If you want to read about conflict resolution, you have an abundance of choices.\u00a0 Similarly, there is a large and rapidly growing literature on restorative justice, on non-violent activism and on peacemaking in general.\u00a0\u00a0 Numerous books analyze violence and its roots as well as the dynamics of power and privilege.\u00a0\u00a0 Few attempt to bring these together in a practical, integrated framework.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately the fragmented nature of this published literature reflects the reality on the ground.\u00a0 People who work in conflict resolution, for example, rarely realize the potential restorative justice offers for addressing the justice dynamics inherent in conflict.\u00a0 Likewise, peacemakers may write off justice advocates as trouble-makers, while non-violent activists often see peacemakers as glossing over underlying wrongs.\u00a0 Those of us in these fields don\u2019t interact with each other enough, nor do we often see ourselves as working toward the same goals.<\/p>\n
To bring these approaches together, Elaine Enns and Ched Myers offer in their new book,\u00a0Ambassadors of Reconciliation, Vol. II<\/a><\/em>,<\/a> the metaphor of \u201cfull-spectrum\u201d peacemaking. Each of the approaches in this spectrum has an important part to play in creating what my former colleague John Paul Lederach has called \u201cjustpeace\u201d\u00a0 – or what the biblical tradition calls shalom<\/em>: right relationships with one another, our creation and our Creator.\u00a0 To truly work in this direction, however, each of us must recognize our connections and contributions to the whole.<\/p>\n Enns and \u00a0Myers don\u2019t just bring us together; they also challenge us to go deeper.\u00a0 Building true justice and peace requires that we do more than work at immediate or \u201cpresenting\u201d injustices and conflicts.\u00a0 We must also be aware of and address underlying factors that contribute to and shaping conflict, such as inequities of power and privilege and structural injustices. Fortunately, the authors offer analytic tools to help understand these dynamics.<\/p>\n Their full-spectrum peacemaking provides an intuitive and practical framework for understanding how the work fits together and the place that each approach has within it.\u00a0 The authors use the metaphor of a tree, acknowledging the importance of attention not only to the roots of our life together but the soil that nourishes it and the way that the various branches of peacemaking can contribute to a just and peaceful world.<\/p>\n Enns and Myers bring to their marriage (yes, they are a couple) and to this book practical backgrounds of experience in restorative justice, conflict resolution, and non-violent activism.\u00a0 They speak from these real-world places, but they also acknowledge their limits and blind spots as relatively privileged European-North Americans.\u00a0 So they have also listened to, learned from, and here offer to us voices of those who have directly experienced the harms of violence and oppression and those who are actively working to address these harms.\u00a0 That is the focus of the second part of this book.<\/p>\n The authors have an ambitious goal in this two-volume series:\u00a0\u00a0 to bring an integrated Christian perspective to the work of justice and peacebuilding for both practitioners and interested laypeople.\u00a0 As an academic and practitioner who is committed to connecting with the same audiences, I believe they have succeeded.\u00a0 While their perspective is Christian, it is not exclusively so, and much in this volume will be of interest to non-Christians. And although (hallelujah!) the volume is not written in formal academic language, those of us in the academic world will learn from it as well.<\/p>\n Note:\u00a0 Elaine and Ched’s website is www.bcm-net.org<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 Ched has an additional website with a variety of resources: <\/span>www.ChedMyers.org<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n (From the Forward to the book.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you want to read about conflict resolution, you have an abundance of choices.\u00a0 Similarly, there is a large and rapidly growing literature on restorative justice, on non-violent activism and on peacemaking in general.\u00a0\u00a0 Numerous books analyze violence and its roots as well as the dynamics of power and privilege.\u00a0\u00a0 Few attempt to bring these....<\/p>