Peacebuilder: a Conflict Transformation podcast by CJP

In this special crossover episode with our friends at Ing Podcast by MennoMedia, we have a conversation with Marshall V. King, the author of Disarmed: The Radical Life and Legacy of Michael "MJ" Sharp.  The book tells the story of Michael “MJ” Sharp ‘05, whose commitment to peace and peacebuilding led him to work with Mennonite Central Committee and the United Nations. Sharp spent most of his life grappling with both the concepts and realities of militarism and war, violence and peacemaking. His murder in 2017 while working with the United Nations as an armed group expert sent shockwaves around the world. He was ambushed with UN colleague Zaida Catalán of Sweden, who was also killed. The investigation into their death is ongoing; dozens were sentenced to death in late January.The topic of Sharp's life and legacy continues in a series of linking episodes of Mennomedia's podcast “-ing”. Check out the series as host Ben Wideman interviews MJ's parents Jon and Michele Sharp, his peers and fellow students at EMU, and David Nyiringabo MA ‘20, a graduate of EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who was the first beneficiary of the MJ Sharp Peace and Justice Endowed Scholarship.King was drawn to the story through “an early sense of injustice” at his murder and the sense that Sharp's life was the story of “a modern Anabaptist …wrestling with the world.”“I felt like MJ had actually gone into the world and, and was doing some of the peacemaking work that we often talk about, that we often, you know, proclaim to believe. But MJ was actually out there doing it and then for a time was missing and inevitably found dead,” King said. A career journalist who also knew the Sharp family, he was especially attuned to the knowledge that there existed “a longer telling of the story other than just the headlines.”King then did the hard work of earning trust and building relationships with people who knew Sharp well. He traveled to Sweden and Germany, to Kansas and New Mexico, using skills he'd practiced from a lifetime in journalism.“At one point I calmed my anxiety by saying, ‘Well, you know, it's just 60 to 80 newspaper columns strung together in a book,” King said. One of the major questions he asked about Sharp, whom he calls at turns smart and savvy and wise, was “what could he teach us?” Yet, King also learned much from listening to people around the world whose lives intersected with Sharp's. “[In] just about every interview I did, there was a moment… where I just marveled at something wise that someone said, or some observation or some piece that MJ had taught them. And tha being in the presence of that over and over again, was an immense gift. I tried to pack the book with as many of those as I could.” 

Dr. Jacqueline N. Font-Guzmán, the inaugural executive director of diversity, equity and inclusion at Eastern Mennonite University, is the featured guest.Font-Guzmán, a native of Puerto Rico, talks about her journey into conflict resolution and to the position at EMU from the fields of law and healthcare. She also shares about her new book, co-written with Bernie Mayer, The Neutrality Trap: Disrupting and connecting for social change (Wiley, 2021). The message at the heart of  The Neutrality Trap is that, when it comes  to the important social issues that face us  today, avoiding conflict is a mistake. We  need conflict, engagement, and disruption in order to make it to the other side  and progress toward the worthy goal of  social justice. The two authors, former colleagues at Creighton University, will co-teach a course on disrupting and connecting for social change at CJP's 2022 Summer Peacebuilding Institute. “The idea is that a lot of our value in neutrality stems from a position of privilege --that it's easy to be neutral,' such as the professional codes of ethics for lawyers and medical personnel,” Font-Guzmán explains. “But if you look at it, they're all through the lens of really preserving a status quo and a system that was not built with people that come from a minoritized group like mine…Every time you're thinking about being neutral or professional, what does that really mean?”Font-Guzmán is a practitioner in the conflict transformation field and is also a professor at EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. She has a master's degree in healthcare administration from St. Louis University, a law degree from InterAmericana University of Puerto Rico and a PhD in conflict analysis and resolution from Nova Southeastern Florida. Font-Guzmán's first book “Experiencing Puerto Rican Citizenship and Cultural Nationalism” (Palgrave Macmillan) was the winner of the Puerto Rico Bar Association 2015 Juridical Book of the Year.She characterizes EMU as at “an exciting crossroad where there's a group of people really authentically going through thinking how they can make a better world, how they can really lead together, how we can teach our students to be out there, be truly agents of social change and be leaders in affecting that social change.” Read about her philosophy and her leadership with new DEI initiatives on campus.

In this episode Lindsay Martin interviews host patience kamau in an effort to understand the behind the scenes development of this podcast, the motivations for its creation and the preparation that lovingly goes into each episode. Lindsay Martin is associate director of Development for CJP. patience kamau's passion is for the earth's “wild” creatures. She is a peacebuilder-conservationist who at heart, sees her role as a conciliatory one between humans and our global environment's complex ecosystems. Along with others who feel and think similarly, she seeks to continually step into the flashpoint and convince fellow humans that, though we now contextually exist in a free market economic system based on exultations of short-term growth and endless profits, a blind pursuit of interest maximization with little thought to environmental impact only serves to undermine our species' long-term survival. 

