Foreword

As we have come to expect from Beth Roy, The Bernal Story is a gift to the practice of mediation and the wider domain of peacebuilding. I say as we have come to expect from Beth because her work represents a rarity within our literature. She combines the best practices of astute ethnography with the best scholarship arising from experienced and lived practice.

The insights emerging from the description and analysis unraveled in this book speak to so many of our contemporary local and global conflicts. We live in worlds that challenge our imagination. I refer to worlds in plural to emphasize the simultaneous nature of local communities that make up daily life, and the global realities we share transnationally where we must find ways to create dynamic and responsive communities from the gristmill of tangled human relationships that too often rage into destructive patterns of conflict…