Ep. 049: Peter Coleman

Peter T. Coleman, Ph.D.

Dr. Peter T. Coleman is Professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia University where he holds a joint-appointment at Teachers College and The Earth Institute. Dr. Coleman directs the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (MD-ICCCR), is founding director of the Institute for Psychological Science and Practice (IPSP), and is executive director of Columbia University’s Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4).

Dr. Coleman is a renowned expert on constructive conflict resolution and sustainable peace. His current research focuses on conflict intelligence and systemic wisdom as meta-competencies for navigating conflict constructively across all levels (from families to companies to communities to nations), and includes projects on adaptive negotiation and mediation dynamics, cross-cultural adaptivity, optimality dynamics in conflict, justice and polarization, multicultural conflict, intractable conflict, and sustainable peace.

In 2003, Dr. Coleman became the first recipient of the Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association (APA), Division 48: Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence, and in 2015 was awarded the Morton Deutsch Conflict Resolution Award by APA and a Marie Curie Fellowship from The European Union. In 2018, Dr. Coleman was awarded the Peace Award from Meaningful World, in celebration of their 30th anniversary and the UN’s International Day of Peace. Dr. Coleman edits the award-winning Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice (2000, 2006, 2014) and his other books include The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts (2011); Conflict, Justice, and Interdependence: The Legacy of Morton Deutsch (2011), Psychological Components of Sustainable Peace (2012), and Attracted to Conflict: Dynamic Foundations of Destructive Social Relations (2013). His last book, Making Conflict Work: Navigating Disagreement Up and Down Your Organization (2014), won the 2016 Outstanding Book Award from The International Association of Conflict Management. He is currently work on a book with Columbia University Press that will be released in 2021 on breaking through the intractable polarization plaguing the U.S. and other societies across the globe, titled, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization.

Dr. Coleman has also authored well over 100 articles and chapters, is a member of the United Nations Mediation Support Unit’s Academic Advisory Council, is a founding board member of the Gbowee Peace Foundation USA, and is a New York State certified mediator and experienced consultant. In 2017, he received the International Association of Conflict Management 2017 Best Conference Theoretical Paper Award for his article Conflict Intelligence and Systemic Wisdom: Meta-competencies for Engaging Difference in a Complex, Dynamic World, and in 2018 The Emerald Literati Award for the paper Adaptive mediation: An evidence-based contingency approach to mediating conflict. Dr. Coleman also founded and edits the MD-ICCCR Science-Practice Blog, the WKCR (89.9 FM) monthly radio program Peace and Conflict at Columbia: Conversations at the Leading Edge, and is a frequent blogger on Huffington Post and Psychology Today. Dr. Coleman’s work has also been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Chicago Tribute, Nature, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Wired, This American Life, Time Magazine, Fox Business, CBS, Fast Company, Chicago Public Radio, and various international outlets.

Contact Information:

212-678-3112 | pc84@columbia.edu | https://twitter.com/PeterTColeman1

Transcript

Susan: It's been, it's been a pleasure to dive into all of your creations and impressive and valuable and really thank you for all of your service and contribution. And you and I go pretty far back, I was tracing it to 1995. I dunno. I trace everything according to pregnancies and I was pregnant with Jack and he was born in 1995.

Peter: But just for the record, I was not the Peter Coleman involved in that process at all, because there's always often been confusion about that.

Susan: If you were going to say it, I was it's because my ex-husband's name was Peter. And you and I are sort of the same age. And so I think people still to this day, actually, this Columbia graduate student said, weren’t you two married? I said, no. But anyway, but yeah, Ellen Raider and I had created a Basic Practicum in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution and then an Advanced Practicum. And we just had a lot of fun and stimulation and I'm really, really grateful for that time. When I think about it, I think of Grace Dodge Hall being filled with all kinds of people from every which place, from around the university and from around the world -- talking about identity and talking about conflict and just a lot of good times, really interesting, great times. Really.

Peter: It was, it was a great time for me to, I was a student when you met me, probably a Doctoral student when you met me in the social org psych program there, but was hanging around the Center a lot. And so got involved in various projects. I know I was involved in a major high-school project that you were involved in and Ellen, I think set up. And so it was a very formative time for me as well.

Susan: Yeah. That was an amazing moment when we had representatives from every one of the NYC high schools in room

Peter: 188 high schools, right?

Susan: Yeah, yeah. It was amazing. Yeah.

Peter: It was extraordinary. And that's when I met James Williams who became a close friend of mine and I'm still very in touch with his sons. I'm going to actually get going to see one of them. They both just started college. One is at Yale and one is at Duke in engineering. And so I'm going to go down and driving my son back. We're going to stop at Duke and see Elijah.

Susan: Beautiful. Beautiful. That’s really cool. And I had been starting the United Nations program to do negotiation and conflict resolution work. And then we brought that into The International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution. And yeah, so I'm glad, I was going to ask you if there are any particular highlights, but you just already shared it. So I'm glad to hear that it was a good time for you too.

Peter: It was a great time for me. I learned a ton. I had never done any training or even teaching before that. So, you know, I know I was trained in your model by somebody, I think, Ellen, maybe you, both probably at some point. And then James and I did a bunch of work with that. And so yeah, it was it was a very formative time for me.

Susan: Yes. Me too. I'm very grateful for it.