In this episode, Dr. Benjamin Bergey speaks about peacebuilding through music, and how working with intercultural youth ensembles inspired him to enter the field.Bergey teaches music theory and conducting at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU). The university recently announced a new concentration in music and peacebuilding, which Bergey developed. He also conducts the EMU choirs and orchestra, conducts the Rapidan Orchestra in Orange County, and served as the music editor for Voices Together, a new Mennonite hymnal.Bergey told Kamau that he's always been drawn to leading ensembles, since his early days in church – "bringing people together to make something greater than the sum of its parts." In 2010, during his cross-cultural semester in the Middle East while an undergraduate at EMU, Bergey interviewed Palestinians and Israelis about the role of music as a tool of both protest and community-building. He was particularly inspired by two organizations that brought young Arab and Jewish musicians together to build common ground. "From a peacebuilding standpoint, we know how dialogue and empathy are those kinds of crucial components in transforming conflict," he said. The Jerusalem Youth Chorus brought the kids together to sing, create their own songs, and take music classes. The Polyphony Foundation did much the same, but with instrumental orchestra activities. Both organizations also facilitate dialogue between the students.[This podcast was recorded before escalation of the current conflict in Israel/Palestine.]Bergey recalled watching an Arab and a Jewish student sharing a violin stand, struggling together through a particular passage of Beethoven's “Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21.”"It's these youth coming together in ways that otherwise doesn't happen …. it doesn't happen organically, right, in just normal day-to-day living," Bergey explained. "Studies show that music making together can … help overcome perceptions of dissimilarity and to work towards accepting others' differences."Organizations like these that work in high-conflict areas aim to bring people together in a safe environment."That takes a lot of intentionality, a lot of careful planning and facilitation, where they can share experiences, bring themselves to feel like they can tell stories and make music," Bergey said. "Because really it's a vulnerable act, especially singing." Bergey went on to write his doctoral dissertation on music and peacebuilding, and trained with Musicians Without Borders in 2018. With a slogan of “War Divides, Music Connects,” the Netherlands-based nonprofit works around the world with artists, social activists and communities on conflict. Bergey sees immense potential in this field, even for everyday group settings, in which activities like drum circles, group breathing exercises, or collaborative songwriting can help people become grounded within themselves and build trust with one another."This really is an exercise in mindfulness, honestly. It's important for us to both listen and feel what's happening within ourselves, but also be able to listen and, dare I say, empathize with those around us," said Bergey.

Talibah Aquil MA '19 (conflict transformation) talks about her first journey to her ancestral home, Ghana; the captivating performance art capstone that was borne of that experience; and her calling as a bridge between the North American and African continents. Aquil first decided to travel to Ghana after research through ancestry.com revealed that she had more ancestors from there than any other African country. For her capstone project to her graduate studies at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, she spent three weeks there, interviewing Black Americans and others of the African diaspora who had returned to their homeland about how those experiences shaped their identities. Aquil used those stories to create "Ghana, Remember Me," a poetry, dance, and music performance that speaks on healing historical trauma within the African diaspora community. The project brought together her experiences and a diverse skill set: A graduate of Howard University with a BA in musical theater, Aquil toured with a professional dance troupe after college.Performing "Ghana, Remember Me" "brought to my attention how many people really need spaces to talk about identity … and the complexities of it," she said. That work has helped Aquil face the present as well as her history. "Something about me connecting to the root of my identity gave me such power that when I came back to the States, it was almost like I was prepared to endure all of the racial chaos that was happening in America, because I knew where I came from," she said. "I saw the power of my people and it gave me strength. It gave me strength. It didn't take away the pain, but it gave me strength to endure."She recalled a feeling of homecoming, even on her first trip to Ghana. "Your cells remember … the body knows," Aquil said. Aquil moved to Ghana last year, and lives in the capital city of Accra. "I knew in my spirit that I was supposed to be in Ghana and, again – not knowing the puzzle pieces, just like my journey at CJP – I knew that I was supposed to be here. And listening to that intuition, I'm so grateful because it has been wonderful," she said.Aquil is now a lecturer at CJP, where she introduced a course titled "Re-imagining Identity" that examines the intersections of identity, storytelling, dignity, and the arts. In that same vein of re-imagination, she is also developing an organization called "We Are Magic.""The goal is to bring diaspora people of color to Ghana – to connect, to history, to identity, and to heal from historical trauma," Aquil explained. "I want to do this at a little to no cost for them. I want to build a place where folks can stay and it be a resting place, a restorative place in Ghana."

