This email series highlights voices of peace from around the world, to help you find yours.
This month’s Voice of Peace is Zuhra Bahman, Search’s Afghanistan Country Director.
A few weeks ago, I struck up a conversation with my taxi driver. The taxi stand is located next to a funeral home, so I asked the man what he’s observed, what he senses about Afghanistan today. “The people who need to die are dying,” he said. This was not a morbid or vindictive assertion. He was reflecting on the fact that for many years, it was the bodies of young people being carried through the funeral home’s doors, victims of war and violence. Nowadays, it is largely the elderly who are dying, a more typical and acceptable (though still saddening) reality.
The truth is, I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies in my life, yet not one of them died of natural causes. Their lives varied. Some lived in urban centers and some in remote villages. Some were Taliban soldiers and sympathizers while others supported the Republic government. They were men, women, and children. Despite their differences, they shared a singular fate: they died because someone else chose violence. In my village in northern Afghanistan, a relative’s husband was killed—one month after they married—by a group claiming concern for human rights. Another relative of mine who worked for the government was murdered by the Taliban as he prayed, leaving behind a pregnant wife and three children. Those responsible for these killings wore different uniforms, claimed different ideologies, but both parties chose violence. The suffering of their victims’ families looked the same no matter who pulled the trigger.
Before joining Search, I had only observed one model of action: people judging another party as right or wrong based on their own positionality, and then seeking to influence their victory in a win/loss scenario. Sometimes this was even called “peacebuilding.” But this zero sum game where there must be a winner and a loser only ever means we all end up on the losing end. In Afghanistan and in the United States, the patterns are the same: polarization, us vs. them, dehumanization, calling people sold out or questioning their morality. It all leads to violence.
As peacebuilders, we must embody a different way. This is precisely what our teams in Afghanistan are doing. Through Search’s Common Ground Approach, we bring people together whose opinions and identities vary but who can find an area of common interest and concern—women’s integration, the economy, environmental issues—and build trust with one another to pursue shared action. Their differences become secondary and their interest in solutions becomes primary. Peacebuilding doesn’t require you to reject your opinions and beliefs, but it does require that you refuse the path of violence.
In peacebuilding, people tend to focus on events: a ceasefire, the signing of a peace accord. What we often fail to see is the process required to ensure this event actually achieves something. Momentous events—good or bad—simply display the paths walked to get there. The ends are shaped by the means. And if we don’t want violent events, we must choose non-violent paths.
We don’t “fight” for peace.
