By Peter T. Coleman, Greater Good Magazine, February 8, 2022
In 2006, I joined a group of about 40 peace experts in a small remote village in Poland called Kazimierz, a historic haven for Jews in a predominantly Catholic region of the world. There Andrea Bartoli, an accomplished peacemaker and devout Catholic who works tirelessly around the world to reduce deadly conflict, made an hour-long presentation arguing that because highly contentious conflicts can become so constricting—in terms of what we are allowed to feel, imagine, aspire to, discuss, or make happen—they imprison us.
In his words, high conflict becomes a place where we come to exist “in the frozen reality of high tensions.” Even contemplating reaching out to a member of the enemy in conflict zones such as Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, or Mozambique in the 1980s was so likely to trigger the wrath of your own community that it became unthinkable. Under these circumstances, he concluded, movement is the cure.
A few years later, our team stumbled on a similar finding while running a type of computer simulation called cellular automata, which presents a checkerboard surface that looks like an urban neighborhood from one thousand feet up, where each of the squares represents people or households in the community.
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