In this conversation, Matt Tibbles shares moving personal stories that actualize both his learning journey and the important peacebuilding ideas he studies, practices and teaches – drawing from experiences as a youth pastor and a juvenile detention officer, in education and prevention for a domestic violence and sexual assault shelter, and from among his students in classrooms at EMU.A 2018 graduate of Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Tibbles is an organizational development and conflict transformation professional with experience working in and with multi-ethnic for-profit businesses, higher education, nonprofit organizations, and indigenous tribes. He balances teaching at EMU with consultancy work among organizations and school districts, focusing on co-creating dignity and honoring trauma-informed and restorative organizational cultures. Tibbles brings these experiences into the courses he teaches to undergraduates in the peacebuilding and development program and the sociology program. He also teaches graduate courses at CJP. Tibbles begins by describing a pivotal experience of de-escalating conflict while working as a youth pastor in the Pacific Northwest. Witnessing the effect of trauma on the child involved pushed him to explore the concept more fully in the youth group he worked with at the church. Later in Alaska, he worked at a juvenile detention facility where he encountered trauma-informed care and practices. Night shifts there allowed for deeper exploration of restorative justice, especially through webinars offered by the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice and readings of The Little Book of Restorative Justice by Howard Zehr (Good Books, 2002).There, Tibbles began to ask different and probing questions about the behavior of the teens he worked with: One guiding question was “In what reality does this behavior make sense?” Viewing those behaviors through a trauma lens, as responses to trauma, helped him and others he worked with see how daily protocols and practices could raise fear and anxiety. For example, walking directly behind a teen in transition between activities triggered a stress reaction, but shifting slightly into her peripheral vision was a much less threatening position. While our default approach might be “blaming and judging,” asking questions about why behavior might be happening “allowed us to see a much bigger, broader picture of what was going on,” Tibbles said.After studies at CJP, he’s worked to integrate restorative justice and trauma-informed pedagogy within the larger university community with a ripple effect as students across the disciplines see the potential and benefits to bring those principles into various settings.“When we’re able to create trauma-informed and resilient systems, my hope is, and I’m seeing it a little bit from students that have graduated, or even students that have transferred out of EMU into another university or college, is that they’re taking these experiences of being trauma-informed and resilient into their own communities into wherever they’re going,” he said. “And they’re beginning, in small ways, to shift systems that haven’t been trauma informed, or, or haven’t focused on resilience into systems that are beginning to explore just even a little bit of what that means and how it [can be] transformative.”

Dr. Carolyn Stauffer, featured in this episode, speaks about about her work in the fields of sexual harm and trauma.  Before returning to EMU --her alma mater-- as a professor, she lived in South Africa for 16 years. While there, she recounts working at a rape crisis center in the mid-1990s, where she saw a "hierarchy of identities" among the survivors of sexual assault.Race "was the primary sort of frame of identity that was given the most recognition … after race then class became an issue," Stauffer explained, especially among those from mixed race communities. In contrast, gender-based issues weren't much considered in the national discourse on oppression, all while "Johannesburg was considered the rape capital of the world." When Stauffer joined the Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) faculty in 2010, she thought seriously and prayed about how to serve those experiencing intimate partner violence and gender-based violence in the Shenandoah Valley. She started the Silent Violence Project, in which Stauffer and a team (which included Center for Justice and Peacebuilding students) worked with women who were homeless, undocumented, or in the Beachy Amish communities. "What were the unique risks that they faced based on their identity?" Stauffer asked. "What were the resistance strategies that they used to push back against abusers … what were their resilience strategies?"At the time, Stauffer was co-director of EMU's MS in biomedicine program. She wanted to ensure that the future healthcare providers under her tutelage would be sensitized to sexual harm survivors, so she held a symposium – with a cadre of conservative Mennonite survivors teaching her students. Many of the survivors hadn't completed the eighth grade."I flipped the script and basically positioned them as the experts to train my biomedicine students sexual harm and trauma. And so it was this total change of power dynamics," Stauffer explained.Despite her vast expertise in this field, Stauffer still welcomes learning from others. She recalls how, after one symposium, someone asked her about the intersection between sexual violence and neurodiversity – for example, a survivor who may have ADHD or autism. "We have to think beyond just one particular sort of static definition of who that survivor or who that harm doer is. I think that's part of taking the field forward, is including an understanding of the intersection of identity and sexual harm."

