A Handbook of International Peacebuilding Into The Eye Of The Storm

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Who Is Calling?

Sue K. Williams

Let's begin with the first point of inquiry: how to assess who is requesting your participation. At a superficial level, this would seem to refer to the person who is calling you. But when you are dealing with settings of protracted conflict, it is important to think beyond the initial point of contact. Remember that in settings deeply divided by conflict, those you are connected with or perceived to be influenced by will carry more weight than who you are, what you do, or what you believe.

We asked Sue Williams to reflect on her experience in responding to requests and first points of contact. Sue has lived in Northern Ireland for the past fifteen years. (She is American by birth and now has dual citizenship.) She has lived and worked for most of her professional life as a mediator and a trainer in conflict transformation and in development in places like Northern Ireland and various countries in Africa and Asia. With her husband, Steve Williams, she coauthored a book on mediation strategies, Being in the Middle by Being at the Edge (1994). She comes from a Quaker background and has worked as director of policy and process skills with the training program Responding to Conflict, located in Birmingham, United Kingdom, and she is now an independent consultant based in Derry, Northern Ireland.

Carefully read what she writes in response to the inquiry, "Who is calling?" She suggests that it is important not only to gain a sense of the person (and his or her organizational affiliation) calling you, but to understand the person's location within the setting of conflict. You need a picture of your point of contact in reference to a web of relationships on the ground locally, nationally, and internationally. Assessment of who is calling requires you to think about networks, levels of networks, perceptions, and who has defined the need behind the request.

* * *

When the telephone rings (or the e-mail, fax, or letter arrives), the journalist's time-honored questions present themselves: Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How? This chapter deals primarily with the first question, which in many ways seems the most fundamental. If the "who" is right, the rest may be negotiable.

When the telephone rings at my house, there's no knowing who may be calling, from where, or about what. Sometimes a caller opens up a whole new world to me by involving me in a distant conflict. As I find out more about the situation, and perhaps end up working with the people there, I learn to care deeply about what happens. In this sense, the who of a request is especially important, because peacebuilding involves us at deep levels. What could appear to be a simple request of providing technical assistance for a limited period of time is the beginning of a commitment to people dealing with a specific, violent conflict. For this reason, I look quickly beyond what is being asked, where, and focus on who is doing the asking.

Who Is Actually Making the Request?

There is someone asking, and my decision will depend in large measure on that person. This is partly because peacebuilding is, by its nature, collaborative, which means that the different parties need to be able to work creatively together. It is not a package, as though they were ordering a computer and I intended to deliver and install it. In our case, the product may be a mediation initiative, a consultation, a training, or a strategic review, but no matter what it is, it will require that I work closely with the sponsoring organization, local partners, individual parties and their organizations, local communities, and perhaps local authorities.

The Who Assessment

Getting a good sense of the individuals and organizations asking for your assistance is vital. The following questions can help clarify whether you want to consider accepting this particular request.

Step 1: Assessing the Person and the Organization

I start with a series of questions that make reference to what I do and do not know about the person calling, the organizations involved, the situation, and the kind of work proposed-for example:

ò Is it someone I know or from an organization I know? If not, how did they get my name? What do I know about them? Whom do I know who is likely to know them?

ò Are they insiders to the situation in question or outsiders? How are they perceived by others in the situation?

ò Do they have a profile locally, nationally, or internationally? Are they known for certain kinds of initiatives and for independence or with strings attached? Do they have a political or economic bias that might be important to the work proposed?

ò Are their values and approach compatible with mine?

ò Do they have a track record of doing good work in a responsible and interactive way? What have they actually done? Do they have the capacity to do this kind of work in this place? Do they understand it conceptually? Can they support it financially and organizationally?

ò What will happen to the results of this work? Will the partners compete for ownership of the result? Will one organization claim credit for more than it has done and risk exposing or discrediting important local initiatives? Will decisions about what happens next be made by those most involved, by those with power or money, or by those in key positions?

Some of these questions are likely to be relevant for any request, and each leads to others. At the same time, of course, the others who are involved will be asking these same questions about me.

Step 2: Assessing How the Organization Is Placed in the Specific Context

I begin with questions about where this initiative comes from. This is important because it tends to determine whose understanding of the problem serves as the basis for the work. It is also important to know as much as possible about all the organizations that may be involved, how they relate to each other, and particularly how they relate to the key parties. If this work is aimed at political parties, armed groups, governments, refugees, community groups, women, or youth, then how does the organization that is calling me and the network of organizations relate to them, and how do they perceive the potential work?

We can approach this question by addressing purpose and entry: Are the groups contacting me an appropriate point of entry to achieve the aims of this initiative? Included in this question is an assessment of the aims themselves. Are they appropriate aims (realistically, politically, ethically), and can this group, with my assistance, select the right people, get them there, and follow up with them?

One call I got came from a familiar partner, a U.S.-based non-governmental organization (NGO), to document and advise a local initiative in a violent conflict in South America. The first step was to make contact with two international NGOs (INGOs) based in Europe. However, the initiative itself was at the community level within the country, with some liaison and campaigning work at the national level. At the national level, one INGO was active on this issue, along with two national NGOs (NNGOs). At the regional level, there was also a local NGO (LNGO), as well as the previous actors, with various relationships among themselves. And at the level of the real work, there were three distinct communities (each of which actually consisted of several smaller communities) to which each of the other organizations related in various ways (see Figure 1.1).

