Spirit in Action
Peace Studies - Professor Ian Harris, UW-Milwaukee
Ian Harris has spent 32 years as part of the faculty of the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. He started by teaching a selection of Education courses, but found his home specializing as a Peace Studies instructor. Ian has guided students through all the multiple levels and phases of Peace Studies over the last few decades, preparing his students to make a much-needed difference in the world through their active, engaged Peace Work.
- Broadcast on:
- 31 May 2009
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I have no hands but yours to tend my sheep. No handkerchief but yours to dry the eyes of those who weep. I have no arms but yours with which to hold. The ones grown weary from the struggle and weak from growing old. I have no hands but yours with which to see. To let my children know that I am out and out is everything. I have no way to feed the hungry souls. No clothes to give and make you the ragged and the morn. So be my heart, my hand, my tongue, through you I will be done. Fingers have I none to help I'm done. Welcome to Spirit in Action, my name is Mark Helpsmead. Each week I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Above all, I'll seek out light, love and helping hands, being shared between our many neighbors on this planet, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. I have no way to open people's eyes, except that you will show them how to trust the inner mind. I have the privilege today to have Ian Harris as my guest for Spirit in Action. Ian has spent 32 years as part of the faculty at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. He started by teaching a selection of education courses, but found his special home in Peace Studies. Ian has guided students through all the multiple levels and phases of peace studies over the past few decades, preparing his students to make a much needed difference in the world through their active, engaged, peace work. Ian was raised episcopal, but has been a Quaker member of Milwaukee Friends meeting since the mid-1980s. He joins us today from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Ian, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. How long exactly did you teach Peace Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee? Let's see, my first class in 1983, almost 25 years. And you just retired. Does that mean you're not going to teach Peace Studies anymore? Well, I'm doing Peace Studies on a slightly broader scale. I just came back from Spain, and I'm teaching there. I've been invited a year from now to teach a Peace Studies course at Columbia University in New York, and I'm going to be going in different venues. I'm retired from UWM, but I'm going to be teaching in different venues in the future. Were you a peace teacher before you were a peace studies teacher? Well, that's an interesting question. When I first started teaching in 1967, there was no such field as peace studies. I was, however, a science teacher in inner-city school, and I developed a course called Science for Survival, which definitely has very deep sustainability themes. We're talking about pollution and conservation and technology. I'm trained as a science teacher, and that's how I took my interest in science to a level that might concern peaceful issues. And then when I was also a teacher in the inner-city in Philadelphia, we had an effective school, and we were teaching the student's conflict resolution, peer mediation, positive communication skills. So I guess the answer is, yes, I was teaching about peace, but not in a formal peace studies way rather in a way that reflected my certification in the State of Pennsylvania. Well then, how did you get into teaching peace studies? I got into it because in 1980 on my campus, there were a group of professors who came together to form something called the Peace Studies Network, and we were concerned about the nuclear threat. We'd meet on a monthly basis and talk about courses that we could sponsor, speakers that we could invite to campus. Our whole purpose was to provide awareness and education about the nuclear threat. And while I was sitting around that table after I had tenure, I realized that I could teach a course in peace education. I was a professor in the School of Education, and it brought together many different aspects of my personality, my interest in science, and the sacredness of life, my involvement with various peace actions and demonstrations and organizations in the 60s and 70s when I was an undergraduate and a graduate student, and also my own personal commitment to peace. You said, Ian, that back in '67, when you first started teaching, peace studies didn't exist. When did it come into existence and what exactly is peace studies? That's not exactly true. I mean, the first peace studies program was founded in the United States and Manchester, Indiana, at a brother in school, and it's called Manchester College in North Manchester, Indiana. In 1967, I think a program was founded at Colgate University, another one in Manhattan University. Both of those were in New York State, so it did exist, but certainly I didn't know anything about it. It wasn't very widespread. Throughout the 1960s, various professors were teaching courses with the Vietnamese War that had a kind of peace studies focus, but it wasn't really until the 1980s when Ronald Reagan started to talk about winning a limited nuclear war, the people went kind of ballistic all around the world. They're very concerned that if there were any kind of nuclear exchange, it might lead to a nuclear winter, and that would be in the end of life as we know it, and therefore we have to try to stop this awful phenomenon from happening, and people started to take very seriously the teaching of peace as an alternative to nuclear weapons. Just how serious have people been taking the need for peace studies? How many peace studies departments or programs or majors are there across the United States or for that matter in the world? Well, I just finished a study of that, and there are about 400 programs around the world. There aren't that many separate departments. For example, let's just take a couple of local examples here in Wisconsin at UW-Stevens Point. They have a minor in peace studies, which they've had since Lee Dreyfus was chancellor, which would probably be the late 1980s. On our campus, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, we have an undergraduate certificate in peace studies, and a graduate certificate in mediation, so that a student can major in any field as an undergrad psychology, political science, communications, education, engineering, whatever, and get a certificate in peace studies. There aren't that many undergraduate departments per se. The kind of program I just described to you is, we call it transdisciplinary. It draws on many different disciplines. There will be courses in deaf and dying in the nursing school. There will be courses in nonviolence in the philosophy department. There will be courses on violence in the psychology. There will be communication courses in the communications department. There are many different departments