Dr. Tim Seidel has played an integral role in the fields of strategic peacebuilding, global studies and interfaith engagement at Eastern Mennonite University. He brings practical experience in all three fields, having lived and worked in Palestine, Israel, and served as Mennonite Central Committee’s director for peace and justice ministries in the United States.Seidel shares his journey to EMU, where he has helped to start an undergraduate global studies major and an interfaith studies minor. He also teaches graduate students at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and serves as director of EMU’s Center for Interfaith Engagement. Seidel brings four topics to the podcast conversation and unpacks them in discussion with Kamau: transnational and anti-colonial connectivity and the politics of solidarity, critical political economy, violence, non-violence and resistance, and religion, interfaith, and the post-secular in politics, peacebuilding, and development. The conversation includes probing questions, ranging throughout hundreds of years of global history, touches on popular culture and current events, and follows a critical thread of colonialism into each of the topics.In a nutshell: “How do we pay attention to the world that we live in today and its colonial constitutions? How do the colonial legacies persist into the present and what are the ways in which people inhabiting this world are struggling and resisting?”If you’re one of those listeners who thrills to the intellectual “chase,” you will want to come to this 55-minute podcast with some paper and a pen to jot down words and names for further investigation, including the several indigenous and BIPOC scholars, authors, political figures and activists who are referenced.Many of the ideas and explorations discussed in the episode are explored in Seidel’s scholarly works and associated presentations. For a full list and links, visit his EMU webpage.Seidel previously taught at American University and Lancaster Theological Seminary. He holds an MTS from Wesley Theological Seminary and a PhD from the School of International Service at American university in Washington DC. At Messiah College, he earned a BA in biochemistry with minors in cultural anthropology and mathematics.

In this episode, Dr. Catherine Barnes talks about designing and facilitating deliberative dialogue processes, as well as current events including the military coup in Myanmar.Dr. Barnes has worked for conflict transformation and social change for more than 30 years in many countries. She has worked with civil society, activists, diplomats and politicians, and armed groups to build their capacities for preventing violence and using conflict as an opportunity for addressing the systems giving rise to oppression and grievance.The conversation begins with a deep dive into deliberative dialogue: what it is, when it's useful, and what it has the power to do for a community struggling with conflict."The dialogue is very much about setting the conversation in this connection point – at a human level – between those who are involved and the perspectives that they have to bring. So that particularly if there's been tension, conflict, or even indeed oppression, that you have this humanization of relationships," Barnes explains. One of the early experiences that led Barnes towards this field of work was growing up in the Quaker Universalist tradition, in which congregants gather in silence "and seek the light of God moving within," she said. They "have … this understanding that often in those spaces, there may be someone who feels moved to share something."Barnes went on to earn her doctorate in conflict analysis and resolution from George Mason University alongside Jayne Docherty, Barry Hart, and Lisa Schirch. She's done conflict transformation work all over the world – including training deliberative dialogue process designers and facilitators in Myanmar. About the current violence in the country, Barnes said she feels "so heartbroken. I feel scared, scared for people who I have come to know and respect and, indeed, to love … I think it really does reveal in many ways how the zero sum nature of a power paradigm based on unilateral control and coercion is so hard to shift.""Are there resilience tools that you think are within the community that might help carry them through this?" Kamau asks."I always, always have hope," Barnes replied. "I often will say that it's actually, it's within movements that you almost need these skills even more to try to think about, 'how do we generate something that will be different in nature, different in kind than the old system that had been oppressive?'"

The first episode features Dr. Vernon Jantzi, currently director of academic programs here at Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) and a co-founder of the center more than 25 years ago. Janzti served as director and co-director from 1995-2002.Jantzi begins the interview with a story of fascinating coincidence: how his visit to a rural community while on alternative service in Nicaragua became the subject of a 10-minute extemporaneous speech in Spanish and how that topic led, not to an assistantship at Cornell to teach the language, but instead a full scholarship to earn his doctorate in sociology.He also discusses how his work with land reform in Costa Rica led to an exploration of mediation and peacebuilding, followed by a collaboration with John Paul Lederach, then also teaching in the sociology department at EMU, to create a graduate program in conflict transformation.Now 26 years later, Jantzi reflects on the changes he’s seen in CJP and how the center is reimagining itself in ways that are responsive to the current political environment in the United States but also to its global network of alumni.“...Working with people in different parts of the world, they'd say, ‘well, you know, it's great to have you here ...But you know, if you really wanted to make a difference, you'd go back and you would change the way your government relates to the rest of the world, or you would do this,’” Jantzi said. “...That’s the exciting part about being at CJP right now.”Respect, dignity, an awareness of the need to honor past history and trauma to promote current healing and how we do this at the national and local levels -- Jantzi sees these approaches as key values for CJP now and in the coming months.Jantzi’s longtime connection to peacebuilding work in Mexico offers a case study for the importance of trust and cooperation among community members. Successful efforts to “rebuild the social fabric” in that region now integrate elements of restorative justice, trauma healing and truth-telling, he says.

