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Explores the application of Baha'i principles towards society building.
Music: Society builders pave the way. To a
better world, to a better day. A
united approach to building a new society.
Join the conversation, for social transformation, society builders.
Society Builders with your host, Duane Varan.
Duane: Welcome to another exciting episode of
Society Builders, and thanks for joining
the conversation for social transformation.
And welcome to the start of
our third season of Society Builders.
I mean, we have been learning so much together, so
thank you for being a part of that journey.
Today we continue our exploration of the
science of depolarization and explore strategies to
help bring antagonistic groups closer together, strategies
to reverse the rampant and accelerating polarization
that is taking over our planet.
And I'm thrilled to have as my guest
today Andrea Bartoli, who is both a scholar
and who serves as the president of the
Sant’Egidio Foundation for Peace and Dialogue, which
is a global Catholic association championing world peace.
Now, Andrea has an amazing academic career, having
served as the founding director of Columbia University's
Center for International Conflict Resolution, also as the
former dean of the School of Diplomacy and
International Relations at Seton Hall University, and as
the former dean of the School of Conflict
Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University.
I mean, these are serious academic credentials.
And beyond his academic work and his work with
Sant’Egidio, he also currently serves as an executive
advisor of the Soka Institute for Global Solutions;
he's a member of the steering group
of the Global Action Against Mass Atrocity
Crimes and the Genocide Prevention Advisory network.
And in his role at Sant’Egidio,
he's been directly involved in numerous successful
peacekeeping diplomatic initiatives around the world, including
in Mozambique, Guatemala, Algeria, Kosovo, Burundi, the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, Casamance, Senegal,
the Central African Republic and South Sudan.
I mean, Andrea has absolutely incredible pedigree,
both in academic and diplomatic circles, bringing
peace to truly desperate people.
And we're going to learn a lot from Andrea today.
We're going to learn from the lessons
he's been learning across this incredible career
with all these amazing experiences.
So, Andrea, welcome to Society Builders.
Andrea: Thank you.
Duane: I'm so excited.
You have such an amazing career across two very
different dimensions, as an academic, of course, but you're
also a diplomat, and the diplomacy work that you've
done is so interesting and so, really, I'd like
to start our story there.
I'd like to take you back in time to what was
probably the first work that you were really doing in that
peacemaking domain, which was your time back in Mozambique.
So let's go on a little bit of a
journey and tell us the story about how you
got started in this whole peacemaking sphere. Andrea: Very good.
Andrea: Thank you.
This is a wonderful opportunity.
And thank you also to the opportunity
to connect with the Baha'i community.
I've heard so much about the Baha'iBahá’í community and
my connection is mainly through the UN office.
So Bani Dugal and this connection.
So there is a diplomatic dimension there that maybe.
But the important element about my experience
is that it's truly, deeply, deeply intertwined
with the community of Sant’Egidio.
So I wouldn't absolutely claim any
relevant role on the Mozambique story.
I was really imaginal player in something that actually the
person that is now the cardinal of Bologna, Matteo Zuppi,
who is a member of the Sant’Egidio even before me,
and now is a cardinal and was asked by Pope
Francis to go to Kiev and Moscow to try to
facilitate a dialogue on peace between Ukraine and Russia, who
was also involved in Mozambique.
He was the one that really created the
conditions for peace to come to that country.
My role was simply more internal to
the community in support to that effort.
But what was interesting about that story actually is
the connection with Peter Coleman that I think was
already in the series, who welcomed me in the
United States when I came in '92 to follow
on the peace process in Mozambique, because there was
a significant involvement of the United nations and I
was negotiating with the United nations their involvement in
the post agreement period.
And I came here as an immigrant,
as somebody that actually didn't speak English,
I was speaking French at the UN.
I was connecting in different ways.
And Peter was welcoming me as somebody that
would not only listen, but in a way
help this process of self reflection.
'Why are you doing what you're doing?
How you're doing what you're doing? What
is the meaning of what you're doing?'
And so on and so forth.
