The Pocket Guide for Facing Down a Civil War

In this Pocket Guide, internationally renowned peace practitioner John Paul Lederach reflects on his experience across over four decades mediating and transforming conflicts in places including Northern Ireland, Colombia, Nepal, Somalia, South Sudan, Nicaragua, and Tajikistan, among many others. His experiences grant him a unique perspective not only on what precipitates, propels, and sustains violent conflict, but also into key understandings and approaches that help shift dynamics of harm toward practices of social healing.

The Guide is framed to reflect on questions increasingly posed about the likelihood of divisive polarization in the United States leading toward political violence and even civil war. To consider this question, Lederach offers a comparative view. He suggests that despite the tendency in the U.S. to hold to exceptionalism, the country is not exempt from the toxic dynamics that have been faced in other settings where open armed conflict, once unleashed, became nearly impossible to end. In each chapter, Lederach describes a challenging pattern that repeats across contexts and animates toxic polarization and sustained armed conflict. He illustrates these dynamics with stories, observations, and wisdom gathered from his work with local communities and national leaders in places impacted by such toxicity, describing how they faced down and shifted seemingly ceaseless cycles of violence. 

This Pocket Guide does not offer quick fixes. Rather, it explores the way ordinary people resisted and countered patterns of violence in their communities. Their curiosity, persistence, and creative innovation suggest that to face down a civil war and heal long-standing wounds that stoke cycles of violence, people must resist the pull of toxic polarization that legitimates violence as the only option. The challenge is to innovate pockets of vitality that embody the basic idea that politics without violence where we live is possible. Such innovation requires a web of courageous relationships that reach across divides, creating the connective tissue that fosters dignity and respect within, between, and across deep political and cultural difference.