by Michael Thomson
Although the address locates the peacebuilding organization where I interned in a plaza, it is actually just another nine-story mass of the limestone, reflective glass, and rebar that dominates central Amman. The security guard at the front entrance, Muhammad, works overlapping hours to mine, so we have grown accustomed to four check-ins per day: one each when I arrive and leave, and another set when I exit and return from lunch. Muhammad is likely in his late 50s or early 60s and takes pride in his job, though he does not mind watching YouTube videos of soccer or boxing now and then. I show him pictures of my niece. He tells me stories of his days as a boxer. I bring him french fries from lunch or a piece of cake when we have an office party. But most importantly, we greet each other with an earnest warmth at the start and end of each work day.
I can recall only two rules for the office building. The first rule is the prohibition on smoking inside the offices, which drives most staffers to the stairs several times per day. The second rule, which Muhammad relays to me a few months after I start, is to refrain from bringing food in the elevator. This came directly from the building owner, or “the big boss” in Muhammad’s words, and although we both gave each other an eyebrow-raised glance at this odd command, I abided without comment for Muhammad’s sake.
One warm day in October, my supervisor asks to have lunch with me to discuss the latest draft of my conflict analysis report. After we’ve somewhat lowered our mountain of shawarma and fries from the Iraqi restaurant across the street, we return to the office, each carrying a small bag of leftovers. We are still talking so I give Muhammad only a terse Salaam Walekum and forced smile. He looks anxious and returns my greeting quickly before asking, as we are almost at the elevator, for us to please use the stairs because of the food. My supervisor, who I had come to respect, says “no thanks” dismissively without turning his head and walks into the open elevator. I give Muhammad a pained look, follow my supervisor wordlessly, and wait in silence.
“I don’t like that guy at all. Sarah said he tried to make her take the stairs the other day too. I don’t know what his deal is, but he’s a bit weird.”
“Oh. I actually like him. He’s been pretty friendly to me.” Silence the rest of the ride up, and in our parting in the hallway.
My response is weak and non-confrontational. Feeling embarrassed and ashamed, I spend the rest of the day asking myself what I am doing ‘building peace in the Middle East.’ In the over two years since this day, I have yet to come up with a satisfying answer to this question, which has in turn forced me to rethink not only my role in the peacebuilding field, but the structure of this field as a whole.
Nothing More Dangerous
The organization I worked for at the time, which I will refrain from naming because my goal here is less to deride an organization than to reflect on my views of the peacebuilding field, prides itself as the largest international peacebuilding organization in the world. This is an odd badge to flash given that the peacebuilding field glorifies grassroots organizations and locally-oriented programming. For nearly a decade before I interned there, I had been naming this organization to curious relatives and friends as a potential dream job site. It exhibited all that my idealism sought: a nonprofit working in conflict zones to bring about reconciliation through the creation of spaces conducive to dialogue. Having studied at an environmental peacebuilding institute in Israel and conducted peacebuilding research in Palestine, I believed myself more than qualified to intern there. Over time, however, I came to see my line of thinking unwittingly embodied in a quote attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to the street artist Banksy: “There’s nothing more dangerous than someone who wants to make the world a better place.”
Typically interns at this organization either produce background material for grant applications or contribute to ongoing program assessments. Given my background in research and a bit of serendipity, I was offered a different task: to conduct the literature review for this organization’s ten-year strategy in the “Greater Levant,” defined internally as Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq (senior staff had excluded Israel and Palestine for reasons relating to internal organizational politics, despite the organization having an office in Jerusalem). I was honored to have a role in such a substantive project and dove into it headfirst, reading and writing without pause at a 24-hour internet café. After no shortage of Turkish coffee and Nescafé, I churned out a 50-page report stamped with over 300 citations and 60 endnotes in less than a month.
The team liked my work ethic and offered me the task of writing the Conflict Analysis Report that would guide the entire ten-year strategy. I felt proud and once again threw myself into it, producing another 30-page report with a few hundred citations in two weeks. The methodology section in this internal, confidential document states that its findings are informed by staff insights, nearly one hundred consultations with a diverse body of nationals from the region, and the literature review. In truth, the report was little more than a revised literature review restructured to fit the objectives the organization wished to pursue in the region. These consultations did occur, though for security, visa, and cost reasons I did not participate in any of them.