So as you know, my audience and you know, when you work this internet world, you have to be clear about your audience, but I've gotten clear about what my passions are and where I think I can contribute. The focus at the beginning of this podcast was really the best processes that I could see out there that were building common ground. And then then it became also focused on gender and, and looking at you know, focusing for women and for people interested in the whole gender conversation and its connection to building a more peaceful planet.

And then I asked you, because we're kind of getting more gray, both of us, to put our heads together as, as humble global parents. . . I wonder if my kids would go ‘oh for crissake’ but, to think together about, how to make this very complex, insights about making this very complicated world better for them. And, and you agreed and I mean, I think probably you feel like, I feel it's been such an intense time, with fires, floods, polarization.

During the last political season, I decided to not put any political signs out front but instead I just painted one large, beautiful Black Lives Matter sign and put an American flag on it. And I live in kind of a rural place and then watched somebody throw garbage at it for the next, I dunno how it went on for a long time. And I just thought, okay, it's my penance just to go pick it up, the poor soul that is throwing it,

But anyway, I'm always interested in being hopeful, I'm not always these days, I go up and down, but I feel like hopefulness is so important for our kids, particularly the way that the world weighs on both of my children, and younger people that I talk to, they keep me honest. They keep me focused.

So basically I asked you a broad question, you’ve written this great book called The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization. And you've done a lot of really interesting work with Doug Frye, who has been on the podcast and some other people on sustaining peace systems. And then you're a Dad, you're a husband, you're a guy who's lived in the world for however many years.

You've, you've been here, you're a US citizen. You know, I don't know if those are all identities that you have. And so, so I asked you to focus on this topic of gender and your insights and observations about it, how the role it plays in creating a more democratic and peaceful world. And you agreed. And so here we are.

But I have one question before we start, because I do ask everybody that I interview this question, which is just what planted the seeds in you, an early seed that got you on the trajectory of what has brought you to where you are at this point in time doing the work that you do?

Peter: Well, I think it's probably a combination of you know, family dynamics because I had a fraught family. I had an alcoholic father who was a gambler. And so there's a lot of trouble and tension in my family. And I had a brother who was a seminarian studying to be in the priesthood and he was very soulful person. So I have these sort of different male figures, I think. And we were in the wake of all of that stuff, but I also lived in Chicago, in the outskirts of Chicago in the sixties. And so I was there when there was a lot of tumult on the street, there was the Democratic Convention, there was major anti-establishment movements there. Martin Luther King came at some point and was sort of pivoting his strategy.

So there was a lot happening on the streets that I would see. And so as a young child, both at home and in the community that was Chicago or communities that was Chicago, I think I was exposed to a lot of conflict and tension and movements towards social justice and challenges. And so I do think it developed what they call “macro worry”, you know, that it's hard to go through your life and not be mindful of what is happening in the world. And so I think that's where, you know, a lot of it started.

Susan: And how old do you think you were when you first had a macro worry? Can you trace it back?

Peter: You know, it was, I was probably, I left Chicago in 1970. So I was there, when I was 7, 8, 9, and I had, my siblings, two of my siblings were older, about 10 years older than me. So they were in high school, they were more involved in movements and, one was sort of a hippie and the other was a seminarian. And I was very connected to them, their music, their fashion, and their politics. So, definitely seven years old, I was sitting with a lot of those issues and trying to make a seven-year-old sense of those issues.

Susan: Yeah. I see the guitars in the background. Do you play them?

Peter: Yeah, I do poorly. All of my family play guitar, several of them have been, are, professional musicians of various sorts. And I, you know, bang these things, but for myself at home, yeah.

Susan: Sort of the same, I actually gave it up recently because I had too many hobbies that I couldn't pull off this business. And I was too bad. And I live in this community where there are so many talented musicians.

Peter: That's true. Yeah.

Susan: Anyway, so to the core of this conversation, basically in doing this podcast so I was, I was thinking about interventions to build common ground and, you know, different kinds of facilitation techniques. And I was interviewing people about that. And then, I've been heavily trained in gestalt. And so I was scanning the planet. Like, what are the big ‘figures’ that stand out to me, ‘figure ground’, it's a simple idea. And, the things that smack me in the face are climate change, boom, big time this struggle between authoritarianism and democracy, just seems to be maybe the struggle of our day. And then the huge gender imbalance that still persists on the planet and the fact that patriarchy just won't die as a system. And I, think those things are related myself. I like this quote from Carol Gilligan -- Feminism is the movement to free democracy from patriarchy -- but in just finishing The Way Out and all the work you've done on peace systems and all of it, I'm just wondering, your thoughts and insights on this topic.

Peter: The topic of gender and peace?

Susan: And its connection to creating a different kind of world order that actually beyond, when I say peace. and probably when you say peace, we're talking about a more active peace, one where we don't have armed conflict as a way of resolving differences. You agree with that phraseology?

Peter: Yeah, I mean I think “peace”, that's more of a “negative peace”, and I think that's a critical component. I also think that, you know, when we study peaceful societies, part of what we emphasize is that they ultimately grow a different culture that's a more tolerant culture, a more harmonious culture. And they are not without their problems and tensions, but they manage them constructively. So they don't use violence or they use less violence to manage them. So, I think it's a combination of both, you know, what Galtung would say is positive peace of negative peace, negative peace being the absence of violence, and positive peace being both presence of a sense of justice for different groups, but also a sense of harmony and connectedness and interdependence, which also oftentimes gets lost in the conversation of peace.

