more well-known books. In there is the letter from a Birmingham jail and where, again, he lays out these six steps of nonviolent social change, sometimes referred to as the six steps of kingian nonviolence. So the impetus really for this special episode or the series of special episodes of this podcast came because I was learning and hearing about the snap guy, the synergizing nonviolent action and peace building guy that is being worked on by Lisa and Nadine, others here at the United States Institute of Peace. And as I was hearing about what this guide was intended to do and educate and share, it immediately made me realize that this was directly connected to Dr. King's six steps for nonviolent social change. So I'm going to walk through them and review them here for all of you watching. And I think you're going to immediately see how there is this strong connection between nonviolent civil resistance and peace building. So step one is information gathering. So when a movement is seeking to create some type of change in a community, they've got to understand what are the issues? What are the concerns of the people who live in that community? What are the impacts and the effects that they're having? Who are the various actors that are part of this conflict? You've got to gather this information to figure out what it is that is impacting and affecting people in that community. So that's step one, information gathering. Step two is education. Once the movement gets an understanding of the issues and concerns actors and institutions that are part of this conflict, then you start educating yourselves and others about those particular issues. How long has this been an issue? What are the policies and laws that are perpetuating this and keeping it as an issue? Again, how does it impact the daily lives of individuals who face these issues and concerns on a daily basis? And then how do you map out all those individuals and institutions that are part of this conflict? Who are they? How long have they been part of this conflict? What are potential solutions to these issues and concerns? So that's step two is education. Step three, King writes about, is personal commitment. So once a movement has mobilized enough people to say, we are going to stand up and take action to affect social change, there are some sacrifices that have to be made. There are some changes that people are going to have to make in their own lives, some commitments that they're going to have to make. And in many of the campaigns throughout the civil rights movement and other movements around the world, there are actually specific lists in terms of what the movement is asking people to do, how to behave, how to treat one another, how to support one another, and be aware of the risks that come with being part of this nonviolent movement. So that's step three is taking that personal commitment. Step number four then is negotiation. The movement then develops a demand. This is the change that we want to see, and they take it to their adversary and their opponent to the negotiating table and to see what happens. So that's step four is negotiation. Then we move to step five, which is direct action. So if you don't get what you want as a movement from that negotiation, then you say now it's time for direct action, protests, street demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, setting up alternative institutions. There are a myriad of methods of nonviolent direct action that movements can use to, in a sense, escalate the conflict. And as Nadine mentioned, make the invisible visible to dramatize the injustice so that more people are engaged, educated, and mobilized to affect some type of social change. And then the sixth step that King lays out is reconciliation. So once the change is starting to take place, people are going to react to this in a lot of different ways. And a nonviolent movement, as King writes, they do not seek to actually defeat people and individuals. They seek to defeat injustice and oppression and evil. But people must continue to live together if they want that change to be sustainable. So they don't want people to feel like they have lost. There must be some form of reconciliation to create what he referred to as the beloved community. So those are the six steps. And again, you can go to his book, Why We Can't Wait, to learn more about it. You can also go to the King Center website, where they list those six steps of nonviolent social change to learn more. So, Lisa, Nadine, and Yvonne, I want to unpack today, in this episode, steps one, two, and three, because they are the steps that I feel are most associated with conflict analysis. And that's really the focus of today's episode. So, Nadine, let's start with step number one, Information Gathering. And the slide that you're going to see up on here is a nice, powerful image of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during one of their meetings, where they are in the process of sharing what information they have gathered about the particular community in which they are trying to mobilize. So it's not an image that I think a lot of people associate with nonviolent movements, something where people are out in the streets. This is an image of a bunch of organizers, folks and activists meeting and talking with one another and sharing what information they have gathered. So, Nadine, my question goes to you, which is, when organizing a nonviolent movement, what kinds of skills does information gathering require? A lot of them, a lot of types of skills. I guess there's a few ways to answer this. And this is one of the places where the division between peace building and nonviolent action work is very clear in how we talk about things. But when we actually get down to the work that we do, there's a very clear overlap or similarities. So I guess if you're talking about skills that information gathering requires, I mean, I guess the first thing to say is that all of this is broadly considered part of an assessment phase of what we might consider strategic thinking or strategic planning. And we're going to want to have people who can talk well with each other. You might call that dialogue on a very personal scale level. You're going to want to have the ability to