"The whole paradox of the human community and human existence is that we're in a constant search for a deeper understanding, a deeper engagement."
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…
Lederach, John Paul. Beyond Intractability Interview. Interview by Julian Portilla. Audio recording, 2003.
Originally published on Beyond Intractability.
Thoughts about the challenge of to all of us as leaders when we live in settings of social fragmentation and at the same time are committed to pursue justice and healing in our relationships.
A manuscript written for the Inter-racial and Cross-cultural Conflict Resolution Project at Conrad Grebel College's Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies.
An exploration of prescriptive and elicitive methods of training and conflict work across cultures that places emphasis on the resources emergent from the context and setting of a given conflict.