This email series highlights voices of peace from around the world, to help you find yours.
This month’s Voice of Peace is Search CEO, Shamil Idriss.
I want to introduce to you a new email series our team is crafting, designed to share some of the insights that guide our peacebuilding work at Search for Common Ground. I’m kicking things off with a brief note today about multipartiality, the centerpiece of our approach. As you read and hear from these voices of peace, I hope you’ll feel empowered and equipped in your peacebuilding journey.
It seems inevitable: when conflicts arise, people feel pressured to choose sides. I’m betting you’ve felt it too—the pull to state a position or make a claim about who’s right and who’s wrong. It seems the only other option is to sit back and stay silent in the face of violence and injustice.
At Search for Common Ground, we’re guided by a third way we call multipartiality. It’s one of the most important—and challenging—pillars of our peacebuilding. To actually transform a conflict, our teams must reflect the various sides of it. Everywhere we work, Search staff are from the communities we bring together, enabling us to convene all relevant parties in a way that advocates for the dignity of everyone involved. We’re able to take a stand without taking a side.
This isn’t neutrality. The option to passively stand outside of a conflict doesn’t exist; our teams’ lives are bound up in it. We’re committed to action, guided by our local staff on the ground who represent the conflicting sides and are committed to responding in ways that actually build peace.
Whether it’s working with soldiers and citizens in the Democratic Republic of Congo or farmers and herders in Nigeria, our teams build trust between the parties in conflict, empowering them to collaborate towards a shared solution. When we dictate a response or side with a stakeholder, we cede our unique power as a peacebuilding agent.
I say it often: You can’t be multipartial alone. It literally requires a community of peacebuilders who know and feel a conflict in their own communities and who champion creative ways forward—options that are hard to see in the intractability of two opposing positions.
So the next time you feel the pressure to choose a side, remember that you’re part of this multipartial community of peacebuilders—not passive, not neutral, but actively engaged to transform the way the world responds to conflict.