Susan: Yeah. Like sometimes if I have to say, what's the opposite of patriarchy, I kind of say pleasure, you know, a much more pleasurable world. I was reading this book called Tribe by Sebastian Junger.

And he, he was siting this research he'd done about Native Americans that had been captured by English settlers at the early parts of the country. And all of them, without exception, apparently went back to the tribe when they were able to, and then the reverse, all the settlers that were captured by the natives when they were given an opportunity to return to the colonies, they didn't want to go.

Peter: Yeah, that's profound. No, I agree. I love that book. I thought that was a very smart book about, you know, the power of tribe and tribalism and also just the implications of wealth in distancing us from one another and moving us away from needing other people, because we can hire a police and firemen and whatever. Yeah, that's a profound statement.

Susan: So anyway, so I don't know if that's too broad a question, but your thoughts about gender and its role in all of this?

Peter: Well, yeah, so you know, my mind flashes probably because of the intro, back to my, I was raised by women, you know, because my father went away, my oldest brother was a seminarian, so he was kind of off in God world doing that. And so I was really raised by my mom who held us together. There were five children.

Susan: Where did you fall in the line-up?

Peter: I was like second from last. And I had a sister whose name at the time was Vivian, now it’s ‘Cookie’ was very maternal and cared for us as well. So they really raised me. And so the power of women is very resonant for me from that, from my origins. I survived because of them, survived some difficult times. But in, in the Peace world, you know I've learned so much from my experiences with my colleagues, you know, I have to give a shout out, I've worked for several years with Abby Disney, who's the social justice active activist and a feminist. And what I'm remembering is in 1998 Jeff Sachs and a guy named Gary Belkin, who's a physician and I held a big forum at Columbia to try to basically change the conversation around peace from just violence prevention and atrocity mitigation to promoting harmonious cooperative, relations in societies, because part of what I argue, is that we don't think that side, we don't go there. It’s all about prevention of harm. Which of course is critical, but it's insufficient to sustaining peace. And so we convened this day-long forum with philanthropists and academics and practitioners to talk about peace and changing the subject. It was an abysmal failure in my view, because, you know, there were people there who were very smart about genocide and atrocities, and that's what they had to talk about. And that's where their passion was. And it was really hard to get people to change course with the exception of Doug Frye, and I met Doug. And he was there and he could speak to peaceful societies and what they represented. But I had also invited Abby Disney because she was becoming more involved in peace work. She had met and sort of supported Leymah Gbowee.

Susan: And she did that amazing series Women, War and Peace

Peter: Yup. Two series of things that they did on PBS, and she did a film with Leymah and about the women's peace movement,

Susan: Pray the Devil Back to Hell

Peter: Pray the Devil Back to Hell. So she had been becoming more and more involved in that. So I had invited her to this forum and, there were a couple of times in the process of the day where Abby would raise her hand and say, this is a room of 40 people, and Abby would raise her hand and say, how can we talk about the mitigation of violence without talking about gender and men and their role in this?

How can we not go there? And there would be silence, right. And nobody could, even the women that were there, there were some various esteemed women, couldn't sort of crack that. And once or twice, or maybe even three times, Abby would come back and said, I hate to be the gadfly, but I'm gonna, you know, what about this? And it just had no traction. And so when Mort Deutsch and I were there and we left there, we realized that was kind of a waste of time. They can't really do that.

Susan: So this was a while ago?

Peter: Yeah, this was in 1998. Before Mort died, when he was still around and active. And so we decided to edit a book on the Psychology of Sustaining Peace, because we figured at least we could try to find a group of psychologist or psychologically minded people to write about this.

So we edited a book and we invited Leymah and Abby to write a piece on gender and peace. Just check that out. Yeah. And it's a fantastic chapter, very thoughtful. It had, you know, it had the context of Liberia, but it made other more generalizable points. And then, you know, so I, we worked, I've worked with Leymah and Abby, we at some point around, right after Leymah won the Nobel Peace Prize, I was in South Africa at a meeting and she was the keynote. And so she and I went out to lunch and I sort of said, what are you going to do when you grow up? Cause she was like 40 just won the Nobel Peace Prize had at that point, like six children living in, in Monrovia and Ghana. And then sometimes in New York. And I sort of said, what do you want to do with this?

And she said, well, what I would love to do is really institutionalize the role of women, of local women peacebuilders and the critical work that they do in so many ways around safety and security and peace. And I would like to have a serious institution that would study that, take it seriously. And, she had been in conversations with various universities about this. And, I knew that she lived in New York a lot, some of her kids were going to school here. And, and I said, well, you should consider Columbia as a possibility.

Susan: I can’t believe she had six kids and was doing all of this. . .

Peter: Yeah. I mean, I think they have an African community model of family. So there's a lot of people around, and had lived through two civil wars. So, you know, that's the context. But so that was her vision. And we started to put our heads together and brought Abby in. And then eventually met with Lee Bollinger and, you know, the provost at Columbia and the president of Columbia Lee Bollinger and, started this process that took a long time to even get traction on. And Leymah was a Nobel Peace Laureate, you know?

Susan: What were the obstacles? Was it the university? Was it money?

Peter: Mostly money.

Susan: Always is.

Peter: Always is.

