Posted on: Sunday, March 17, 2002
ISLAND VOICES
Symposium on conflict, mediation leads way toward better world
By Evan S. Dobelle
President of the University of Hawai'i
From Feb. 28 to March 2, citizens and scholars from around the world gathered at the University of Hawai'i for the George E. Taylor Symposium on Cultural Conflict and Mediation. The topic has attracted a great deal attention, given the state of international affairs: a great deal of conflict and a worrisome lack of effective mediation.
There is something in the mind that lends itself to creating dichotomies: east and west, us and them, good and evil. But the only dichotomy that matters, in the end, is the one our participants gathered to discuss. Conflict and mediation are twin impulses but distinct choices. We can overcome the existence of differences if we are committed to mediation, if both parties — or the many parties — enter into a space that can accommodate difference and make communication a central value. Failure to do so leads to conflict and even violence.
Our participants did not come to be "academic," in the way that word is typically used. It's a good thing: They would have found no ivory towers in the University of Hawai'i system. They came to be academic in the way that I hope we one day use the word: knowledge used in the service of humanity, knowledge created in universities that are both sanctuaries and moral agents, embedded in their home communities.
For the University of Hawai'i, that home community is the entire Asia-Pacific region. We believe we have a responsibility to that region, and to meet our responsibility, we must think beyond East and West, us and them.
This is a timely subject. The proponents of the "Jihad vs. McWorld" theory of events miss the nuances of a world theater that has embraced both modern and anti-modern characteristics. In this world, the greatest threats to security and peace are not those nations that remain poor so much as those nations in the throes of development.
The terrorists of Sept. 11 and the suicide bombers in Israel are products of middle-class development, not poverty. It is development that leads to urbanization, the formation of social groups built around compelling ideas or charismatic figures, the venting of ambitions and the access to technology, all of which combine to put pressure on governmental bureaucracies that have outlived their usefulness and may even impede progress. It is precisely the dramatic economic growth and modernization in places such as Indonesia, China and Pakistan that will cause political upheavals in the years to come. Some will be violent. But all need not be.
Globalization is not an option but a reality. Isolation also is not an option, but for different reasons. All the world's people are, in some sense, our neighbors. The dichotomy, then, is not between us and them, a self-fulfilling prophecy of division, but rather between conflict and mediation.
Many questions were raised at the symposium: Are there positive forms of conflict? How do you mediate between unequal partners? Can mediators be neutral? While we cannot guarantee we have the "right" answers, we know we are asking the "right" questions when they open communication between people rather than restrict it.
Increasingly, policy is created outside of the halls of government, and so the work carried out by citizens carries the weight of vital diplomacy. It is, therefore, up to citizens — you and me — to create the very structures of communications that our international, intergenerational, interconnected world will use to navigate the wilderness that stretches in front of us: broad, deep, wild.
The only way out is through. And we must go together or not at all. At the symposium, we began to chart the course.
