Beyond Intractability Interview

Julian Portilla: I usually start out with a question a lot of people laugh at, which is, a brief overview of your work.

John Paul Lederach: Yeah. Brief overview of my work. Well, my work falls into different kinds of categories. I think the primary piece of it is I’ve been working for many years to accompany people who are trying to address deep-rooted conflict and basically accompany a lot of their preparation and design and support of their implementation. I have tended to work much more at the community or middle-range level of society, and because of long-term relationships in a number of places and with the right sets of people, occasionally that translates into direct connection to higher-level, official peace processes. But the mainstay of my work has not been to focus directly on [01:00] formal negotiations or working at sort of the Track I level or close to it and support of it. That has happened, but isn’t the mainstay of it…