It’s okay
to cry “Wolf!” Just do it with
spirit. Professor Aaron T. Wolf’s 2017
book, The Spirit of Dialogue, Lessons
from Faith Traditions in Transforming Conflict, Island Press, is anything
but alarming, rather more it is consoling.
Based on an impressively broad reading of faith literature (Judaism,
Christianity, Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, Bahá’í Faith), facilitation
of water conflict agreements in the Middle East (Israel, Palestine (River Jordon)),
North Africa (Egypt, Sudan (Nile River)), Southeast Asia (Mekong River), the Caucuses (Azeri, Armenia and
Georgia (Kura-Araks River), and consultation with the World Bank, the Vatican,
U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation, Professor Wolf, now over 20 years at Oregon State University,
knows his stuff.
Wolf asks, “What,
precisely, can spiritual traditions offer the fields of facilitation,
mediation, and conflict transformation, especially when people in conflict
often come from a variety of backgrounds and belief systems?” He answers:
“Well, quite a lot, it turns out.”
Later, he explores the “constructs of anger and conflict, as understood
by faith traditions, and some of the tools and techniques to assuage both.” A worthy study indeed.
"We don’t
all come from the same place in our attitudes about water. “[T]he Western legal structure is very
comfortable with the idea that one side in a dispute can be found entirely
right and gain everything, while another side is found entirely wrong and loses
everything. In contrast, the balance of
justice and mercy in many communities of the South and East can retain individual
rights and honor on both sides of a
dispute and lead to reconciliation of a wrongdoer within one’s community. Consider the Arabic word tarrahdhin, for example, defined as ‘resolution of a conflict that
involves no humiliation,’ a profound concept with no Western equivalent.”
In Wolf’s “glass
half full” approach, he says, “As the historically contrasting worldviews of
the global North and West and the South and East increasingly more interact,
both within and without the worlds of complex negotiations, we have the
opportunity to heal historic divisions.
The history of conflicts and cooperation suggests that people do come
together, even across vociferous divides.
And yet the suffering created by scarcity and conflict will only
increase with population growth, poverty, and global change. As the dangers grow, however, so do the
opportunities for dialogue and healing.”
Water conflicts Wolf has facilitated have reached “general consensus
that the highest priority [of needs] should be given simultaneously to drinking
water and to water for spiritual purposes.”
Water plays
a significant role in the spiritual practices of most the world’s religions and
is central focus in the lives of indigenous peoples. “Both faith and water ignore separations and
boundaries. Thus they offer vehicles for
bringing people together, and because they touch all we do and experience, they
also suggest a language by which we might discuss our common future.” Wolf’s approach to water negotiations is
first to remove reference to artificial boundaries, permitting the parties
opposite to focus on the organic watershed, to look at systemic issues within
the whole. Negotiations focused primarily
on rights, rather than shared goals, he suggests, exacerbate rather than
resolve conflict.
Professor Wolf
admonishes that “the impact of conflict is generally felt by a much larger
population than is charged with resolving it.”
His facilitation works systematically to identify common interests,
ascending through “four worlds”: the physical
(positions, warrior, adversarial), the emotional (interests, lover, reflective),
the perceptual (values, thinker, integrative) and the spiritual (harmony, dreamer,
a “world without” which “straddles the internal (intellectual mind) and the
external (intuitive mind, which seems to tap into deeper and wider knowledge).”
The Spirit of Dialogue is a thoughtful
read. I recommend it.
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