But it was principally money, but also Columbia is a research university. It was a male, it was a boys college initially. So it has its own baggage in terms of embracing something radical like this, which is institutionalizing — the vision was to institutionalize a program on women, peace and security that would privilege the expertise of local women, peacebuilders around the world, in Africa initially, but in America as well. And really highlight their experience and expertise, so that they are the experts. It's not me going in to teach them about peace, it's them sharing their insights and then communicating them, and then working with Columbia students to document what they do and to be able to write articles or videos.

Susan: I interviewed one of them, somebody who came through that center Riya Yuyada who's in South Sudan a really kick-ass woman, really amazing person. Yeah.

Peter: Yeah. I mean, they were all extraordinary people and, you know, so, but again, this was a radical thing. This is not a Columbia University fodder, this is very different. So part of it was just communicating to the trustees and to the president's donor group and whatever, what this could be, the importance of it, and how it fit in someplace like Columbia and even donors would come back to us and say, we’re not going to give money to Columbia University for women peacebuilders, what are you talking about? You So there were all kinds of obstacles. . .

Susan: Because there was a female arm of Columbia, Barnard?

Peter: No, not because of that, just because you know, again, like women, local women, peace builders and Columbia University are different universes. And so like, how do I support local women by funding something at Columbia University? Like, what are you talking about? So there was all kinds of challenges to it. And some of it was sexism, hard change sexism. Some of it was just bureaucratic challenges that happen with launching anything in a place like Columbia. But most of it was money from the very beginning. And you know, part of what I learned, because Leymah was able to get generous gifts from Oprah and from Melinda Gates and some other donors, but we were just constantly working on the money to try to get it, or the vision was to underwrite it so that it could be endowed so that we could fund these women because they didn't have the funding to do this. And so it all had to be underwritten in order to be sustainable.

Susan: You know, there's some research and it's significant. I mean, you can Google it, you'll see it, but apparently in the 21st century in the United States, I don't know about globally, that women hold the purse strings for more of the assets in the United States in the 21st century. You know, money doesn't give you power, but money sometimes reflects women's ambivalence about power. And I think a lot of those people that have access to that money, they're often letting men manage it. And there are significant things that women, not that men wouldn't fund something like this, but if that research is true, women could do significant things by actually taking charge of the resources that they have access to.

Peter: Yeah, no, I think that's true, but I think that all women are not the same, and some women still have internalized patriarchy and who's really in charge. And certainly women of a certain generation are more likely to have that in many of those women have access to these resources. So again, it is about what you can imagine and what doesn't compute for you. So, what I was going to say is that I was exposed in some ways through this process, through meeting Leymah learning of what she does, learning of the Liberian movement. And then these various initiatives that they did because they did launch this very impressive project, which is a logistical nightmare to have 15 or 20 women peacebuilders from across Africa.

They put out a call to invite women. And I can't remember the number, but there was at least a thousand applications that came in, like within a month of women across the continent. And they were able to choose 15, you know. So it was challenging in that way because the need was profound, the interest, the resonance was profound. But also, you know, the first event that was held in Kenya was the weekend that there was a bombing in Kenya in Nairobi and which, you know, so, so you have these women from all over the place coming to this, this capital, and then you have this event happen and they had to regroup, you know, so there, there were many obstacles, or getting people to come to America and getting them visas.

So there were multiple challenges to this project. The project had a good director who was fantastic and managing a lot of the logistics of this, but ultimately what I learned just to answer your question in a long-winded way is the, the challenges of even understanding the roles women play in, in conflict zones and pre and post conflict zones, in places with mostly scarce resources, in keeping the community safe, in doing it in logical and in kind ways, and in ultimately building the infrastructures of peace. And, then sometimes actually mobilizing that in a peace movement, like Liberia,

Susan: And often in extremely violent contexts

Peter: Oh, in extremely violent contexts with major violence against children and women, right? So they're recipients of this and attempting to manage this. So you know, so I did a deep dive into that world and getting a sense of those realities and ultimately what can be learned from these extraordinary women in their journeys and, and in their practices. And what I found is, again, my experience that Leymah, a Nobel Peace prize Laureate with an extraordinary track record networked around the world, respected around the world, is the poster child for the Gates Foundation, Gatekeepers events, and, you know, can't raise money. We just couldn't get the money. And so we got these initial gifts from Oprah and from the Gates Foundation, but all the other champions, and I could name names, but I won't, but there were several major champions who just ultimately didn't deliver.

Peter: And so, you know, and Leymah is not a fundraiser, she's an organizer and that's her passion. And so meeting with some owner of a football team and asking for money is not her gig, you know, so this was painful for her to sit in rooms with these people and, and make a case, even when we'd done all the prep work to set it up. But I do think that, what happened to this program ultimately, and the program is ending, the Women Peace and Security program will end in about six months

Susan: Oh, this is a discouraging story

Peter: Yes, it's a discouraging story. But it's reality. And again, there are layers of why it was so challenging. Many of them, we were willing to fight and navigate, and figure out some resilient strategy to move forward. But money ultimately was our undoing, because this is not a, this is not a program that you can just kind of run from grant to grant.

Peter: You have to have enough of a foundation that Leymah can get supported, that the staff can get supported, and that the women who are involved can be supported, otherwise, you know, you just can't do it. You gotta be able to pay the people, pay the faculty, and the women were the faculty. So it was our attempt to kind of flip their understanding . . . one of the reasons that Leymah wanted to do in the first place is that her feeling was that many of these academic programs that are about women are celebrating the elite women, the Hillary Clinton peacebuilders, or the Leymah peacebuilders but not the women that are on the ground doing the work that she's so passionate about and familiar with. So, our attempt was really to try to even flip that, even in the women peace security world, say, yeah. . . because she would have people, organizes of these programs, come to her and say, how do you find these women?