The tenth and final installment of the Peacebuilder podcast’s first season features Dr. Jayne S. Docherty, executive director of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU). Docherty speaks on her path to the field, the importance of considering worldviews in a conflict, and how the program has grown and changed since she joined as the first non-Mennonite faculty member, shortly before 9/11.The concept of worldview is a keystone in Docherty’s stories. It shaped how she interpreted the fiasco at Waco, Texas between the Branch Davidians and the FBI, which she wrote her dissertation on while a doctoral student at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. It’s also the reason she chose to teach at EMU – “it’s the only place nobody asked me what I meant by worldview,” she says.But she prefers “the word ‘world viewing’ better, because it’s an activity that we engage in all day long.”Docherty went on to publish a book based on her dissertation: Learning Lessons from Waco: When the Parties Bring their Gods to the Negotiation Table. That research taught her a lot about mediation and negotiation in a situation where two groups have a “toxic combination” of shared and different assumptions of the world.“When the worldview differences are really, really deep, you can’t convince the other party to do anything. All you can do is construct a space in which they can convince themselves,” she explains. “Every worldview is a way of seeing, but it’s also a way of not seeing. So what are you not seeing?” Acknowledging your own and others’ ways of world viewing makes team-based conflict analysis all the more important, Docherty says. That way you can cover for one anothers’ blind spots.Docherty had to navigate some differences in worldviews when she came to the then-Conflict Transformation Program as an Italian Catholic whose father was a career Air Force officer. “At CJP, coming in as a cultural outsider, I was literally the first non-Mennonite hired into the faculty for this program,” she says. Even so, she’s found an “authentic care for one another. I think that’s what we have. I think that’s what we strive for here.”Her hopes for CJP in another 25 years? That the program is recognized, not just internationally, but also in its own figurative and literal backyard as “a really dynamic organizing location for peace, justice, and nonviolence, and doing work in a trauma-informed way.” We already have a strong network of graduates doing good work in the field, Docherty says, but it’s somewhat of a “latent network. And our job right now is to try to plug that in.”

Dr. Howard Zehr is director emeritus of the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice and a distinguished professor of restorative justice at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. In this ninth episode, he talks about his path to victim-offender conferencing as a young practitioner, the early days of restorative justice, and where he sees the field going from here.One of Zehr’s formative experiences as a young adult was attending Morehouse College, a historically black men’s college in Atlanta. He was confronted with being part of a “minority” as one of the few white students in attendance.“People just didn’t read me the way I was used to being read. My body language, what I said was interpreted totally different[ly],” Zehr recalls. “It was a profound experience and not an easy one.”It was in the 1970s, while teaching at another historically black institution, Talladega College in Alabama, when Zehr started working with the criminal justice system. He provided support to prisoners and trained student research teams “to help defense attorneys pick juries in really highly politicized cases: death penalty, prison riots, police brutality.”In 1985, Zehr published the booklet Retributive Justice, Restorative Justice, followed by Changing Lenses in 1990, a seminal work in Zehr’s own career and the field at large. He joined CJP in 1996, at the urging of Professor Ray Gingerich and Director Vernon Jantzi.“My self concept is basically a journalist of justice,” Zehr says – communication and networking are foundational to his work. The whole reason he launched the Little Books of Justice and Peacebuilding series was to make the core concepts of CJP accessible to a wider audience. Zehr pitched the first title, The Little Book of Restorative Justice, to his publisher saying, “I want it to cost about the same as a Big Mac dinner.” Over 100,000 copies of the book have now been sold in a variety of languages.What does he celebrate most about CJP? “We’re still, as far as I know, the only academic program with a practice, a reflective practitioner value-based kind of approach. Which is what we set out to be.”Looking forward another 25 years, Zehr says he likes where he sees the next generation going.“That’s partly why I’m staying out of it,” he says. “A lot of them have a much wider vision about applications – to historical harms, to social injustices – but I don’t want us to lose also some of our focus on things like bringing those who are harmed and those who caused harm in the context of a criminal system together as well … I hope we can hold those things together.”