Given my lack of Arabic proficiency and the absence of any notes compiled or passed along to me from the consultations, I incorporated no Arabic-language source into this analysis. Indeed, despite repeated requests, I could not even get a short summary or high-level takeaway from any of these consultations, making me doubt whether this report was not simply another box for my team to tick off, as opposed to an integral part of a ten-year strategic review. Given the ostensible purpose of this document to guide this organization’s strategy in four of the most conflict-prone countries in the world —all of which have Arabic as their national language— over the next ten years, the absence of any Arabic-language sources in it is a shocking and inexcusable flaw in the analysis. The report appeared and read like solid conflict analysis, but the most important types of sources —some of which were readily available to be included— were absent and replaced by Western analysis from think tanks and major U.S. publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker. None of the dozens of national staff working for this organization in each of the four countries examined in the report —who give clout to the organization’s messaging that national staff run national offices— contributed to the report. Their lifetimes of experience, knowledge, views, and insights were replaced by that of a white American man with less than a year of aggregate experience in the region who cannot speak Arabic but can write conflict analysis that follows all the field’s stylistic conventions.
And yet. I received nothing but praise for my work. Senior staff members commented that I was a ‘gifted writer.’ My supervisor, his supervisor, and his supervisor, all of whom were men not hailing from the region and two of whom were white U.S. nationals, did indeed use my analysis to guide the formation of the ten-year strategic objectives in the region. They brought me into senior-level meetings to present my analysis and incorporated my contributions during strategy discussions. They have written glowing recommendations for me for academic and professional applications. To this day, I become viscerally sick when I dwell on this too long.
Too Close to Home
Another inflection point in my evolving views on this topic occurred in the early summer of 2020. After the conclusion of my internship and a brief stint farming with a family in Togo (long story), the Covid-19 pandemic forced my premature return to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I would stay with my parents until starting graduate school in the fall. A few months into this respite, Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, and the city I grew up in erupted in protests, rioting, and escalating use of force by MPD officers. This violence, and the blocks of destroyed buildings on Lake Street left in its wake, spotlighted a history of racial bias and overcriminalization among law enforcement, as well as a longer and more insidious history of structural violence and division in the city.
I have studied, conducted research, and worked in the peacebuilding arena in Croatia, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, and yet I have observed no stronger visual representation of disunity than on the street a few miles from my parents’ house in South Minneapolis. The graffiti on the walls surrounding the George Floyd Global Memorial bore such a striking resemblance to that on the walls of the Separation Wall between Israel and the West Bank that it brought back my PTSD symptoms from living there. My Jordanian and Palestinian friends were posting about George Floyd, Derek Chauvin, and racial inequities in Minneapolis on their Facebook pages.
This experience reminded me of the problems with the underlying logic of international peacebuilding organizations. Perhaps the most (over)used term in peacebuilding literature is “social cohesion,” which is almost never defined yet frequently cited as the crucial variable for successful peacebuilding programming. Put most simply, the dominant approach to peacebuilding, derived from Gordon Allport’s Intergroup Contact Theory, assumes that people who interact with each other are less likely to fight with each other. Social cohesion, then, refers to the degree of solidarity within any given community, and often acts as a metric for gauging the amount of tension between members of groups in conflict. The theory has spurred a whole genre of peacebuilding programming referred to as “people-to-people” programs (P2P), which bring together members of groups in conflict for sport matches, dialogue, academic study, and thematic workshops. Like almost all other peacebuilding organizations, the one I interned for centered P2P and Intergroup Contact Theory in their programming, organizational mission, and theory of change.
But could I apply the tenets of peacebuilding to my hometown? The discussions that occurred within the organization I had left a few months earlier were both made for the simmering tensions in Minneapolis and seemed absurdly inappropriate. I am certain that almost everyone I knew in the city, including myself, would have scorned intervention by an international peacebuilding organization led by people from other countries to bring MPD officers and protesters together for dialogue. How could they possibly gain legitimacy in the eyes of those whose attitudes they sought to transform? How could superficial events bringing people together for brief periods possibly address the breadth and depth of division and the undercurrents of injustice rooting it? Discussions of social cohesion? Not in my backyard.
The Definition of Insanity
Shortly thereafter, during my first year in graduate school, this organization recruited me to lead the conflict analysis for their ten-year strategy in the Arabian Peninsula, centered on the conflict in Yemen. Attracted by the higher pay, opportunity to learn more about conflict in the region, and potential for career advancement, I disregarded my ethical reservations and took the contract. Over the next eight months, I completed the same tasks as when I was an intern, except this time for more money and with less oversight. As before, almost all material I used in my reports came from English-language sources.
This research process also exposed how my lack of experience was mirrored in organizational leadership. For instance, the director of the Yemen country office, who has a staff of roughly 60 Yemeni nationals working for him and is one of the few non-Yemenis in that office, does not speak Arabic and asked me if there were any readings that I would recommend to him in order for him ‘to better understand Yemen.’ Just as with the —perhaps also apocryphal— definition of insanity attributed to Albert Einstein, I am not sure why I expected ‘this time’ to be any different.