Peter: And Leymah would say, they're everywhere!! You know, so I was deeply schooled and around the women, what they offered, the challenges, the extraordinary lives they lived. And then also with these experiences around exclusion and racism and Africanism and sexism that combined with Leymah to, I think, ultimately be major obstacles to . . . you know Leymah’s a provocateur, she's an activist, she says provocative things to the UN, she speaks truth to power, that's in her. So does that play some role? Is it easier if you're deferring to the patriarchy? Maybe. That's not her thing. So part of it was probably her, but most of it, I think was really just what she represents. And so people couldn't imagine giving, you know, we didn't need that much money. It, depending, you know, if you look at philanthropy, we needed probably $25 million to underwrite this thing in perpetuity, and to be able to have a good programming.

Peter: And that's not that much money. But it was, again, something that just never was forthcoming. And at some point we had to say, you know, we're spending down what we have, we can't. So, so, yeah, so that was very discouraging.

But as you know, as I said, part of what I became more familiar with is the research on when women are in the, at the table, peace treaties are more sustainable, right? They're more likely to happen. They're more likely to be sustained.

And that's these handful of women that get selected into this men's club to have these conversations. So, I guess I, I learned more about the iceberg, you know, not just the tip of the people that we see, but all of the work that's done every day, tirelessly without any attention or celebration or recognition. And, you know, and then we, we tried to go into the belly of the beast at Columbia University you know, an esteemed research university, and really do it there and do it right. And even networking with the feminist scholars at Columbia was challenging because it wasn't what they envision as feminist work, right.

Susan: What was ‘it’? Conflict resolution? Peacebuilding?

Peter: Leymah’s vision of local grassroots recognition celebration was not academic, it wasn't typical research. It wasn't a researcher going in and studying the subject and coming back out with ideas, it was this very different model of education of status and of knowledge creation and knowledge where the knowledge sits. And I think, you know, ironically in academia, that's a hard nut to crack. And so I think we made some dents, but the last year or so has been a very frustrating and disappointing time for the program. So I guess what I've just been trying to glean from this is the, the lessons that I've learned about gender and peace, clearly, if you look at the research of the statistics on men and violence, you know, men are major perpetrators of most. . .

Susan: The major! I mean, I would say again, I'll quote Carol Gilligan -- patriarchy creates violence in men and silence in women -- and not helpful for men. I mean, as a, as a mother of a beautiful soul son, I will say, I think that that system, you know, making boys into little soldiers and all the different ways that that happens, and taking away their humanity early in so many ways that it's really painful. But my focus often is helping women gain more confidence that our voices really make a difference, and that we need to lean in to them. . . William Ury, I don't know where he found this, but this apparently, the practice of dueling apparently came to an end because women started laughing at the practice

 Peter: Oh great.

Susan: But I think it's a great little anecdote, and then apparently around the signing of the Declaration of Independence when Ben Franklin was taking some of his inspiration from the Iroquois Confederacy, the male tribal folks that arrived, their first comment was ‘where are the women’? Because they would not make any take any great undertaking without first consulting with the grandmothers. Which gets into some of the work you've been doing around peace systems. And, because sometimes, oh my God, Peter, sometimes I just think, oh God, have we made any progress in Western society? Like I live on Wappinger Lenape land. Where I live, 50 years ago you were not allowed to sell land to anybody that wasn't Caucasian. . . .

Susan: And so watching those transitions happening around land in the Hudson valley and awareness among many that a lot of what happened with native people was not perfect, but they had a very different kind of, they do have a different kind of social structure, which is much more egalitarian and promotes much more peace. And you contrast that with two men in this country own more than 40% of the rest of the country. I mean, it's, it's

 Peter: Obscene

 Susan: It's obscene, it's crazy. It's, there's no way that you can have democracy. So, I guess I guess one of the things we could turn to is, and I don't know if you might have to say about this, but it's, I do want to convey to women because they are really the audience that I'm most reaching out to at the moment, confidence that how they lead, how they negotiate, how they use themselves in fact does matter.

Susan: And it's tricky. Like, so many of the women I've worked with are, you know, they accommodate, they avoid, they do the things that you might expect them to do. They, are frightened by, you know, in a big scheme, they are frightened in the large sense by male violence or the prospects of violence. And how we negotiate adds up,

 Peter: Absolutely.

Susan: And so I'm curious if you have any thoughts, comments for women about the importance, about how, how women choose to negotiate. And of course it's a big, broad, but the strategy that you use, whether it's collaborative, whether it's adversarial, you know, how they choose to use themselves, and yeah.

Peter: Yeah. So, but have you, by chance had Deborah Kolb on your podcast yet?

 Susan: No, not yet.

Peter: Yeah. So Deborah called has studied women in negotiation, gender negotiation for a long time. And, and you know, is a colleague of mine. I've done a little work with her. She too has spoken a lot about this. And I have a student who graduated last, did her finish her dissertation? Her name is Asha Gibson. She's an African American woman living in Ghana right now. We had a zoom dissertation defense over the summer, and her research was on intersectionality and women's negotiations around their salaries. And part of what she writes about is, you know, what we know from the study of complex systems is, you know, initial conditions matter when you negotiate your salary for your first job, it, it sets a pathway to your wealth for the rest of your life. And so, so part of what you summarize is the profound importance of women recognizing their value advocating for themselves. You probably know this research that, but in negotiations, women are much more assertive and likely to advocate for more, in a negotiation. And when they're negotiating for others when they're negotiating for their staff or, but when it comes to others.