increase that scale and go to information gathering between groups. You're going to even take it bigger than that on the biggest scale, you know, to incorporate outside factors, which you might call research. So attention to detail is important. The ability to really dig deep and do and take time to do effective research on who's responsible for which laws, who's funding, what elected official, where if you're going to take it to the once you've done an assessment of the general issues, you're also going to do very deep work on scouting or taking notes about where you might want to have actions. And I think you also are interested in all allegiances or alliances between different groups and different individuals. And all of that is really important to, in all of that, it's really important to keep asking questions until you get to what you feel are root causes or baseline understanding. So not just taking the easy answers, perhaps, but actually digging in depth both in building one-on-one relationships, but and also building the broader work that you're doing in the community. I guess maybe on a very simple level, it's thinking about how you talk to people, how you gather information from individuals and groups, and how you do research. And those skills, the skills of doing research could be everything from mathematics skills to in this day and age, being really good at seeking things on the inner webs. So there's a huge spectrum there. Right. Just a follow-up question on that. I think a lot of people look at non-violent movements and see a lot of folks who are with righteous indignation who want to immediately go to the streets and have those dramatic actions. I think what's critical about these six steps is direct action is step five. The first one is information gathering. And so I'd like to do a little appreciative inquiry with you. You've worked with movements all over the world for many years at this point. Is there one movement or campaign that you can think of off the top of your head that did the information gathering step really well? I mean, we're talking in honor of MLK and we're using the civil rights struggle as a way to move this conversation on movement building. And I think that that is certainly a great example of a campaign that consistently did move information gathering. And I think that's really a critical point here is that you don't just do it once and be like, oh, I figured out who my neighbor was. I figured out what their issues are. It has to be an ongoing time where you have a culture of information gathering and then assessment of how that's been applied and if there's been any changes, how to integrate new information that comes in and then to do it again in a cycle. It's actually not a straight line trajectory, unfortunately, or fortunately, I guess, depends. So this kind of thing is really important. For example, in the civil rights movement, there were campaigns that were very localized right. You could start looking at even out of the lunch counters, it had started in one particular location and how it's spread. And once it's spread, how they it had to be adapted for different communities. And the movement itself, once that campaign to desegregate the lunch counters was very effectively being used in other places, they had to actually think at some point about how do we broaden the impacts of what's happening so that more of the country is involved. Not just the deep south, where the lunch counters were being desegregated, but broader. And so you use particular tools like we have a strategic planning tool called the spectrum of allies, where you actually are going to look at who your allies are, who your opponents are, and how you move people, not necessarily the opponents all the way over to being allies, because that takes an incredible amount of resources, but thinking about how to move people who are in the middle just closer to you and those people who are in favor, but haven't done anything to do something. And one of the things that was done in the civil rights movement was, of course, to ask to educate young white folks from the north to come down and support the freedom rides and the struggles that were happening. And by that way of being personally involved, helped to make sure that the education of people who are the northern whites who didn't come down to this house were educated because of their family members and friends going down to the south. And so that's a really good example of information gathering, the understanding that their message wasn't getting out of the south to the broader northern groups that needed to know about it and to understanding that information and then changing your tactic to meet that information was really critical, I think, to getting the critical mass of people involved in the movement that enabled wins. Great. So, Lisa, I've got a question for you, and then we have a couple of questions from our viewers online. But, Lisa, you've written a book looking at conflict analysis, conflict assessment, of course, which information gathering is a key part. So, are there conflict analysis frameworks that you find useful for structuring how a nonviolent movement would go about gathering information? Because I think that is different than a peacebuilding organization or program that's going into a conflict affected region to do their program. We're talking about a nonviolent movement in this case. So, are there conflict analysis frameworks that you see as being valuable for nonviolent movements? Sure. So, in the research methodology for gathering information, again, not just once, but in an ongoing sort of way throughout a movement, you need to think about how do you get diverse people to carry out the conflict assessment to do the information gathering? So, who is using these analytical frameworks and who is doing the interviews is actually really important because it matters to the kind of information that you get. So, I just am back from four months in the Middle East, most of the time living in Israel and Palestine, and it was interesting to see the dialogue groups there between Israelis and Palestinians being a form of information gathering, because Israelis have perspective on what they think Palestinians want and vice versa. Palestinians