Through this research I met virtually with Nadwa al-Dawsari and Peter Salisbury, two of the leading conflict analysts for Yemen. Both provided a wealth of insight that foundationally shaped the analysis in my reports. Al-Dawsari is Yemeni and had until recently lived her entire life in Yemen, founding the Yemen Chapter of Partners Global and working extensively with Yemeni tribes to implement programs and conduct conflict analysis. Peter Salisbury, International Crisis Group’s Senior Researcher on Yemen, has spent 12 years writing conflict analysis on Yemen’s war. Both al-Dawsari and Salisbury spoke with me again recently to discuss positionality and purpose in peacebuilding and conflict analysis.
Nadwa enters a room with a commanding presence. Her straight posture, wedged haircut, and bright crisp blazers radiate a contagious and youthful buoyancy. However, over time I realized that her wardrobe masked a fatigue that revealed itself in deeply etched circles around her eyes. Nadwa’s exhaustion went beyond her busy schedule; her spirit was weary, as if she was tired of being tired.
“Western institutions have hijacked the Yemen narrative that fits their ideological and institutional objectives,” al-Dawsari told me. The co-optation and mangling of Yemen’s conflict narrative by Western think tanks, policymakers, and analysts is an overarching theme in al-Dawsari’s writing and in our discussion. I could not help but notice my contribution to this problem. My analysis, besides the gaps identified above, had to ultimately orient towards strategic objectives that promoted dialogue, reconciliation, and other nonviolent means of resolving conflict. It would be an awkward and untenable position for the organization if my report advocated for a renewed violent offensive in Yemen.
In contrast, al-Dawsari seeks to present this extraordinarily complex conflict through Yemen’s history and by incorporating Yemeni tribal dynamics and grassroots organizing efforts into her analysis, for instance by complicating the relationship(s) between al-Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and Yemen’s tribes.
“I write based on what I think and how I feel,” al-Dawsari told me. “A lot of times it is controversial, and sometimes shocking. I was never really an analyst before the war, and started doing analysis because I thought there was a huge gap in Yemenis’ voices in war reporting.”
Resigned
Like al-Dawsari, Salisbury eschews narratives that wrap conflict analysis too neatly into a coherent thesis. For example, in January 2020 he spoke to Houthi authorities, tribal leaders, and members of the International Recognized Government (IRG) about an outbreak of fighting in Western Jawf, a governorate in Northern Yemen that sits just below the border with Saudi Arabia and had up until this point divided the Houthi forces to the west from the IRG and allied forces to the east and south.
These conversations led to conflicting narratives. The Houthis argued that the IRG instigated the violence as the catalyst for a campaign to retake Sana’a, while IRG officials argued that a buildup of Houthi forces over time on the Jawf border indicated an imminent attack from the Houthi forces. Salisbury also learned of a tribe flipping allegiances, preparations for serious fighting in the area from both the IRG and Houthi forces, and clashes at a checkpoint that appeared to trigger hostilities. Staying true to these disparate and contradictory pieces of information belie a straightforward narrative and thesis. While it may be tempting to sew these pieces together into a cogent, cohesive, and definitive narrative, Salisbury chooses to instead depict the fog of war.
“The older I get,” Salisbury reflects, “the happier I am to insert uncertainty into my analysis and put my hands up and say, ‘these guys say this, and these guys say this.’” Even when this seems like providing the reader with the complexity and contradictions of conflict at the time, it can seem simplistic and reductionist in retrospect, or “milquetoast analysis” as Salisbury describes it. The trick to good analysis, he argues, is to “distill without simplifying.”
In holding this approach up to my own conflict analysis and the organizational constraints within which I wrote it, I do not think my work —and the legitimacy of international peacebuilding work broadly— holds up to scrutiny. Unlike the approach taken by Salisbury and al-Dawsari, which consistently elicits input from the ground and inductively generates arguments, conflict analysis in the organization I worked for had the distinct purpose of justifying P2P and related programming that the organization could attain through available grants. And this, perhaps, is why no other staff at this organization criticized the integrity of the analysis and its methodology. The analysis I wrote served its purpose fully and neatly, with the necessary aura of professionalism. Its legitimacy within the organization was based on its coherence, quantity of references, length, and format.
The issue, then, is the radically opposed measures of legitimacy within peacebuilding organizations compared to those outside of it. I sometimes ask myself whether Muhammad would have greeted me as earnestly and warmly if he knew that I was working to “build peace in the Middle East” without speaking Arabic. And if my work would have been illegitimate in his eyes, how could it be legitimate in mine? This question is not asked within these organizations, but it is one of the most relevant questions asked by those whose attitudes P2P programs seek to change. For some, it is the only relevant question. I left the peacebuilding field because I could not answer it.