To Help Build Peace, Be Vulnerable

June 21, 2017
Darren Kew in Nigeria in 2015
Darren Kew, right, observing the presidential elections in Nigeria in 2015.

“Democracy and conflict resolution are linked concepts,” says Darren Kew, a visiting scholar of conflict resolution and peacebuilding. “If you take a conflict resolution workshop and institutionalize it, you get something that ultimately looks a lot like democracy. Democratization is, in essence, conflict resolution at the national level—a nation trying to work out its problems and make decisions about what it is going to do next.”  

Darren Kew is a professor of conflict resolution and the executive director of the Center for Peace, Democracy, and Development at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and he studies the relationship between conflict resolution methods—particularly interfaith and inter-ethnic peacebuilding—and democratic development in Africa. In the past, he worked with the Council on Foreign Relations’ Center for Preventive Action to facilitate conflict resolution and peacebuilding in Nigeria, Central Africa, and in Kosovo. He has also worked as a consultant to the United Nations, USAID, the U.S. State Department, and to a number of NGOs including the Carter Center.

Born in East Chicago, Indiana, Kew traces his earliest awareness of social justice and responsibility to his Roman Catholic upbringing. But it was as a student at Notre Dame, studying for a year in Japan, that Kew first felt the acute need for democracy building and human rights work. During a trip to Beijing with his classmates in early 1989, he visited Tiananmen Square, where thousands of students would later gather to protest the government.

“When I was in Beijing, I stood with all these other young people and felt their energy. It was an amazing moment when they later took over the Square, and it felt like we, as young people, were going to change the world,” explains Kew. Only weeks later, on June 4, the Chinese military would kill at least several hundred of the student demonstrators in the square. Kew was deeply shaken by the news.

“Naturally, I took it personally, and I felt tremendously useless. The only thing I could think to do was to someday put myself in a position where I could do something to help. And that, I think, is part of what brought me to human rights work.”

In the early 1990s, this work took him to Nigeria, following an election meant to return power to civilian rule from the military juntas that had ruled in the decades since the country’s civil war. Shortly after Kew’s arrival, Nigerian General Ibrahim Babangida annulled the credible election in order to maintain power. As Kew began working for a human rights organization operating in the country, he began probing the systemic roots of the violence he witnessed.

“I found myself asking questions about the motivations and psychology of the people involved. Why was the military committing these human rights abuses? Why is one ethnic group fighting with another? And you could see the people of Nigeria asking questions, too, right before your eyes. How do you build a nation? How do you build democracy?”

These questions brought Kew to the academic study of peacebuilding and conflict resolution—a discipline that has allowed him to balance research and teaching with his field work as a mediator and facilitator of peacebuilding workshops.

Since then, Kew has continued working in Nigeria and has authored a book and many articles on conflict resolution and democracy building, including Civil Society, Conflict Resolution, and Democracy in Nigeria (Syracuse University Press, 2016). In the past decade, Kew has worked as a mediator in dialogue forums between Muslim and Christian leaders in Kaduna, one of Nigeria’s federal states that is evenly split between Christians and Muslims, and, in recent decades, has witnessed tremendous violence between these groups.

To this end, Kew has collaborated with Nigeria’s Interfaith Mediation Center (IMC) and Boston’s Essential Partners—an organization dedicated to approaching intractable conflicts through reflective, structured dialogue—to explore ways in which dialogue models can be adapted to a specifically Nigerian context. IMC was founded by Pastor James Movel Wuye and Imam Muhammad Nurayn Ashafa, a duo commonly known as the Pastor and the Imam, who in December 2015 were keynote speakers at the monthly public colloquium of the Religions and the Practice of Peace (RPP) initiative at HDS, led by Dean David N. Hempton. Kew has been an active member of RPP and a contributor to its programs since its first year in 2014.

As a visiting scholar at HDS’s Center for the Study of World Religions, Kew is writing about IMC’s interfaith work in Nigeria and also hopes to learn and write more about approaches to inter- and intra-religious peacebuilding.

For those interested in peacebuilding, Kew advises a balance of self-knowledge and practiced attention to the needs of others.

“The internal struggle is such a conscious part of our field and to be successful in this discipline, you need to be a self-reflective person who is developmentally minded and who can develop both yourself and the people around you.”

Kew emphasizes the importance of brining a genuine openness to others to the peacebuilding process.

“Part of success in this field is being able to quiet all the voices inside your head and heart and to hear what the other person is saying to you—not only what they are saying directly, but the other things they are emanating and expressing. People who are really good at mediation and peace facilitation are able to show their own vulnerability and are able to inspire other people to show their vulnerability.”

For more on Pastor James Movel Wuye, Imam Muhammad Nurayn Ashafa, and the work of the IMC, you can watch a video from their RPP Colloquium, “Interfaith Strategy for Peacebuilding: Prospects and Challenges.”

by Daniel Hornsby