have an imagination or a perception of what they think Israelis want, but it's really only when you have a dialogue group that the information sharing about what each group actually wants and how they articulate their interests and their needs, it's actually quite a radical process and it's not skipping over direct action, it's just saying in order to develop a more strategic movement for change, you really need to understand what is motivating the other side. So, the Fisher and Uri Onion analysis where you're looking at positioned interests and needs, that's a really important conflict analysis, conflict assessment tool that is essential, I think, for nonviolent direct action campaigns to develop an understanding of the interests and needs of the opponent, because I think oftentimes people aren't, they're filling out these analytical frameworks on their own and they're not actually having representatives of the group that they're opposing. So, if you're looking at the American South that would be having white moderates participate in some of the information gathering so that they could see what are other white moderates thinking, what's the frame of thought, what are their interests and their needs as they think about the civil rights movement. And in the same way in Israel-Palestine, you know, for Palestinian nonviolent action organizations to be thinking about what is it that Israelis need and what are their interests and how do we shape a movement that actually invites moderate Israelis, progressive Israelis over to join the struggle for social change there. So, I think that that interests, identifying the interests and needs of the opponent or the moderates or again using that spectrum of allies to think about the, you know, each of the groups within a movement, sort of where are they at, what are they interested in, what are their forms of power. I think these tools from nonviolent action and the field of peaceful, they actually really need to be brought together so that we have more successful information gathering strategies. That's great. And the name of that tool about the onion, you talked about positions, interests and needs, can you repeat that for us and we can share it on Facebook? Sure, it will be in the upcoming training guide that we're writing. Yeah, it's just often called the onion tool and it looks like an onion where the outside is what groups positions are, what they say they want, but underneath that are the interests and the needs, the deeper usually it has to do with identity, self-esteem, belonging, deeper things that human beings need in order to survive. And so, it's important to sort of dig deeper than what groups are saying they demand and looking at is there a way of actually all the groups coming to the negotiation table and finding a way forward. And I think the civil rights movement ended up doing that. I think there were the white moderates at the beginning were very afraid of what the movement meant and weren't clear. And I think that all of the speeches and writings of Dr. Martin Luther King as well as the other civil rights leaders really used a narrative that invited white moderates to come on board. And enough of them did that there was enough movement so that some new legal frameworks could change. Obviously, this country has a long way to go in terms of addressing the roots of racism. We are still living the civil rights movement. But important, there were important moments of success and that success happened because African American leaders understood the interests and needs I think of white leaders and white moderates and the movement could use that information to design a more strategic movement. All right, great. Thank you. And also, I think another tool that Nadine mentioned and Lisa did as well as a spectrum of allies, the folks Google spectrum of allies, nonviolent action. That's a great tool. Let's turn now to our Facebook audience. Nick, you said we have a couple of questions. Thanks, Darren. Melissa asks, are there any tips for successful information gathering and dialogue through either social media or other online platforms? And we have another question from Faraz who asks about intractable conflicts and how to approach negotiation and situation of deadlock as well as how to deal with power imbalances and negotiation. Okay, interesting. So let's start with the social media information gathering through social media. Nadine, Lisa or Yvonne, either one of you want to tackle that one? Yeah, let me give my thoughts on that. As I'm coming from the 20th century, I'm going to diss social media completely now. Let me give you a short introduction where I come from when it comes to information gathering. So the way we did information gathering back in October was divided into two parts. And so the first one we called introspection, the second one we called analysis. So the first one introspection is actually when you're like actually doing information gathering inside yourself, inside your soul, what do you really want to see in the end? And what are you ready to do to get that? What motivates you? What do you want to get in the end for yourself personally? And this kind of looking into your own soul and understanding your own true emotions that Onion, that Lisa mentioned, you have to peel your Onion first before you peel other people's Onions. And once that is clear, you will be ready to make that commitment later that Dr. Martin Luther King writes about in phase four. That is kind of to be like really kind of to understand yourself. And then similar analysis needs to be done about the people that you want to mobilize. You need to understand what motivates and you need to understand is going to bring them into the movement. And this is where I think Facebook can be useful for establishing contacts and reaching out to maybe different people. But we have to be very careful that what people tend to project on social media is not really that inner layer of the Onion. So you will be getting a lot of use that Onion metaphor. You will be getting a lot of positions, but not enough needs. And for that, we need to walk out and we need to go and directly spend time with people to get to know them better and to get to know what is behind their behaviors that