Abstract
In seeking peace, governments negotiate around interests and issues; citizens focus on relationships. The peace process embraces both, but, until relationships are changed, deep-rooted human conflicts are not likely to be resolved. The power of citizens is most fully realized and demonstrated in the capacity to build and to change relationships. Governments rarely demonstrate that capacity, and they can be overwhelmed for lacking it.
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Endnotes
The full text of President Anwar al-Sadat’s speech, “Statement Before the Israeli Knesset, Jerusalem, November 20, 1977,” appears in Harold H. Saunders, The Other Walls, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), Appendix VI, pp. 171–182. This excerpt is found on p. 177.
Mikhail Gorbachev, “Address to the Forty-Third Session of the United Nations General Assembly” (New York: TASS, December 7, 1988).
The concept is developed more fully in Harold H. Saunders, The Concept of Relationship: A Perspective on the Future Between the United States and the Successor States to the Soviet Union (Columbus, OH: Mershon Center, Ohio State University, 1993).
See Vamik D. Volkan, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: From Clinical Practice to International Relationships (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1988), for discussion of identity in intergroup relationships. A most helpful capsule discussion of the concept of identity appears in
Erik H. Erikson, “Prologue,” in Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968), Chapter 1.
See Harold H. Kelley, Ellen Berscheid, Andrew Christensen, John H. Harney, Ted L. Huston, Georges Levinger, Evie McClintock, Letitia Anne Peplau, Donald R. Peterson, Close Relationships (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1983), Chapters 1 and 2, especially pp. 12–13 and 31–40.
See I. William Zartman, Ripe for Resolution: Conflict and Intervention in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, 2nd ed.); Elusive Peace: Negotiating an End to Civil Wars (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995); with
Timothy Sisk, “Beyond the Hurting Stalemate” (National Research Council Paper, 1996).
See, for instance, John Paul Lederach, “Process: The Dynamics and Progression of Conflict,” in Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1997), Chapter 5.
Many accounts of acknowledgment-contrition-forgiveness exchanges appear in Michael Henderson, The Forgiveness Factor: Stories of Hope in a World of Conflict (Salem, OR, and London: Grosvenor Books, 1996), with Forewords by Rajmohan Gandhi and Joseph V. Montville. See also
Edward Luttwak, “Franco-German Reconciliation: The Overlooked Role of the Moral Re-Armament Movement,” in Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson, eds., Religion: The Missing Dimension of Statecraft (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), Chapter 4.
This account appears in Joseph V. Montville, “The Healing Function in Political Conflict Resolution,” in Dennis Sandole and Hugo van der Merwe, eds., Conflict Resolution Theory and Practice (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 112–127. Montville, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer who worked primarily in the Middle East, is director of the preventive diplomacy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He is the author of the phrase “track two diplomacy” and a practitioner of the “walk through history”—an exercise in which participants in a dialogue or other program talk or walk their way through painful moments in their shared history as a way of broadening their perspective on their relationship. He has been one of the pioneers in focusing operationally on acknowledgment, contrition and forgiveness.
For other discussions of the acknowledgment-contrition-forgiveness transaction and of reconciliation, see John Paul Lederach, Building Peace, Chapter 3; and Donald W. Shriver Jr., An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
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Saunders, H.H. (1999). Changing Conflictual Relationships. In: A Public Peace Process. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299392_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299392_3
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