 Susan: I don’t just know it, I've experienced it first hand. . .

Peter: Right. Okay. Right. So again, you know, but what Asha was writing about, she was interested in intersectionality and being a black woman and how those things together would create anxiety in women and affect their negotiations, something called stereotype threat. But what she was citing was the critical importance of these early negotiations, you know. . .

Susan: I even take it back. I mean, for me, it was profound to actually, I mean. . . looking at the work of William Ury and some other, Doug Frye, and, Rabia Roberts who I have interviewed extensively and a number of other people that that we have a much longer time on this planet of being more collaborative, way longer and way, way, way longer than, than coercive, war like. That always surprises people still. . . And, in those settings, women were absolutely were equal, revered. There were goddesses.

The ways that Christianity came in and took over pagan relics that were very celebratory of the divinity of women. Knowing your divinity makes a difference in how you show up at the negotiating table, knowing that you are not less than, but actually absolutely equal to. And that somehow we created this dynamic what my ex-husband calls this pyramid structure with, you know, certain white guys on top, white women this is the United States, you know, and that that, that culture really it's like a hex in terms of how much you're able to ask how much you're able to receive, how much you think you're worthy. And then that's just internal. Yeah.

Peter: And then it's how you're perceived by others. Absolutely. Yeah,

So Doug Frye wrote a book called War, Peace and Human Nature, which is I think his last book. And it's a great book because he does summarize, you know, he's made this case before, but he summarizes archeological evidence that cites that, you know, humans history with war, which is group on group violence at a certain level only goes back. The evidence of it only goes back about 10,000 years. And yet humans, various types of, of humans have been around for 2 billion years, homo sapiens for about half that. But nevertheless, you know, a long time and 10,000 is this, like, you know, this, this past weekend. And that's when we organized for war. And that was mostly because of stuff, you know, that we were hunter gatherers we'd be in these small teams, we'd go to the food, would change with the weather. And so yes, those relations were more egalitarian and more cooperative, highly interdependent because like, you know, we were a tribe and we needed each other fundamentally. And it wasn't until these groups stopped in places and said, oh, the salmon fishing is excellent here. Let's settle here, started to do agriculture, started to own land, hold the land. That's when intergroup violence really came up. So it was really related to stuff, you know, having more or less stuff.

Susan: I sometimes I think that, that, like I like Wikipedia, that probably isn’t your thing as an academic. . .

Peter: I actually respect Wikipedia. Let me just say that. Let me, let me say this about Wikipedia. There was a study done recently, which I think is fantastic, which is shows that when in the process of Wikipedia developing content on a particular issue, when you have more polarized membership on a political issue, the content is much better because Wikipedia will throw you off Wikipedia if you spout a bunch of nonsense or vitriol or make stuff up. So they hold you accountable to certain norms, but when you have extreme points of view, adhering to those norms, you get better content.

Susan: Oh, that’s sort of support for our adversary system, our litigation system. That's kind of the premise of it.

Peter: If there norms and rules to some degree. Yeah. I mean, again, I don't know if it necessarily equates to justice, but it definitely equates to better content around complicated issues when you have very different points of view. Anyway, but I was impressed by that because I know that there is an attempt to democratize knowledge and what people go to for references. And I think it's evolved, but they did, unlike Facebook and Twitter and these other places that don't have strong norms about what you can and can't do, you know, they're starting to introduce them, Wikipedia has been doing that for a long time, so you can have dissent and conflict and difference, and ultimately it can result in better content if they adhere to the norms.

Susan: Yeah. My point was, is that when you, when you search masculinity, war, whenever you come up with Mars was the God of masculinity and war actually, you know, the Greeks equated those two things, which how long have we been creating these social constructs that are pretty rough on men and women.

Peter: Although Lysistrata came in and, and, boycotted the warriors. And that worked pretty well,

Susan: I think was maybe inspirational to Leymah. I never asked her, you know. .

Peter: I don't know what her familiarity was with Lysistrata, but definitely they used sex boycotts as a component of one of the strategies. Yeah.

Susan: Okay. So let's see I'm, interested in, inspiring women, empowering them, inspiring everyone to be rethinking. I mean, sometimes this whole . . . I have “they/them” child, and that's been an interesting process for me, non-binary pronouns.

Peter: And for all of us over 60. . .

Susan: Initially, I would say I was really frustrated. And then recently they said to me, because I really was failing, like I would see them and I would slip and call her, or she/her. And they specifically called me and said, ‘Mom, it would really make a lot of difference to me if you could get this right’. And I realized that the problem was, is that I was going to my friends, and talking about my daughter, and they are a daughter, but talking about my daughter as she/her and going back to my daughter and trying to switch back to they/ them, and that was not working. And so I now have been using, they/them consistently across the board. And what's been interesting is all the conversations that I've been having with my friends, you know, which is exactly their point. That I would become a better ally for what they were standing for. But I get it, getting out of the binary structure, I began to think this is a peace movement. I don't know what you think about that, but the more I thought about it, I thought because I think that patriarchy as a system feels very comparable to the military industrial complex and to think, are these the same thing really?