we wish in the end to influence. So to go back to the original question, I think that any technological tool is useful if it can make our work more efficient and more structured. But we have to always remember that this kind of information gathering and later movement building requires that human connection. And we need to be able to appear into somebody's soul and to understand who is behind the machine and what is going on in the inner layers of the Onion. And building off of that, Yvonne, I encourage everyone to check out and listen to Dr. King's Nobel Peace Prize speech. And in it, he talks about the advances in technology. So this is back in 1963, I believe. And he said something along the lines of we have invented airplanes that have allowed us to fly like birds. We've invented ships and submarines that have allowed us to swim like the fish. But we have yet to learn how to live together and love one another as brothers and sisters. And I wonder what he would say if he were receiving the Nobel Peace Prize this year, and we were experiencing and using social media that we're able to tweet like birds or post and share our positions. But has that technology and those advances allowed us to share and understand our needs and our interests and, again, live and love one another as brothers and sisters? And I think that's clearly still a debatable question that users of social media and the companies that provide and design these systems are still grappling with. Let's turn to the second question from Faraz around addressing power imbalances when it comes to and power asymmetries when it comes to negotiation. Lisa, perhaps you could take this question because I know you were touching a bit on negotiation earlier. I'm sorry, can you repeat the question? Sure. Yeah, Faraz is essentially asking about, first of all, intractable conflicts, how to approach negotiation kind of in a state of when there's a deadlock. But when you get to the point when you're at a negotiation table, how to deal with the power imbalances that exist? Well, I think, like Nadine said, this is not a sequence of steps where you try negotiation and then you go to direct action or you do your direct, this is a back and forth. And then it's really using conflict assessment to figure out, do you have enough power at the negotiation table to actually get what you want? Or do you have an alternative, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement or it's known as a BATNA in the negotiation field, often negotiation won't work if the power is too unbalanced. And so what both Gandhi and Martin Luther King said, and they were saying it from a strategic point of view, it's important to keep trying dialogue and negotiation, but also to be very savvy about it's not going to work now because it's too unbalanced. So then you go back and you do nonviolent tactics to shift the power and then you test again. Is the other side ready to actually be serious to have a negotiation where they realize that the status quo is not okay and they have to change? So it's actually a much more fluid and dynamic process of continuing to test whether negotiation is a possibility. There's this concept of rightness of when both sides have reached a hurting stalemate, when both of them have reached the point where they realize that continuing a unilateral mechanism of nonviolent action or on the government side may be the use of force against activists. If that's not working, then governments and activists reach the conclusion themselves that it's time to negotiate and we can both negotiate in good faith and come to some kind of outcome. So it requires conflict assessment to figure out whether both sides or all the different stakeholders have enough motivation at the negotiation table and really actually believe that their alternatives to negotiation are not as good and that they want to find a solution. Great, thank you. And if I can add one thing to that, it's just it really depends how we define the other side because if we see them as a monolith, as a single team that kind of works together and very cohesive, then we will have that dilemma are we going to do direct action or are we going to negotiate? But you know if we, how should I say see them as elements that are coming together to work together, then we should use nonviolent action as a negotiation towards those elements of the other side that we want to win over. So when we say no negotiations, we don't say like no negotiations to the elements of the opponent. We are actually through the direct nonviolent action negotiating and reaching out to these elements, pulling them out, making them defect. So when we come back to the negotiating table, we are facing a weak and much weaker component. And so even from a strategic point of view, it is how should I say useful to rethink what do we see as the other side? The best other side is very small and very isolated. And that is going to be the only, how should I say, part of the opponent that is going to stay on the wrong side throughout the conflict. Everybody else can be given an opportunity to defect and to come to our side. Right. Thank you, Yvonne. Yes, and I want to remind Faraz and others that tomorrow's episode, again, starting at 11.30, we're going to look specifically at step four negotiation and all the elements of power, tactics, skills of negotiation between a nonviolent movement and its adversary. So that's going to be a great episode as well. In our final 10 minutes, I want to look at steps two and three. And step two, if you recall, is education. So once many of the issues and concerns that are at the root of a conflict are heard and the various actors and institutions involved in the conflict are mapped out, movements start educating themselves and others about those issues and about those people. So the image you're seeing here is one of the citizenship schools and you're seeing an image of September Clark, who helped organize these citizenship schools, educating individuals about their rights, actions that they can take. And so the question is like, how long has this been an issue? How has this issue been impacting people on their day-to-day lives? What are the policies and customs that have perpetuated this issue? What are some potential