Dumbo Feather – July 2019

It sounds like you’re a bit of a

boundary walker? Or a web weaver?

So how in your view does

conflict relate to belonging?

And with the benefit of, you know, 40-odd years practising in this field and all
the research you’ve done in it, how are you currently answering that question
of how we mobilise around dignity and compassion on a global scale?

So I was constantly in this combination of justice and peace as an interesting challenge of

holding together what eventually I’ve tried to bring into one word as “justpeace.” Which I

think links the deepest aspirations for people to have recognition but also redress for things

that have been harmed with the need of redeveloping and redefining relationships.

Yeah exactly. A spider moving around the anchor points [laughs].

Well it’s interesting you ask that because that’s increasingly what I think is

one of the cutting edges. You were talking about boundary walkers; I think

it’s one of the boundary areas that our wider field of peacebuilding is just

now coming to. Well I’m not even sure that it’s fully arrived at understanding how deep that

is. I say that because I think we’re at a time in human history where our earlier models for

organising ourselves based primarily on the notion of nation states have defined identity

and belonging. We’re increasingly at a place where we’re facing planetary fragility of our own

making. And that fragility is both about the environment but it’s more significantly about

how fragile our survival has become across this planet.

It’s much easier for us to envision family as extremely localised, almost tribal or national.

Those are the two identities with the greatest gravitational pull around belonging. Yet we are

witness to a range of things happening across our globe that drive very large portions of our

human family into states of mobility. So how we combine our planetary fragility with human

mobility is at the core of the question of belonging. What does it mean to belong when you

are in essence facing a system that has not been well developed to handle and to respond to

a global family with large portions of people who are suffering and are moving for purposes

of survival? The current political trends across our globe respond with populist imagination;

that is, people pull back toward the narrower definitions of hardened boundaries and walls

for protection. This comes with a very sharp rise in trends of “othering”—we feel threatened

by those who are not from our group. So belonging comes at the core of things that are

in essence transnational. For me there’s a fundamental right to belonging that requires a

concept that has to be far more robust in how we are interdependently connected as a global

family. Robust to the level that we have a capacity to understand ourselves as a human

family as a starting point for addressing the challenges of how large portions of our family

are seeking a capacity for basic flourishing that has not been possible for them due to climate

shifts. What many of us don’t fully understand is that climate is actually a huge driver

of human conflict and mobility and will remain so well into the future. We have to think

differently about how we understand and organise ourselves with the survival modality.

Compassion increasingly is seen, anthropologically, as the element that made survival and

innovation possible. And so the question I think we have to bring to bear from the standpoint

of peacebuilding and belonging is how do we mobilise around dignity and compassion more

than mobilising around the gut reactions to protect and defend?

Many of the challenges require

us to move away from our older

models of making collective

We have a very poorly developed notion of a

global family.

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BOUNDARY WALKER

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