And I don't know if you have any thoughts about

Peter: Yeah. I mean, I think it's a justice movement. I do think that recognizing differences in gender orientation and identity is a movement. I think it is a movement and an attempt at inclusiveness and recognition of the challenges of people that are born or feel in different ways in trying to respect and create safer environments for them. So I think it is a, a justice movement, and I think justice, as King would say, you know, ‘No Justice, No Peace’. I think it's a foundational component of peaceful society.

 Susan: Did that originate with King?

 Peter: I think so. I mean, I know it it's a quote of King, but I don't know if he started it, but let's say so for now. I don't know, maybe it was Lysistrata, I don't know. But by the way, I do have to say just in terms of our Peace and Conflict field I have become a tireless champion of Mary Parker Follett, because, and I know, you know, she is, but, everybody else, nobody else does, you know, still to this day, often, even in our field Mary Parker Follett, who was an American social worker and was an extraordinary woman and a visionary around constructive conflict and around power sharing.

And, and she worked at a time and organizations when there was a ton of violence around union formation and companies fighting back. And so it was a very tense time in business and industry, and she was a visionary of another way. And I quote her in the beginning of this book The Way Out, because she, she was so pivotal in offering men and anybody in business and us as a society, an alternative way to think about power relations, about conflict, about engaging with one another social, you know, in terms of our social relations and gets so little attention. But she is one of, one of my heroes.

Susan: So Terry Real is somebody who I really have taken. And I know I'm watching the time. I know I gotta let you go pretty soon. But Terry Real is somebody that he's a family therapist

He's a pretty interesting person. A great writer, a great thinker. But he's writing a book at the moment or he's written it, I don't know yet, I don't know how he phrases it. The perpetrators, the falsely empowered the, you know, the people that are in the one-up position in it one up one down kind of model, which are often men and which are often white men in our society. And I don't know, this is a personal question, but, you know, you've been in the cauldron of the conflict field, you know, how has it been for you to navigate that in your negotiation style, your conflict style as a white, tall, good-looking guy?

Peter: Well, so probably very different in different areas of work. The place that my identities have been the biggest lightening rod is in diversity work. And I've done a lot of practice around diversity, doing D E I A J reform within institutions in my own college and university and outside in the world. And, and when I do that work, I am the representative of the oppressor saying . . .

Susan: I’m sure you get projected on all over the place. . .

Peter: Immediately. And so

Susan: Probably it doesn’t matter what you say, probably doesn't make any difference in terms of what lands

Peter: Yeah, probably, but you know that's the space that has been the most fraught around this. But it's also . . . I write there's an anecdote in the book about when I first came on faculty at TC and I was asked chair a big diversity. . . there'd been a big crisis at TC around diversity. And the president was kind of panicking. And I wrote him and said, this is a great opportunity for you to do real reform. And he said, okay, great. You do it, you chair it. And I was a non-tenured, white guy coming into this new position. And, it was, you know, kind of a terrifying moment because on the one hand I was a conflict person. I was a social justice person, I believed in this work, on the other hand, I was the worst person to do this. So I negotiated with him that I would do it under certain conditions. One was that I needed to have a, co-chair of color and actually Dennis Chambers, do you remember Dennis?

Susan: Oh, I love Dennis

Peter: Dennis was my co-chair, and we spent this summer in this committee

Susan: Just for listeners. Dennis is black, Jamaican American. . .

Peter: Dennis was a security guard, was a union member at the college, also taught martial arts, had his own school and martial arts, but also did our courses and was interested in conflict, you know, very eclectic, very, yeah, very soulful person. So he, and I co-chaired this thing, but it was, you know, it was a summer of hell for me because, what I said to the president is the only way I'll do this is if you invite everybody who are the most outspoken and angry members of our community who are raising issues right now, including some of the faculty. And I had to kind of fight with this president as a non-tenure person to say, I won't do it otherwise because otherwise I'm your puppet and what are we doing here? So but that room with those people was a really hard summer because I daily got, you know, ‘what the hell do you know, white boy’, I remember one of the older faculty of color saying to me, ‘who the hell are you to do this work? Shame on you’

Peter: So I was like, no, where to go, but we did it. We did good work. We made progress, we institutionalized some changes. It was really important. It was a very painful experience. I didn't sleep much. I think I lost seven pounds that summer. I just couldn't eat. But it was, but it was worth it. And so, you know, so that's when issues of identity are certainly at the forefront of any dispute that I'm involved in, or I have to take it on the chin. I have to sort of see, you know, ideally if I'm surprised at it, I'm an idiot because you know, of course it comes up. But I've recognized it as, in some ways, you know, again, often the hardest thing I have to do is just sort of sit and take heat and try to eventually use it as energy to change what we're trying to change. But it's always been hard and exhausting. But you know, as I wrote in the book, that was one of the most satisfying professional experiences of my career, because ultimately I think what we were able to do through all of that tension and a lot, not all of it focused on me, but, you know, fair amount or focused on the white male president who had appointed me

Susan: You were a good person in the end to be in that role in a way. . .

Peter: I was a good person in it to be in that role with Dennis and other people in the room that really made it work eventually. Yeah. There were 16 of us in this committee.