So it started a collaboration of decades around
this very important passage of reflecting on what
you are doing, on the importance of doing
something, recognizing that there is a good intention
behind what you're doing, but also evaluating the
result and also spending time in understanding what
is really happening when something good is happening.
So in this sense, I really want to stress this
distinction between my own role and what the community of Sant’Egidio
was able to do, because Sant’Egidio in many ways is
a very interesting expression of the Catholic Church.
After Vatican Two, I don't know how familiar you
are with the Catholic Church and the changes that
it went through, but in the 60's, a very old, Pope,
John 23rd, had this vision, this invitation to the
Catholic Church to gather in a council all bishops
from all over the world came to Rome and
the church was transformed deeply because it became a
church that was much more seeking what unites rather
than what divides, much more connected to peace and
commitment to justice, and significantly, much more ecumenical.
Christianity has been divided for centuries,
Orthodox and Catholic, Protestant and Catholic
and so on, Evangelical, Baptist and
so many different expression of Christianity.
But for the Catholic Church, the Vatican Two
is the moment in which the church becomes
truly or returned to be truly ecumenical.
I'm sure that this kind of reasoning
may resonate with the Baha'i approach.
Absolutely important change for the Catholic Church.
So in order to understand Sant’Egidio, it's
important to understand Sant’Egidio as an expression
of the post-Vatican Two Catholic Church.
In this sense, by story is a story of discovery.
What does it mean to be
something that never existed before?
How can you be something that
is rooted somewhere clearly Catholic?
We are clearly proud of a tradition that goes
back to Jesus and has a very clear sequence
of people that have this connection to Him.
But how can you take 2000 year of history
and then engage in a project that is new?
So Sant’Egidio started as a small group of high school
students in 1968 by the initiative of Andrea Ricarddi.
And I joined in 1972, two years later.
And when I joined, wow, we were 30
kids, I was in high school, and now
we are several hundred thousand around the world.
We are present in 70 countries.
In this sense, there is a resonance with the
Baha'i experience of growing, of starting very small and
then growing significantly around the world, and very similar.
These patterns of being rooted communities that are in
different countries and live this life of generosity.
We like to say nobody support that cannot help another
and is a logic hat is contrary to a lot
of money-centered reasoning of the West, where you need
to have the money to do anything.
Money is really the driver of everything.
Sant’Egidio says not at all.
The driver is really the personal, spiritual, historical commitment of
somebody that is awakened to the possibility that even if
you are very poor, even if you are in a
free zone, even if you are confined in a nursing
home, you can actually do something good for others.
So my role in Mozambique, my role in that
particular peace process was of support, the way of
helping those that were really doing the peace process.
Matteo, Andrea, Jaime Gonzalez, that was this bishop
that invited us to play that role.
And in that sense, I continued in my academic career,
because I really felt that this role of supporting, this
role of encouraging others to be who they can be,
this role of helping others to be better, helping others
who they want to be, was a good fit for
me, was a good way for me to become who
I was supposed to be and all that.
So Mozambique is a wonderful moment, but
it's also the beginning in many ways.
It's the beginning of something that unfolded.
It's also the beginning for the country itself.
Mozambique was divided then.
It had a very difficult story because it was
a colonial country of Portugal for hundreds of years.
And the result of that colonization was that
there was a military resistance against the Portuguese.
And in 1975, the portuguese military decided to get
rid of their colonies and stop fighting colonial wars.
So Mozambique became like Angola, like the independence
suddenly, and the Vatican that had a century
old rule that they could only have white
Portuguese bishops in the colonies controlled by Portugal,
could apply the Vatican to this position, that
they could have black native local bishops.
So a friend of ours that was a priest
in Rome, as an exile priest, became bishop of Beira,
the second largest city of the country, and had
terrible experiences because he was put to jail, he
couldn't go to see the communities, because this was
a Marxist-Leninist government that was significantly anti-religious,
especially anti-Catholic, because the Catholics were connected to
the Portuguese and the Portuguese colonial powers.
And so when he came to Rome, the Catholic have a rule.
Every bishop on earth must come to
see the Pope personally every five years.
