Storytelling For Peace

Attorney Stewart Levine tells the story of the lawyer who won his client a $500,000 judgment in a two-hour hearing. When the delighted attorney turned to his client after the hearing, however, he found him crestfallen.

"What's the matter?" the lawyer asked. "You just won $500,000!"

The client shook his head. "But I never got to tell my story."

"When people have conflict with each other," Levine explains, "they have the story about the conflict, and the story is the way they talk to themselves. … One of the most important ways to resolve conflict is to let people tell their story."

Numerous storytellers, scholars and other professionals support the view that stories bear the seeds of peace and reconciliation, both because a feel for story is part of what it means to be human and because of the inherent narrative nature of conflict. These professionals have long noted the human instinct for story, referring to humans as homo narrans, a "storytelling animal." The fact that we experience life as narrative allows us to understand the actions of others through the sharing of stories and, in turn, to form healthy, respectful, and productive relationships.

"Like incidents in real life, the story kindles emotions and encourages theorizing," says Ruth Stotter, author of More About Story (Stotter Press). Story, continues Stotter, enables people "to distance themselves from the immediate problem at hand "allowing a more objective, dispassionate examination of issues."

When faced with conflict, we can use both the emotions and the perspective engendered by story to good advantage. According to Annette Simmons in The Story Factor (Perseus), Story creates an alternative viewpoint. Conflict comes from a small picture that looks like you and I are separate. Story has the capacity to hold both of us in the same story and show what we have in common, as well as to ignite or awaken the feelings of sisterhood and brotherhood that transcend our differences. It doesn't solve our differences; it creates something that's bigger than our differences.

Storytelling allows us to experience the universal truths found in shared circumstances. Carl Jung's pivotal work on the collective unconscious underscores this notion of universal truths. The archetypes shared among disparate peoples suggest that we are all parts of a whole, and that to cut ourselves off from that whole is to sever the connection with the source of our existence.

Story also allows for a new vision of the possible. In Getting to Resolution: Turning Conflict into Collaboration (Berrett-Koehler), Levine considers story-sharing a vital step in conflict resolution. He describes the process of conflict resolution as one of all sides' bringing their stories to the table and emerging with a new, shared story for the future. That is to say, although holding separate stories is potentially divisive, sharing these stories and creating others builds bridges among the stories, as well as among those who carry them. In addition, stories in the Western tradition are predicated on conflict—and its resolution. By presenting a model of conflict transformed, a story helps people envision peaceful solutions to their own problems.

UNESCO designated 2001 the International Year for Dialogue Among Civilisations, a fitting start to the Decade of Peace and Nonviolence. Throughout the world, people are using storytelling to bridge chasms of distrust and prejudice. In Australia, a program called Pulkids is helping children connect with each other and the Earth through stories. In Northern Ireland, storyteller Liz Weir has used storytelling to connect war-torn communities. And in the U.S., lawyer Stewart Levine uses stories to bring together opposing people and organizations.

Are storytellers the most appropriate professionals to wage peace? John Paul Lederach believes that all sectors of society must participate in the task of peacebuilding, which needs to include a "comprehensive, multifaceted strategy" not only for ending violence, but also for achieving and sustaining reconciliation. He notes that people "need opportunity and space to express to and with one another the trauma of loss and their grief...anger, pain, memory of injustice. " Storytelling affords such an opportunity.

Unfortunately, we sometimes miss the source of violence, so focused are we on the symptoms. In Is There No Other Way? (Berkeley Hills) Berkeley professor Michael Nagler notes that the root cause of violent societies is not guns, but hate. Steadily addressing hate before violence erupts, he believes, is much more effective than reacting to a violent incident.

Nagler sees violence as a failure of imagination, keyed to the basest idea of the human being. Storytelling harnesses the imagination, exalts the individual and employs wisdom and love to address problems both before and after violence erupts. It also dovetails with the strategy of principled negotiation as expressed by Roger Fisher and the Harvard Negotiation Project. Principled negotiation promotes the search for mutual gains whenever possible, along with employing fair standards and decency to resolve conflict. Negotiators, Fisher says, are people first, with emotions, values, backgrounds and viewpoints. His strategy for reconciliation—including putting yourself in the other person's shoes, discussing each other's perceptions, listening actively, speaking about yourself rather than them and making your interests come alive—all echo the goals and outcomes of storytelling.

The folktale "It's Not Our Problem" (retold in Peace Tales, by Margaret Read MacDonald, Linnet Books), about a king whose hands-off approach to problems leads to escalating conflict and, finally, disaster, has been told for centuries in Burma and Thailand. Storytellers and facilitators use this and other stories, along with age-appropriate activities, in order to elucidate themes of cooperation and understanding. Some might simply tell the story, ask a few relevant questions, and let the conversation, and the group's personal stories, flow.

One of the approaches presented by Linda Fredericks in Using Stories to Prevent Violence and Promote Cooperation (Colorado School Mediation Project), involves delineating the main themes of "It's Not My Problem," including the consequences of refusing to take responsibility for one's actions. She then presents questions for discussion, such as "Why does it sometimes seem easier to fight than to try to solve a problem?"

Next Fredericks initiates a group activity based on the values demonstrated in the story. Students identify the incidents in the tale that escalated toward war, writing each incident on a self-sticking label and attaching it to a domino. They then arrange the dominoes in order of the incident, so that they will fall into each other, thereby setting up—and letting fall—a literal domino effect. After discussing this effect, students relate stories from their own lives that illustrate times when they failed to take responsibility for an action, with negative consequences. The activity ends with a discussion of how the domino effect could have been reversed, both in the folktale and in real life.

All articles in this series:

• Introduction
• How does it work?
• Selected stories for peace and conflict resolution
• Selected bibliography
• Storytellers and Story Educators for Peace

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