Susan: Yeah. I really do believe some of the fundamental principles of, you know, conflict is an opportunity if it’s used well, and that the real growth and change can come from it. So, okay. So just to close but I do want to end with some hope inspiration for women, particularly because COVID has really set a lot of women back all over the planet. I think who we are and think are matters. I think our stepping into our leadership matters, are feeling confident matters our voices matter, our not being cowed by violence matters. And I don't know if you have any tips for women, or words of encouragement or thoughts in terms of what you think, basically what I'm looking to convey is that it matters.

Peter: Yeah. Well, I agree with you completely, that how we feel about ourselves, how we show up, what our aspirations are and our expectations for ourselves are critical determinants of what happens, right. And it doesn't mean that we can fight the structures that be, but they matter. And I, you know, I particularly around the diversity work that I do, I've become less and less enamored with interpersonal work because, you know, that's what the diversity field is mostly about is like me being aware of my own implicit bias or my own, you know, whatever, and being more respectful towards you. And I think that's important, but it doesn't change the structures. And ultimately the work that we do in institutions now is about changing those incentive structures, and the critical importance of that. Let me give you one example. I mean, I do think that there are bright spots in that area, that there are real things changing, not just being more respectful to each other, because that can be a ploy, but really changing the structures.

Peter: And here's an example, there's a, there's a movement in the UK and in Europe called the Athena leadership movement. And it is about women in stem and it's a, it's a movement in higher education that institutions need to kind of be, become more inclusive and more aware and do a lot of important work. And what is the game changer there is that their versions of the, of NSF start to tie their funding to these organizations actually meeting certain criteria. In other words, if you're not respectful and inclusive of different genders, you're not going to get money and that has changed the game there and there it's happening in the U S there's a group called AAA's, which is the American like academic something, something society. It's an association, they have a movement called ‘Sea Change’, and it is not just gender it's, gender and diversity, other types of diversity.

Peter: And they too have started a certification program where a university, and Brown University recently was a pilot on this, you know, it's like when you build new buildings these days and you try to get sustainability …certification, you get bronze or gold or platinum. Well, this will be a kind of inclusive inclusion certification that will have the same kind of levels. And the goal of this group is to get NSF, to buy into limiting funding, to institutions that have these certifications. If that happens, then real things change

Susan: Yeah, follow the money. . .

Peter: Follow the money. And, it's just one example of one of the structures that, that have promoted patriarchy and STEM and in universities and et cetera. And I have to say, you know, one of the things, I'm a faculty of the Earth Institute as well,

Peter: And Alex Halliday, who came in from there, came from the UK, he was at Cambridge and came here and was very aware of this. And he had a lunch with me the first week he was there and he said, why are we so behind on this, on this agenda, let's go. And so he's been a clear champion from the get go, because he's seen like what's coming here. And that, you know, a. it's the morally right thing to do, and b. we're gonna lose all our funding. So let's go, you know, so I think there are those kinds of important structural changes that are shifting. They're not happening at the speed that we would all hope they would happen, but they're shifting. And those will be game changers in terms of inclusion for women and inclusion for other marginalized groups, I think.

Susan: Yeah. And I totally agree with you in terms of the unit of change is not necessarily the individual. I mean, when I, when I had seen getting, getting very large contentious groups together in a room and using the right process amazing things can happen

Susan: Thing. So, listen, I don't know if there's anything else you want to say, but I am watching the time and I want to just be respectful of it. And

Peter: No, I appreciate the conversation and the investigation, you know, I spent the last three years working on political polarization in the country, which certainly has a gender role and is wrapped up in misogyny and racism. But this book is about trying to bring down the vitriol, those American psychosis that we're in and offer people some actionable evidence-based actions that they can do in their lives if they're fed up and just want to kind of bring things down. Not everybody's there, you know, people are still enraged and engaged in the fight. But more and more, the middle is exhausted and feels.

Susan: Well, maybe I should end with not, ‘are you hopeful’ but what, what makes you hopeful?

Peter: What makes me hopeful is that in particularly in writing this book over the past three years now, I've spent a lot of time studying who's doing what around this. And the reality is that there are thousands of groups across the country and in all various sectors that are doing fantastic bridge-building work a very different some, some with the media. So I'm actually bringing, you know, the select committee and the modernization of Congress is within Congress itself. And they're a bipartisan committee that's really doing work on de-polarizing the structures around Congress. There's media. One Small Step is a great thing that StoryCorps is doing. And, you know, so there are, in this time of crisis because of political polarization and COVID and racial injustice, and, you know, sexism in this very unsettled time of ours, there is a resurgence in energy and a sense of urgency around issues of justice and inclusion, but also doing it in ways that are not vilifying everybody on that side. And so that's, what's been hopeful to me is just learning about all the extraordinary things that our people are doing. And some of these are, these are brilliant people doing like there's a woman named Nealon Parker, who's at Princeton university who used to be, Obama's like HUD chief of staff or something who has a project called ‘Bridging Divides Initiative.

You can go to their website, there's a map of America. And what they've been doing is gathering bridge builders everywhere across the country, so you know, locating them. So you can go and check, look at your region, look at your county or your town, and see who's doing what, where, so it's just a beginning of recognition of the fact that there is extraordinary work being done in sectors. And in communities across this country, there is an infrastructure, or an ecosystem that we can tap into and we can build. And that's where I find hope.

Susan: Cool. Well, listen, thank you so much for your time, and it's really nice to see you again.

Peter: Great to see you too. Thanks for having me on. I look forward to sharing it. Yeah.

Susan: All right.

Peter: All right. Be well, take care.