It's called Visit a Ad Limina Apostolorum.
And so the guy comes to Rome a couple
of years after becoming bishop and tells us the
story, tells us the story that he cannot go
to celebrate mass and visit the communities.
And they had a lot of people, prison and so on.
And Andrea, the founder of the community,
start responding to this suffering, saying, 'well,
we want to help you.
Let's see what we can do to help.'
And what was curious was that in
Italy, you had the largest communist party
outside the Soviet Union, 30% of Italians.
After 1945, Italy became one country, and
so always voted for a communist party.
So in Rome, we were going to high
school, everybody, public high schools and so on.
You need to imagine at least a
third, if not more, were communists.
It was like going to taking the bus together.
For an American audience, it's very difficult to understand.
But in Italy, it was just normal Catholics.
Duane: You understood.
You understood the discourse,
you understood the language.
You could kind of communicate with.
Andrea: We were also playing together, listening to the same
music, going to the same parties and so on. So what?
Andrea had the genius of thinking that in
order to help a new bishop recently appointed
to the second largest city in Mozambique, we
could speak with our friends in italian high
school whose parents were Communists, because the Communist
Party had significant economic interest in Mozambique, and
they could help invite the government of Mozambique
to be less contentious against the Catholic.
Duane: Amazing what a great strategy that was.
Andrea: You know, sometimes you need to leap
into something, and the strategy actually worked.
It worked because italian Communists were italian first,
was completely clear that it made no sense
to be in Mozembique and be anti-spiritual, anti-religious.
Everybody was spiritual in one way or the other.
Why do you want to be
contentious against your own people?
It was much better to be open, to
be respectful, and so on and so forth.
And of course, it was also an economic
interest, because the Communist party had significant economic
interest in Mozambique through the cooperatives.
And that boy had a little bit of a leverage
with the Mozambique party, and they were able to start
this conversation with Sant’Egidio on religious freedom.
So the first ten years in Mozambique were really trying to
help a friend to be as spiritual and catholic and religious
as he wanted to be with his own community.
It was really just a gift of being freer together
as a way for Mozambique to become a state that
was less concerned about controlling and more trustful, that being
open to spiritual dimensions was not that bad after all.
While this was happening, there was a military
confrontation by Renamo, an active military group that
was contending the control of the government, and
there was an active civil war.
So this bishop, we engaged for ten years on religious
freedom, became clearly the point of reference for both.
He was able to speak with one and the other.
Duane: He became this bridge
between these conflicting parties. Andrea: Exactly.
And I remember vividly the day when we were
together in Rome and we were strategizing what could
we do and what should be done.
And so, and we said, to know the name
of this guy, Jaime Gonzalez, and I think you
need to go to speak with Renamo.
You need to go and speak with them.
And he looked at us as we were
asking him to go to the mall. You know what I mean?
This was a very difficult travel.
This was not easy to do.
This was not something that you would
take a train and go to Philadelphia.
This was serious, betraying the government side, doing
something secret and so on and so forth.
It needed to be organized through the South African
Secret Service, that at that time was Apartheid
South Africa, not the South Africa today.
This was a very different moment.
But the guy accepted to do it.
And the result was amazing.
It was amazing because when Jaime told the
story, was a remarkable story, because, as you
know, he was really reluctant to do it.
And they invited him into a small plane
and he said that for two hours, they
were actually moving away from Mozambique.
So he said, they're going to throw me in the
sea and nobody will ever know that I ever existed.
But they were just only waiting for the night
to come so that they could come back to
Mozambique secretly and land in this place where the
strip for the airplane was signaled with torches.
And as soon as the airplane
landed, all the torches were stripped.
And so there was no trace of
this landing, no trace of nothing.
The guy gets out of the airplane and is welcomed by
Dhlakama, this leader of the opposition, and the two realize that
they start to speak Ndau and Ndau is a local language,
not Portuguese, not the language of the colonial, but the language
of the people of that particular region.
So you can imagine that the conversation is much
more fluent and much more open to trust, much
more relaxed, much more open to consideration.