Katie Mansfield, lead trainer of the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP), speaks about her path to STAR from working in multinational banking during 9/11, polyvagal theory, and her dissertation work on embodied trauma healing.Mansfield, who was raised on Long Island, flew back to New York on September 8, 2011, to be close to her mother after her grandmother’s death. She lost friends in the terror attacks on September 11. “I was physically present with both a sense of fear and powerlessness that I had not, until that point, experienced in my body before,” Mansfield says. A few years later, she quit her job and began learning about different ways of seeing the world from a family in India – a peace education teacher; his wife, a human rights lawyer; and his mother, the first female high court justice in the country.During “time around their table, they were just removing dirt from my eyes,” Mansfield says. When she returned to the States, she worked with the organization Peace Games alongside school children grappling with neighborhood violence and interpersonal conflict. Her mentor there suggested she pursue further education in peace studies. Mansfield went on to study under John Paul Lederach at the Kroc Institute at Notre Dame, who suggested she take a class in restorative justice at the program he helped found – CJP. After finishing her master’s in international peace studies, she attended the Summer Peacebuilding Institute in 2009, which “made a very strong impression.” She recalls attending a STAR training in 2010, where she talked about her experiences on 9/11. Another attendee from Somalia told her, “Well, now you know how we feel every day.”Mansfield’s doctoral dissertation, Re-friending My Body: Arts-based, embodied learning for restoring my entirety, in part draws on neuroscientist Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory, which deals with the vagus nerve’s role in the embodiment of emotion and trauma.“So many of us are learning the words, but not the embodiment,” Mansfield says. “Trauma and joy and life land on the body, and systems and structures, and how people respond to us is because of what’s happening in the nervous system. Do I feel safe in a situation in my body, or do I feel endangered?”In researching for her dissertation, Mansfield was confronted with the power and privilege she’s experienced in her own life, and their effects on how she interacts with others. Similarly, she sees one of CJP’s core challenges now, at its 25th anniversary, as overcoming a tradition of “helpers and healers” going from a privileged and safe position to help others in less privileged situations.“That model is a holdover from colonial mindsets, and it is not fully respectful of the incredible resilience, capacity, wisdom, power, healthy power that exists in all of these communities that some people are trying to go help,” Mansfield says.

This seventh episode features Bill Goldberg, director of the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI). He speaks on the importance of grassroots and domestic peacebuilding, even in Eastern Mennonite University’s (EMU) own backyard and campus.Goldberg jokes that he “married in” to the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) through his wife, former faculty member Lisa Schirch. His background was in international relations that often dealt with negotiations between world leaders. At CJP, though, he saw the value of grassroots-level peacebuilding.“It actually was more important than the high level. That the high level negotiations would always fall apart if it wasn’t backed by lower level and by communities working together,” Goldberg says. He started taking classes at CJP, then picked up a few short-term contracts, like arranging transportation for SPI. He became the director in 2014.Goldberg’s predecessors, Pat Martin and Sue Williams, taught him a lot.“Pat had an open door policy that no matter what she was doing, no matter what time of day it was, if someone came to her office to talk, she would just drop everything and be with that person,” he says. “And with Sue, her analytical mind was just incredible,” whether it was arranging classes or “speaking truth to power.” One major change Goldberg has witnessed in his time at CJP is a shift towards domestic work, rather than focusing on international conflicts. In his early days he recalls international students challenging the faculty and staff - “you have to fix your own problems as well as help us fix ours. And I think it took 10, 15 years for that realization to set in.”This change has accelerated in the last few years, he says, due to fewer visas being approved – meaning domestic-born students are now in the majority at CJP – and a surge in white supremacist rhetoric across the U.S. and in Harrisonburg itself.“It’s just become much easier to be open about racism and bigotry, and to actually be a racist and a bigot out in the open, and so we’re now seeing the need to combat that more,” says Goldberg.While Goldberg sees this as a necessary and powerful shift, there are still ways he thinks EMU as a whole could improve: like hiring non-Christians as full-time faculty. Goldberg himself is Jewish, and while he understands the value of a Christian Mennonite university, the hiring policy “implies to others, only those who are Christian have the values to teach here.”

Dr. Johonna Turner, is assistant professor of restorative justice and peacebuilding at The Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). In this episode, Turner speaks about her history of community organizing, activism, and youth development work in Washington, D.C.; the Faith Integration Task Force she helped form at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU); and her vision for CJP’s role in transnational movement-building.Turner first came to CJP in 2010 as a participant in the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience program. She had been doing a variety of organizing and arts-based activism in Washington, D.C., and “was looking for a place where I could get some more skills to supplement and to really support me in the work that I was doing … the youth identified trauma healing as an approach that was especially important for breaking cycles of violence that depend upon repressive, state-sponsored punitive measures.” She joined the CJP faculty in the fall of 2015, and became the co-director of the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice in 2018.About three years ago, Turner found herself in a number of conversations with faculty and students who wanted “to be more intentional about creating spaces for deliberate reflection on faith in the classroom, and spirituality writ large.” She banded together with Carl Stauffer, Tim Seidel, and Amy Knorr to create the Faith Integration Task Force to facilitate EMU as a “multi-faith space in a Christian university,” that both welcomes perspectives from other faiths while honoring its roots in Christian theology and spirituality.Out of those conversations, Turner has created classes such as “Peacebuilding Through Biblical Narrative” and “Justice, Peace, and the Biblical Story.” One of Turner’s goals through these courses is to understand the injustice, oppression, and violence “that are preventing abundant life for all people,” and find ways to discuss these issues in the church – a space she says is “often depoliticized.”While Turner says that CJP’s sense of community is a great strength, she also sees “the need for more intentional integration of critical theory within the curriculum, particularly feminist perspectives, critial race perspectives … queer perspectives in our curriculum and pedagogy as well, attention to racial and gender justice, attention at large to how systems of oppression are at the root of violence.”And her vision for CJP at 50? “A crucible, an incubator, of peacebuilders, organizers, artists, and activists who are not only able to connect their work to what’s happening in their own local contexts, but also able to see the linkages between what’s happening at their own places and what’s happening at other places. Who are able to challenge the systemic roots of oppression that give rise to acts of direct cultural and structural violence. And who are able to more deeply work at challenging all systems of oppression, including heterosexism.”