solutions to addressing this conflict? The list goes on and on and on. So Nadine, I want to turn to you because Nadine, not only have you contributed to this synergizing nonviolent action and peacebuilding guide, you're also the author of a report looking at education and nonviolent movements. So Nadine, what are some other forms of education that you can take to the public on a mass scale? How can movements get creative around educational campaigns? Great. There's so much to say about this. So I'm going to start off by making a plug that people, after they read a letter from a Birmingham jail and other MLK writings, that they go to beautifulrising.org or beautifultrouble.org or by the books. But the website has all the information about strategic creative activism and a myriad of ways to get creative around education and empowerment. And I think we're talking about the spectrum of educational work that we could do. I mean, it's everything from, yeah, talking to your kid or your neighbor to projecting giant images on a building in Washington DC or in Sarajevo. It's everything from doing social media to street theater or formal theater with a message, a motivational message. It's involving artists, 3D artists, visual artists, cultural practices in communicating with people in the ways that they are able to hear the information that you're giving them and the ways that they're used to understanding. I think it's using everything at your disposal. And I don't know exactly what you want to cover, but I do think that there are a myriad of ways of getting education out there, whether it's, you know, this in Damascus, when the Syrians wanted people to know that there was a vibrant resistance movement and were outlawed from being public in the streets and gathering in the streets, they would release ping-pong balls with messages written on them that would flow down the hills of the city that people could pick up. So there's all kinds of creative ways to get information out there and education done. Great. Great. Thank you. Yvonne, take us back to your time with Audpor. What were some of the issues that you and others in the movements felt that the larger public needed to be educated about in order to mobilize them and have them become part of the movement? Well, you see, so there was this disconnect. And I think that kind of question that I'm going to address is relevant today more globally than it was back in the 90s. But in the 90s, it was important. People believed in democracy. People wanted their vote to matter, and they wanted to be influencing the politics through the ballot box. But they realized that the system was rigged and that the elections were regularly stolen and that the system was hijacked, the political system was hijacked. So we needed to reconcile these two. People wanted it to work, but they realized it didn't work. So our education was actually how they as citizens can fix the system directly because they couldn't rely on the politicians. That was that was obvious. And the politicians couldn't fix it for years. So nonviolent direct action and educating people how to take politics back into their own hands was actually the way we educated people that they can still have democracy. They can still exercise their citizens' rights, but they can fix parts of it that actually jeopardize the exercise of those rights. And this was actually educating people how to spot the electoral fraud, how to respond to it, and how to engage in acts of civil disobedience, which culminated with the general strike to force the authorities to recognize the results of the elections. So in that sense, information gathering was how we figured that out that there is that disconnect. And then education was this slow process that we could actually tell people, you know, this is the problem, but this is how you through your action or lack of action contributed to the problem. So you have the ability to fix it. You want to get involved, you have to get organized and mobilized, and you will be able to fix that problem. And that was kind of something that gave people a lot of courage a lot of hope. And this is why the turnout at the elections, for instance, for the age group under 30 was 70 percent. 70 percent of young people under the age of 30 voted in those elections. It was precedent. It never happened after that. But people believed that they could do something about it. And it wasn't just following the rules and institutional politics. There was the mobilizing and let's say social movement component to that as well. Great. Great. Thank you. And now let's move on in our last five minutes to step three, which is personal commitment. If we could put up that slide, this final image here of a young woman who is participating in one of the sit-in campaigns, and she is being arrested by the police. And so when we're talking about personal commitment, when we're talking about self-awareness, knowing the expectations of us and what we're being held accountable for in your role in a movement. And these were all essential parts of the civil rights struggle. So conflict analysis is oftentimes initially thought of as a process that requires inquiry into things external to oneself, the people, places and issues that color a conflict. But how often does our analysis involve an assessment of our own involvement, our own impact, and our own readiness to engage in that conflict? And, Yvonne, you touched on this a little bit earlier. Lisa, I want to turn to you to first answer this question. Can you talk to us about self-assessment? What does a process like that look like when individuals, groups or organizations are looking to engage and participate in a non-violent movement? So, yeah, absolutely. Self-assessment is important for a variety of reasons to figure out what your own interests and needs are, so beyond your own positions, as you mentioned, Yvonne mentioned earlier. To look at your own biases and prejudices, I think that the work right now in the white community is to look at white privilege and white superiority and the narratives that we've absorbed. And so I think that self-assessment is also important as we think about the civil rights movement. I think to look at the sources of power that we have, you know, each of us are