So Jaime, together with Matteo Zuppi, this person
that I mentioned now is negotiating in Ukraine,
and Moscow were able to start this conversation with
the government side and the Renamo side, exploring
options of what could happen.
And then they came with two delegations to
run for two year and a half.
And after that, in '92, the agreement was signed.
And it was a tremendously important agreement
because it brought the country together.
Mozambique was finally one, had a unified government,
they had a unified army, they had the
capacity to bring together other countries.
So for Sant’Egidio was beautiful way to
grow into becoming this agent of peace.
But it's interesting that this is in '92, right?
So the meeting in Rome happened in 1990, but the
shift from the religious freedom work that we were doing
since the, those ten years that I was mentioning before,
the shift actually towards peace happened after the prayer that
Pope John Paul II did in Assisi in '86,
where he gathered many religious leaders to pray for peace.
For Sant’Egidio that was again an invitation
to take peace seriously, not just spiritually, not
just individually, but for society as a whole.
And when I think about society builders, you
invited me to this podcast for this.
I think that we really need to take peace seriously.
We really need to engage with peace as
a responsibility, not just something that might happen
or should happen, but actually something that requires
a certain level of creativity.
As the story that I shared with. Duane: you know, it
sounds like from the story that you're telling, that the
peace focus at Sant’Egidio was not something that was
intended at the start, so to speak.
It's something that evolved organically as you started off
really looking know, protecting religious freedoms and a sequence
of, you know, Pope John Paul II's call and
then of course, later on, the work in Mozambique,
it took you on a journey where peacemaking became
more of the focus for the organization.
Andrea: Totally.
I think you got it absolutely right, 100%.
That's exactly how it.
Sant’Egidio is certainly not an organization
that started as a peace organization.
We were just concerned about living the
gospel, acting on the gospel, loving others,
serving others, living a life of prayer.
That was Sant’Egidio and this
is still Sant’Egidio's effort.
But this work is really this response to life,
response to society, response to what you see.
So for us it's much, much more
connected to serving the poor than expressing
any intentionality on our own, right?
So it's much more somebody that sees somebody on the street
that is in need of food or in need of shelter,
and then you give the food and you give the shelter.
So peace is almost for us a call
as a need of humanity as a whole.
This is true in small communities, it's
true in countries, it's true at the
human level, with everybody, universally.
Duane: Before we start talking about some of the
other exciting peace initiatives you've done, let's talk
a little bit more about Sant’Egidio
I think the audience will find this very fascinating.
Tell us a little bit more around how
the community is structured, how it's organized.
You've talked a little bit about the focus on
improving the plight of the poor and the disenfranchised.
Tell us more about what you do day
to day around the world in these 70
plus countries that you're represented in.
Andrea: Sant’Egidio is organized through small communities.
Five people, ten people, 100
people, 500 people, a thousand people.
Small communities that live together, usually
with similar age, similar life conditions.
So you may have communities of Sant’Egidio in
people in high school or a community of Sant’Egidio in
a nursing home or a community of Sant’Egidio among immigrants.
Usually communities are created around
certain form of similarity.
People in the same village,
people in a university together.
And there is always the initiative of 1, 2, 3, 4
people that come together and then they say,
we want to do a community.
And that created all sorts of surprises for us because
as I said, I joined the community when we were
30 kids and started my own community, the community when
I was striked in high school and I started preaching
when I was 14 years old.
So for us, very young people can
preach, women and men can preach.
Communities are clearly created by everybody.
You have a very ecumenical dimensions that I
mentioned before, but we do have a structure
and there are people responsible for the community
and then there is a hierarchy of these
responsible people, the person referred to somebody else
that finally report to the whole leadership.
But what I find interesting is what I was
mentioning before is that Sant’Egidio threshold is at the
same time very easy and very demanding, because to
a certain extent, everybody can take the gospel and
say, I can practice this word, I can put
in practice this word that Jesus shared with us.
But on the other, when you say nobody's so poor
to help others, well, you are clearly calling a responsibility
that is reversing all sorts of entitlement, that moves beyond
this notion of being somebody, being important, of what you're
doing and so on and so forth.