This fifth episode features Dr. David Brubaker, dean of the school of social sciences and professions at Eastern Mennonite University, which includes the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). In it Brubaker talks about the environmental and generational changes that organizations now face, the tension between focusing on international versus domestic conflict, and global trends of income inequality.Brubaker came to CJP in 2004, when it was known as the Conflict Transformation Program. At the time, he taught organizational studies; he now teaches organizational behavior, development, and leadership. He’s also worked as a consultant with over 100 organizations, from non-profit to for-profit to governmental, in 12 different countries.“There are just some really classic issues that tend to produce stress and conflict in organizations, no matter what part of the world they’re in or even what sector they’re in,” Brubaker says.Two major challenges that all organizations are now facing, Brubaker explains, are changes in the environment and the generational shift away from baby boomer values to those of Generation X and millennials.“Generational research has found that millennials, for example, have a much higher priority on work-life balance,” Brubaker says. “People aren’t willing to just sign over their lives to organizations, as happened with my parents’ generation and with mine as well.”In his consulting practice, Brubaker has relied on all three academic pillars of CJP: conflict transformation, restorative justice, and trauma awareness and resilience, which he says are unique to be housed within one program.As to what CJP could be doing better, Brubaker says that many practitioners have been attracted by the “siren song” of international work, “often at the cost of paying attention to growing economic and social polarization in our own country.” At the same time, though, the trends we see in the U.S. are happening on a global scale, he says. “As the gap between the rich and the poor has grown around the world, we are seeing the rise of populism and nationalism because that’s how people give voice to their grievances,” says Brubaker. This feeds directly into his vision for CJP 25 years from now. He hopes by then the program will better address the intersection of politics and economics, by supporting those on the front lines of those conflicts.“Those who are closest to the problem or the challenge are the ones best able to figure out how to beat it,” Brubaker says.

Academic program coordinator, Janelle Myers-Benner, who has worked at CJP in various capacities for 20 years. Myers-Benner speaks of her formative experiences volunteering in Bolivia; the many programmatic shifts she’s helped usher through CJP; and memories of her second daughter, Nora, who died in 2008.As young adults, Myers-Benner and her husband, Jason, spent a year working at an orphanage in Bolivia. They returned to Harrisonburg “struggling with big, big questions, and [CJP] was a place where questions were welcome, and not only welcomed but engaged,” she says. Myers-Benner then got her first job with what was then called the Conflict Transformation Program in 1999 as a work study student.“I cannot reflect on my 20 years at CJP without Nora coming prominently to mind,” Myers-Benner says. Nora, the Myers-Benners’ second daughter, was born in October 2007 with a rare genetic condition. Myers-Benner worked from home and hospital throughout Nora’s life and returned to the CJP office when Nora was about four or five months old, baby in tow. She remembers the community rallying around her family during this time. In one story Myers-Benner recounts that Linda Swanson, a student at the time, “almost filled the CJP freezer with these big trays! I think she fed our family for a couple weeks … that was this abundance of generosity and this outpouring of love.” A CJP alumna, Ann McBroom, took Nora for long walks while Myers-Benner helped the program transition to EMU’s new database.“Many of the people who come through our doors are just unforgettable people … the roots feel very deep, and the connections feel very deep,” Myers-Benner says.Her hopes for CJP going forward are also focused on the people. In another 25 years, Myers-Benner says she hopes the school will further “center the leadership of indigenous people and people of color.”“We need leaders who are creative, who can dream, who can hope, who can envision something different than what we currently have, who’ve shown the ability to rise above immense challenges.”