Such a complex structure, with both myself and the inviting agency so far removed from the action, raises several immediate questions and warning flags, highlighted by questions that go beyond intentions to the framing of needs and problems:

ò What is the presenting problem or issue? Who has defined it? To whom was it seen as a problem or need? These are the key questions.

ò What kind of consultation process was used to define the need in designing this initiative? Who was involved, and who was not?

ò What did those most actively involved (the community and those working with them) think of the proposed initiative and my involvement?

ò How do all the organizations and levels relate to each other? It is important to know the history between the organizations and to understand who can help with or obstruct the work in progress.

ò Is there political conflict not just between governments and armies but between and within organizations? The more organizations and levels there are, the greater the likelihood is of rivalry and conflict between them. (In some cases, this was managed very well, but in others, I've been caught in significant internal organizational disputes.)

ò Within the organization, who wields power over this initiative, and how do they deal with others? This can be a real stumbling block. I've found myself trapped in the role of fronting an activity for an organization that talks about participation and collaboration but actually engages in hierarchical tyranny.

Step 3: Assessing the Political Significance

Peace is, and will be seen as, political. We are, after all, working in situations of potential violent conflict.

Because there is a history of deep conflict, there is a history of mistrust. Any activity will be viewed initially through the lenses of caution and suspicion. In some situations, the political overtones of conflicts may arise from ethnic, religious, linguistic, or cultural overtones. It is vital to understand as much as possible about the nuances of both the situation and the relationships involved, particularly those with whom you will be working closely.

Because much of my work is political, I will use an example where the issue itself was political. I received a request to provide mediation training to a selected group of eminent persons who were potentially in a position to mediate between the various political parties (and their associated militias) during an upcoming election in a central African country. I was not familiar with the national NGO requesting my involvement; an acquaintance had referred me. As they described their situation and their plan, several things struck me as significant in deciding whether to proceed:

ò The situation was urgent. Elections were soon to be held, each party had an armed militia, and the pattern was that thousands of people were killed at each election.

ò Although I knew the region, the kind of work, the language, and some of the cultures, I told the caller I thought I had insufficient experience in this situation. The caller replied that with my experience of political mediation and command of French, I was as close to ideal as they were able to find. In the following days, I did more research on the political situation, but I was very cautious about my suitability.

ò The national NGO requesting assistance seemed to have a realistic understanding of what could be done to build on the skills of the team and to provide on-call support for problems emerging later.

ò Those selected for the mediation team seemed to represent a significant level of credibility and generally might be perceived as either individually independent or collectively balanced (bishops, university professors, and retired diplomats). There was one former prime minister, who might offer too high a profile and insufficient independence of the political conflict.

After doing extensive research with books, articles, on-line, and with a network of colleagues, I decided to accept the offer. As things turned out, the person with the high political profile was a useful entrée in the short term but an obstacle in the long term, which confirmed my experience that high status can be an asset and a disadvantage, either or both, at particular moments in the process.

Civil war broke out one hour after I arrived in the country for the training. Although I was trapped in the shelling, telephones in the capital continued to function. We ended up doing a mini-workshop by telephone, and the mediation team negotiated two cease-fires, during the second of which the French Foreign Legion managed to evacuate my location.

This example also illustrates another lesson: one rarely ends up doing what one envisaged, but the flexibility and willingness to do what seems possible often may produce useful results.

Step 4: Striving for Creative Synergy

The total effect of an initiative may not be the sum of the inputs and component parts. Among the other factors that can be extremely important are timeliness, excitement, the right people, flexible funding, a shared strategy, and embedding the initiative in a larger process. This leads to another set of questions related to the who assessment:

ò Is this timely? This is the most important factor of all because it encompasses the activity, the people, and the situation. Timeliness is hard to assess in objective terms; I rely primarily on the evaluation of experienced, well-informed local peacebuilders.

ò Is the strategy underlying this initiative shared by many actors? If yes, what you are doing can fit into a body of work. If no, then it will have only itself to depend on. It is important to know what other peace initiatives are being undertaken and how this one fits with them.

ò Is there flexibility in strategy and funding? This issue is particularly important if the work goes well and prompts ideas for other action. In this case, flexible funding and organizational strategy can take advantage of developments and support creativity.

I raise these questions with the people or organizations making the request. The answers are not always clear immediately. Examples that spring to mind include some that far exceeded any reasonable expectation of their impact and some that involved so many competing forces that they accomplished far less than was invested in them by all concerned. Again, the judgment seems to be intuitive, based on juggling many different factors and imponderables, such as what people did not say.

Ask questions about funding in the early stages. I would never advise refusing a request purely on the basis of lack of funding, both because this is philosophically unacceptable and because my experience is of having agreed to a few initiatives without any funding that turned out very well.

Continues...

Excerpted from A Handbook of International Peacebuilding Copyright © 2002 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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