And rather, there is a calling that
is quite demanding in many ways.
But this explained the vitality of Sant’Egidio.
I remember vividly again when the first community outside
Italy was born, and of all places was born
in Germany, because a group of university students came
to Rome in pilgrimage, both Protestant and Catholic, together.
And they came to prayer once.
And then they said, 'we would
like to do this in Germany.'
And we said, 'of course, do this in Germany.'
But then we had to figure out what
it meant to do Sant’Egidio in Germany.
And as you said before about Baha'is, in many ways,
Sant’Egidio kept discovering what life was asking, what life
was offering, what life was encouraging us to serve.
And so we became this incredibly diverse group of people
that has hundreds of people in Ukraine and Russia.
At the same time, we have people in France
and Germany, at the same people in Spain, but
in Mozambique we are now in hundreds of places.
In Malawi we are in hundreds of
places, and in a small village.
The logic is probably very similar to the Baha'I
communities that you have somebody that is bringing life
together as life would like to be.
We do believe that in many ways,
peace is not something that we know.
There is this language now based on
Galtung - prevention, peacemaking, peacekeeping, peace building, the
four stages that he identified.
There is a market, there is a huge
investment at the UN level about peace building.
But our belief is actually the reason there is no
peace is because we are not in peace and we
are not able to receive the peace that already is.
So in a community, you usually twist, you restructure
many of the logic that are operative in the
world today, where you have these responsibilities.
We need to make peace, we need to make peace this way,
or we need to impose peace, or we need to advocate for
peace because they are not doing it, and so on.
But rather the logic is to say, first you need
to pray, first you need to come down yourself.
You need to allow peace to come to you.
You need to allow peace the space that
peace requires for us to really experience.
So small communities are spaces where this may have.
And interestingly enough, we do believe that
of course we need to serve the
poor and be within disenfranchised.
But there is always this attitude that even if
you are very poor, you cannot be only poor
or that you are not poor first, that if
you are poor, it's because conditions.
It's like somebody being sick.
You are not only sick, you are not sick.
Sick is not the definition of your identity.
You have many other things in
addition of being sick, right?
So poverty is not the
defining characteristic of anybody.
You can transcend conditions by helping others, by
praying, by finding the center of yourself, serving
life as life is, and all this.
So Sant’Egidio is an interesting, as I said, it's
an interesting new development of the Catholic Church.
And now it's clearly interreligious in a sense
that committed to interregious dialogue, very important connection
to the Jewish world, the Muslim world.
I don't know exactly how many connections that have
with the Baha'IiBahá’í, but probably we will find that
at the local level in another occasion, like Bani
at the UN we have connections. Duane: Amazing.
Is there an educational program for your community?
How is it that your local membership translates its
goals and aspirations into the arena of action?
How does that occur?
How do they develop the skills
they need for those ambitions?
Andrea: So we don't have formal education processes.
We rely on friendship as the venue and the
conduit, taking advantage also of this kind of communication.
You are in Perth, I'm in New York.
Speaking as if we are in the same room. Now.
We can connect with a lot of people,
but even in the past, when we didn't
have Internet, the logic was really old fashioned.
Christianity started in these long journeys
that the disciples of Jesus did.
Paul, Matthew, Thomas, everybody traveled
quite significantly, and communities were
born out of personal account.
So what we believe is that rather than rely on the content
of the transfer, this is the way you have to do it.
These are the things you need to learn.
This is the thing that needs to be done and so forth.
What really counts is the friendship, is this sense of
communion that whatever you are doing, you are doing in
the name of and in communion with this larger family.
Then to a certain extent, imagine that I come to you,
or you come to me and you say, serve the poor.
Look around, look for somebody who
is poor and start serving.
It's very simple invitation, right?
But it's probably better than saying, if you
do the elderly, you need to do this.
If you do the foreigners, you need to do this.
If you do the children, you need to do this.
Why do you want to overwhelm people with
instructions and directions that they don't need, if
they are the one that needs to rediscover
the beauty and creativity of serving?