different. We have different types of leverage over others because of education or the information that we have, the position of authority we might have, charisma for some leaders. And I think sort of really knowing yourself what kinds of power you have and how can you leverage that type of power is an important part of figuring out where your responsibility is and, you know, to whom much is given, much is expected. And I think that's kind of a rule of nonviolent action for people who have financial resources. Nonviolent movements require generosity in spreading that around. And we need leaders who have charisma. And we need leaders who have access to positions of authority like religious leaders who are often really significant in bringing the moral authority to a nonviolent movement. So, yes, personal reflection on assessment is an important part of thinking about what kind of commitment you can make and should invest in a movement. Great. And then Nadine, as was mentioned earlier, you've worked with movements all across the world. You work with beautiful trouble and beautiful rising. How do you help people determine their readiness and commitment? Can you take us into a room that you've been in with individuals who want to take action, they want to participate in a movement? But with your background, you also realized, let's be real about what you all are committing to or wanting to commit to. What does that type of preparation look like? Well, if it's not obvious already, I'm a big proponent of training and education. So, I think that, as Yvonne mentioned, the first thing that we get to is, can people actually articulate in a training, in a workshop together, can people individually and together articulate the issue that they're addressing and what they want to do about it? And then we need to talk about their understanding of what strategically they can do to make change. It's a balance of doing an assessment personally, but an assessment as far as organizational strengths and weaknesses, as well as the issues that we face externally. And can we put in place the support structures, the contingency planning, the emotional, the physical, the legal, whatever the support pieces are that will help enable people to do this work and help people to do it as best as possible, as most effectively as possible. So, it's sort of a combination of, as Yvonne said, peeling your own onion and understanding what you personally can bring to it, or as Lisa said, if you have, depending upon what your resources are and what your commitments are, how you can support the issue, I think that is often done in a facilitated session, whether it's a workshop or a training. And so, I really do think that's how we judge what people can bring to the table, a real analysis assessment. Great. Thank you, Nadine. So, we've come to the end of our time. I've just got one last question that I'd like you all to briefly respond to to close us out. And that question is, what is a good way to celebrate Martin Luther King Day and the week that follows, as we are doing today, and the broader approach to nonviolent social change that he championed? So, that perhaps this could be a tradition from your own life or one that you've observed in other parts of the country or other parts of the world. Lisa, can we start with you? What's a good way to celebrate Martin Luther King Day that you are aware of? Well, yesterday, there were many activities going on. Some people were marching and vigiling, and others were reading his work. Lin-Manuel Miranda from the famed Hamilton play read one of Martin Luther King's letters on the Vietnam War in a video, which I found as a very powerful way to look at the application of Martin Luther King's words for today and his advice for how we should think about a strategic movement for change. I think a commitment to action is always a good thing. So, it's not only a day of reflection, but it's a day of writing letters to your representatives or writing letters to the governments of other countries who may be oppressing human rights leaders. So, taking some kind of action. Great, thank you. Yvonne, what about you? What's a good tradition, a way to celebrate MLK and the broader nonviolent approach he endorsed? So, you know, when Cesar was in his 30s and he was still a consul in Goal and in a few other provinces, he went to the tomb of Alexander the Great, and he sat on the tomb and was thinking, what can I do? Alexander died at my age, and where am I, and what am I going to do with my life? So, I think that we can do the same as activists and peacebuilders and organizers is that, you know, on MLK Day, we can sit and reflect and think what can we do and where we want to see ourselves maybe at some point in the future and the struggles that we're leading. Great, thank you, Yvonne and Nadine. You'll have the final word. I have to second what Lisa and Yvonne said. It's really important from my perspective to move into action. So, to do the assessment and then to do something, whatever it is that you can do, you should do it. I happened to spend yesterday facilitating high school students in an arts and activism day all day long. So, for me, it's really important in where I am in my work, in my life to pass on information and to help other people actually think about, figure out what is that spark that will enable them to become involved at all or to become involved at a greater level and give back. And so, I do think as we need to do assessment in our strategic campaigns, we also need to have a moment to reflect on our work and MLK Day for activists and I'm a practitioner, seems to be a great time to do that. Awesome. Thanks for having us. Thank you, Lisa, Nadine and Yvonne for being on the show today. And thanks to all of you who tuned in to this special episode on Facebook Live. The Peace Frequency to Remind You 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 podcast at ThePeaceFrequency.com. You can look at previous episodes and you should. I encourage you all to tune in tomorrow at same time, 11.30 a.m., where we will have a great discussion around step four, which is negotiation. So, how does negotiation work in the context of nonviolent movements? So, until then, keep supporting, building and learning. Peace.