In this episode, Dr. Carl Stauffer, professor of Restorative and Transitional Justice here at CJP, and an engaging storyteller, reflects on his childhood in Vietnam and the way that war shaped his outlook on life; his early adulthood with a young family in South Africa during a time when the nation was experiencing rapid transition away from decades of apartheid rule. He talks passionately about how central his Anabaptist faith has been pivotal in his work and how it continues to shape the way he shows up and teaches in the classroom.Stauffer’s parents were doing church and development work in Vietnam when the war broke out. They decided to stay, and Stauffer was born there in 1964.“That has affected my life and work significantly,” Stauffer said. He remembers one night that the fighting came within a half mile of their home in Saigon, “climbing under the bed with my mother and singing and praying, and the house shaking.”Following in his parents’ footsteps, he and his wife, Carolyn Stauffer, joined the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in South Africa in the “historic” moment of 1994 – only months before Nelson Mandela was elected. It was from South Africa that Stauffer completed his master’s degree at CJP, known then as the Conflict Transformation Program. After 16 years in South Africa, Carl joined the CJP faculty (Carolyn is also a faculty member at EMU and has worked with CJP programs).In recounting his experiences through the episode, Stauffer weaves a story of the development of transitional justice, which he defines as an umbrella term that came about in the 1990s that describes structures and processes that are built to contain violence while a country moves from war to peace. In 2007, Stauffer’s commitment to transitional justice blossomed in a refugee camp in Sierra Leone, where he supported a “justice movement from the grassroots” that implemented indigenous ways of addressing conflict on a macro level.Today, Stauffer says, we have a “steep learning curve” to apply these concepts and practices to our own society in the U.S. “Issues of healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation remain really divisive concepts right now in the polarization of our current political setting,” Stauffer said. But throughout all of the difficult work he’s done, and the violence he’s seen in the world, Stauffer retains hope. “My interpretation, which is Anabaptist, is that Christ’s teaching and Christ’s way of living was not something just for us to imagine, but for us to do,” he explained.

In this episode, Dr. Gloria Rhodes, professor of peacebuilding and conflict studies here at the Center for Justiceand Peacebuilding (CJP) at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU), talks about the field of conflict resolution and transformation. Rhodes begins the episode by looking back on her own introduction to conflict-related work, as a fresh EMU alumna teaching in Russia. She tells of how one day, an argument between students came to blows during Bible class. “They didn’t have a sense of interpersonal peacemaking, and I had grown up with that as a Mennonite … they really trusted authority to always be the problem-solvers, the decision-makers,” Rhodes explains. She felt driven to know more – so she returned to the United States to earn her masters and doctorate degrees in conflict analysis and resolution from George Mason University. Rhodes says that she, and CJP at large, have learned about self-assessment and acknowledging privilege. “As a white North American female with a PhD and middle income,” Rhodes said, “probably I’m not the right person to enter many situations as the expert, or as the person who might help to bring about change. So I think we all need to be able to ask those questions of ourselves. And I’d say that’s a change that has happened in our curriculum.”Rhodes sees this as part of a larger movement at CJP to examine not only the technical processes of peacebuilding work, but the bigger picture of how practitioners and educators live out their values. She hopes this examination will continue in the years to come. As a place ofhigher education, “we have legacies and privileges that go with that, that I think we are in the process of asking hard questions about that, but I think we still have learning to do,” Rhodes says.

In this episode, Dr. Barry Hart, professor of trauma, identity and conflict studies here at CJP, reflects on his own beginnings in the field of conflict transformation and trauma work, definitions of trauma and trauma healing, how CJP has evolved since its inception, and where he sees it – and the entire field of justice and peacebuilding – growing from here.Hart has “officially” taught at CJP for 23 years, but first came on board as a summer workshop instructor in 1994. After graduating from Eastern Mennonite Seminary in 1978, Hart lived and worked overseas, developing a trauma healing and reconciliation program for the Christian Health Association of Liberia during the Liberian Civil War.“I was very keen on trying to weave together what I understood could be brought from the outside … the people themselves were very resilient, amazing in their own right, and had skills and traditions that could help in their own healing process,” Hart recalls in the podcast.CJP co-founder John Paul Lederach invited Hart to come present on his work during a Frontiers workshop (the Frontiers of Peacebuilding events were the precursors to today’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute).“Coming back was really just part of what I wanted to do, and who I felt I was,” Hart says. Hart has seen CJP through significant academic changes, like the inclusion of restorative justice and transitional justice curricula and the creation of the Foundations I and II courses. As for the future of the Center, Hart envisions CJP addressing the climate crisis and its intersecting issues more effectively. “If we can go forward with a real sense of care for each other, care for the planet in a way that, actually, has not only care but practical actions, then I think we’ve gone a long way. So 50 years from now, we may be known as a Center for Justice, Peacebuilding, and the Environment,” says Hart.

A trailer to Peacebuilder, a podcast by the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP), at Eastern Mennonite University, in Harrisonburg, Va. We here at CJP are celebrating 25 years since our founding. We’ve been celebrating this milestone since July first 2019 and will carry on through the end of June 30, 2020. This podcast delves into who we’ve been, who we are and who we hope to be.