So what we do is to say, first start
in friendship, then start praying, and then start serving.
Friendship, prayer and service,
easily understood by anybody.
And then what you do is simply, these
are just three routes that you keep going
deeper and deeper and deeper and understanding.
So more than rely on formal education processes, we
rely on the human capacity to rediscover the spiritual
capacities that lead to friendship, prayer and service.
Duane: I know you also talk a lot about
accompaniment, and this is a very popular idea
as well within the Baha'i community.
Maybe you could tell us a little bit
about how accompaniment fits into the narrative here.
Andrea: Very nice.
First of all, we feel that all of
us have been accompanied, and have been accompanied
because we have been welcomed first.
So the community is this beautiful human
space in which you are welcome first.
And this was true when I joined and we
were 30, but it's true in Malawi, where there
are other 30 that are welcoming others.
So first, the realization that you're not alone in
the world, that loneliness is an illness of sort.
If you are alone, something is not
working as it should be, that communion
in the human experience is actually fundamental.
And therefore, accompaniment becomes this experience of
sharing life together, discovering that if you
are together, this surprising revelation, opening of
life is much better understood.
So you capture perfectly how
this peace vocation came about.
But that was exactly because we were speaking with
Jaime Gonzalez, because we were welcoming him, we were
listening to him, we were asking questions to him.
We were open to say, 'but if you
do this, then we could do that.
What about these other things do you remember?'
And this is also beautiful about accompaniment, right?
Because the moment you said to me, 'I did
a podcast with Peter Coleman', you reminded me of
30 years of friendship with Peter Coleman. Right?
So suddenly you are not just Duane, I never met
you before, but suddenly you are a friend of Peter.
Right?
So there is an interesting gift in
accompaniment that enriches our lives tremendously, because
those who accompany are not guiding.
Those who are accompanying are not imposing.
Those who are accompanying are not oppressing.
Those who are accompanying are really accompanying.
They are the space.
We need to be who we are.
They are the presence.
We need to be who we are.
So what we saw over and over
again with the elderly, with the immigrants,
with the kids, really with everybody.
That accompaniment is fundamentally transforming.
And of course, it transforms both.
It transforms the one that is accompanied,
but also the one that accompanies. Right.
There is a very strong, natural bond in accompaniment.
Duane: Beautiful.
And you spoke earlier also about reflection.
Tell us a little bit more about
how reflection has intersected with this journey.
Andrea: So Sant’Egidio, as I said, relies on
three pillars, friendship, prayer and service.
And all of them have reflection moments.
On the friendship side, there are regular
meetings, regular actual meetings of the community.
There is a speech, a reflection, something that
is offered to the community, and then everybody
shares her own reaction, reflections and so on.
So it's really a sharing of the community
together that is very frequently, when
needed, or different ways, a personal speech with
somebody that is accompanying you.
And then the prayer is very often this reflective
moment of your days, your week, your entire life.
But even the service is always accompanied by a
small meeting of those who are serving and are
asking questions like, are we doing well?
Is anything new?
Should we do something differently?
And so on and so forth.
So all three moments of friendship, prayer and
service have built in this reflective moment.
I think that, again, this is interesting
in relation to the society building, right?
We are engaging on this theme of society building.
And I think it's very important because in
society, very often, reflections are difficult, because any
form of emphasis and endorsement or any form
of criticism is perceived as polarizing and dividing.
So if I am endorsing this, I am against
that, if I am criticizing this, doing it in
an hostile way, and so on and so forth.
But we actually say this is ridiculous, because reflections
is what you need to do every day.
You need to do it with your friends.
You need to do it in a climate
as somebody that is trying to learn.
You cannot learn if you don't see your mistakes.
You cannot learn if you don't understand
the problem that you need to address.
And the attitude should be honesty on
one side and hope on the other.
But in reality, very often, the
climate, the cultural climate around us,
is always hostility, hostility, hostility.
And so reflection becomes almost impossible
in the public sphere, right?
