Keynote Speech by Prof. John Paul Lederach

I’m John Paul and it’s really a pleasure to be with all of you by way of this means today.

I’m caught between a beautiful tree and a barbed wire fence, which is where I think most of us are caught these days.

It’s terrific to hear what IMPACT is doing. It’s extraordinary to know the gathering of people, and in particular a kind of a network of networks that’s linking in to local communities and to local experiences, but tied in to the global challenges that we have.

And I think those challenges really are probably best known by all of us with the proximity that we have to the expressions they take where we live. The deep and very toxic polarization that’s emergent over so many issues. The tendencies toward authoritarianism that offer solutions by way of narrowing our capacity for holding diversity and disagreement to specific forms of control…