And this is why I think that experiences like
Sant’Egidio, like the Baha'i community, are so precious, or
probably any form of authentic community is so precious
because you need to have these reflective moments.
And in order to have the reflective
moments, you need to have the community.
If you don't have the community, if you don't have
somebody that probably point, it's very difficult to do.
Duane: So thank you so much for
the background with Sant’Egidio
Let's go back to Mozambique.
This was a turning point for your community.
Suddenly you were thrust into the peace sphere.
Suddenly you had a success that
was, I mean, really monumental.
Bringing peace to a civil war, to
a nation, that's not an easy achievement.
That was just a massive seismic event, and
that led to your community really becoming a
peacebroker globally, regularly hosting these summits at the
Vatican, bringing warring nations, warring people, warring communities
together, charting paths going forward.
And your journey from there has been so amazing.
Guatemala, Algeria, Kosovo, Burundia, Democratic
Republic of the Congo.
I mean, it's just on and on.
It's just such an incredible story.
What have you learned?
I mean, reflection is a big part of what
you do across all these different peacekeeping initiatives.
Now going all the way back to Mozambique.
What have you learned?
What are the big insights that you walk away with?
Andrea: Well, one is clearly that you need to talk with
everybody, and you need to be open to speak with
people with whom many do not want to talk.
So there is a very significant ethical moral dilemma there,
because in order to do peace, you need to work
those who are doing war. Doing peace, in a way,
is an accompaniment to those who are actually doing terrible
things, that have done terrible things.
So there is a significant tension.
And I think that it's very important to not
underestimate this complexity, because to speak too easily about
peace is dangerous, because you can be.
Duane: Point, great point.
Andrea: Gandhi was not living, Martin Luther King and Sadat and so
on, and very often your own that are killing you.
It's the one within that is killing you.
But also because, as I said, the moral dilemma
of giving a way out to people that many
others would like to see in jail, would like
to see punished for what they did and such.
So I think that this is really
a learning that bringing us together.
But at the same time, as I said, it's
this commitment to speaking with everybody and listening to
everybody, understanding why people are doing what they are
doing, understanding their own reasoning, understanding the good that
is there available to them, and so on.
The other thing is this dimension that there is
no exit strategy, that the same accompaniment that we
would offer to somebody who is a child until
is late in life is true for countries.
There is this expression of the exit strategy.
We went the other day to see the secretary general
of the UN Guterres, and the president of Sant’Egidio was
explaining that Sant’Egidio doesn't have an exit strategy.
We are not out of a crisis because we are not
able to do x, y and z in six months.
The strategy is to be in a country when the country is
needed to stay with the crisis over time and so on.
And Guterres was extraordinarily responsive with that.
He really stressed the importance of that attitude.
That is the long term.
When you mentioned at the beginning that Baha'i
decided to have the next 25 years dedicated
to this society building, it's very unusual for people
to give each other 25 years. Right.
We are much more used to these
20 minutes, this 20 second kind of increments.
The idea of 25 years seems to
be so out of the ordinaries.
But in this sense, Sant’Egidio is very
much in sync with that logic.
And in this sense, it's also very Catholic.
The Catholic Church has been around for 2000
years and has seen changes over time that
many other traditions didn't see the same way.
One thing that is interesting for me in
that sense is actually this gift of America.
Because I came here, as I
said, in '92, I learned English.
I didn't learn English at that point.
I started working in academia, and now I
am engaging with this Soka University of America.
It's a new chapter for me because this is
clearly a Buddhist organization, and we are doing an
institute called Soka Institute for Global Solutions.
And in that sense, it's this effort of saying, how
can we address the problems that we are not even
able to describe or to get our head around, especially
the problems that are human made, because humans clearly are
creating problems of extraordinary manmade that were not there before
humans took hold of the planet.
So it is required a different kind of
reasoning to understand them in the first place.
And self reflection at the human level is
very complicated, very different, and so on.
So it may very well be that we will engage with
the Baha'i to try to figure out this kind of complex.
Duane: That sounds wonderful.
That sounds great.
We've talked about peace at a kind of
national level, like civil wars, and, I mean,
very big communities that we're talking about there.
But of course, the challenge happens
even at an interpersonal level.
You know, this idea of people who are antagonistic being
able to find a path to come closer together.
So when you translate it down to
the personal level, what insights have you
learned there around what is successful in
helping bridge the gap between antagonistic peoples?
Andrea: I would say that the presence and services
of friends, people in between, people that are
able to listen to both, people that are
able to speak with both, is extraordinary.
I always remember George Mitchell explaining the peace
process in Ireland and saying, 'I never had
everybody together in the same room.
I never had a meeting with everybody that was involved
in the peace process, was physically present in this.
I was able to speak with everybody, but
not everybody was able to speak with everybody.'
So everybody needed Mitchell, but not everybody was able
to go beyond the animosity, the hostility, the pain,
the suffering of what the conflict meant to them.
So in this sense, I really think that it's
very important for us to truly reflect on the
need for millions and millions of friends that are
able to stay in between, that are able to
encounter, listen, appreciate, respect, people that would not be
able to do the same with their enemies, because
the intermediary, the friend, can do exactly this work.
If you are in a situation in India between
Hindu and Muslims, if you are able to be
friends with both, you may discover and listen to
dimensions that would be otherwise just extraordinarily difficult to
capture if you are speaking directly with your enemy.
The second element is that the friend opens
up everybody to the creativity of the spirit.
So back to the logic that
I was trying to address before.
The logic is to say, peace is already there,
it is us that is to bother, it is
us that needs to let peace come in.
So rather than thinking, oh, the Hindu needs to
change this, and this is what the Muslim needs
to change, and this is how the Hindu needs
to speak with the, this is how the Muslim
needs to speak with the Hindu, and so forth.
The logic of the friend is that the more
polarized the conflict is, the more entrenched the positions
are between Russians and Ukraine these days.
The more you need to be able to be a
presence that is present to both and allows for those
little moment of the spirit in which the spirit speaks
to everyone in the conflict, to the Russians, to the
Ukrainians, to the intermediaries, to the friends, and so on.
I would say that these are the two important things
to have, really, this role of the friends, friends of
everybody in the system, but also this reliance on friendship
as the space through which the spirit speaks and guides
the way in these difficult, very narrow paths.
Duane: Oh, that's amazing.
It's very inspiring.
Any other advice that you
have for the Baha'i community?
So this Baha'i community, of course,
is embarking on this journey.
It's an exciting journey.
What advice would you have for the community?
Again, visualize grassroots communities, very similar to what
you've been talking about with Sant’Egidio.
You know, communities in the Highlands, in Papua New
Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, visualize
these communities all over the planet trying to put
this idea of helping bring antagonistic groups together.
What advice would you have for that community?
Andrea: Well, once, I would say continue to be welcoming.
I think it's beautiful to have a community.
It's a great gift to be in a
community that is a great gift to the
community when you can welcome someone else.
So be welcoming.
And that portal, the second one
is be caring for the poor.
The poor are actually speaking of what
is needed by humanity as a whole.
I think that the poor will lead us to really
do the important thing, the change that is needed.
And third, I would say don't be shy in speaking
with the powerful, because the powerful may be willing to
listen to you and guide large group of people towards
the path of the good for all.
I think that we all need to spend more times
in articulating what is good for everyone, not just for
me, not just for my community, but for everyone.
So articulating the good of all is going to
be a big challenge for all of us.
And I really hope that the
Baha'i will continue to do this.
Duane: Wow.
How amazing was that?
I think you'll join me in feeling
incredibly grateful and privileged for having had
the opportunity to learn from a person
with Andrea's experience in global peacekeeping.
And I loved his lessons on the
role of reflection and on accompaniment.
And in particular, I love these themes because they're
both central themes to approaches which Baha'i are really
working to implement all over the world.
So thanks again, Andrea, for an amazing episode.
And in our next episode, we'll continue
our journey exploring the science of depolarization.
So thanks again for joining the conversation.
For social transformation, I look
forward to continuing our dialogue.
That's next time on Society Builders.
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