that contribute to these transdisciplinary programs. What do they do in the math department to contribute to peace? I can't say that I can answer that even though I'm a certified math teacher. I know myself, when I wrote a book on peace education, I did give examples of different kind of math problems that would involve, say, you know, how far out from the epicenter would the radiation fall and a nuclear bomb were dropped, and it was sixteen kilotons of force. I mean, there are problems that we can give in like that. I don't know that the math department per se would have a focus course on peace. My question was partly tongue-in-cheek, but it was also serious from one point of view, and that is that the mathematicians and scientists are generally the people who are very much involved in production, enabling of the technology that produces our weapons, that makes our wars as lethal as they are. So I figured that there must be some way to bring them into the discussion to bring their influence to bear on peace studies. That would be very nice. I know when I was in England recently, I did attend a peace education network conference and there were scientists for peace. They had started out their careers somewhat idealistically in pursuit of pure science, but they found out once they started to work and once they started to research at universities and they started to see the type of grants we're getting, that in fact as scientists, they were contributing to the war effort and the destruction of life, so they had formed an organization and they were traveling around various schools, trying to make younger people aware of this aspect of science. So in order to teach peace studies, do you, Ian, have some kind of a degree, a PhD or something, in peace studies in order to be able to teach it? No. I have a degree in foundations of education from Temple University, however, it would be possible to get a PhD in peace studies right now. Some of the stronger programs in the United States are at the University of Syracuse and George Mason University in Virginia. There are other programs, for instance, the Sociology Department at Colorado, offers a PhD in peace studies, the Political Science Department at Hawaii does, there's a very strong master's program in peace studies at Notre Dame University, so there are a variety of graduate degrees that can be earned in peace studies now, yes. So if you get a degree in peace studies, what do you do with it if you have a minor or a major or a master's or a PhD? What do you do as a job opportunity in the world to use this degree? It kind of depends a little bit. A lot of the people who get master's degrees end up working for INGO's international non-government organizations like Amnesty International, for example, or the Red Cross, they travel abroad. A lot of people who get PhD's often end up heading, there's a whole practice component involving mediation and conflict resolution, they head up agencies that do that, also with a master's degree, and there are now sufficient peace studies programs in the United States that somewhere with a PhD can get a job teaching peace studies. We have a young assistant professor here in the communications department who came here from the University of Texas, she studied peace studies with less Kurds down there, so she's actually a professor teaching peace studies courses on our campus right now. So that career tract is available, it definitely wasn't available in 1967 when I started my endeavors in this area. The one thing that I didn't hear in your list of professions that I was specifically listening for was government. It just seems to me that we really need to have peace studies specialists in the state department at the UN and in many other areas in our government, aren't they there? That's a very interesting comment because, in fact, there is a United States Institute of Peace, and a very strong peace studies person did work there, and she had the audacity to speak out against some war in Iraq, and she was fired for contradicting our government's policies. So I think it depends a lot upon the particular administration that's in Washington, D.C., as to whether or not some of our peace studies degree would get hired within the government. I just want to be clear about this, is that also true of the people in the Department of State, and I'm not talking about political appointees necessarily, but civil servants. And it makes sense that they would be able to do their jobs much better if they had come up through the ranks of peace studies. Well, that's certainly true. We would like them to be aware of all kinds of alternative dispute mechanisms so that they don't just bring in the Marines when they're conflicts around the world. I just can't tell you right now that I'm confident that the current people who are hiring career foreign service officers would be looking for someone with a peace studies background. Peace studies is generally seen as being kind of liberal or leftist. Well, is it? Well, it is, but there are concerns that people have all over the political spectrum concerning violence. One of the problems is people on the right tend to want to use force to deter violence, whereas people on the left seem to be a little bit more open for negotiation, for non-violence, for peace building, for peace making, for different strategies. Are there any of the alumni from your program, people you've helped mentor through the peace studies works, that are out there working in the world that you're particularly proud of, that they're doing something that you're particularly glad that you had a hand in preparing them for? Oh, sure. There are all kinds of activities that graduates of peace studies programs do. There's a young woman who's working, I think it's at Hebron House, which is a shelter for the homeless in Waukesha. She's a graduate of the peace studies program. One of my ex-students is now an East Timor, helping the East Timorese with an election. She's spent a couple of years over there helping them with their transition to democracy. Another ex-student in mind is now working for peace action in Washington, D.C. and their national headquarters. So yes, my students do go out and do very, very wonderful things, but I should also emphasize that many of my students are teachers and they're out there in these very violent schools trying to bring peace, and that's a very important role to play. I'm assuming, Ian, that the ex-student you're referring to working in East Timor is Jill Sternberg, and I just want to let you know, if you don't already know it, that I did an interview with her a while ago about that and the other work she's done, and you can listen to that interview via my northernspiritradio.org website. And this is also a good time for me to mention, if you just tuned in, that this is a Northern spirit radio production called Spirit in Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and we're talking today with Ian Harris. Ian has just retired from 25 years of teaching peace studies at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. He's also just finished a study of peace studies programs across the U.S. and the world. Ian Harris is Quaker and is using his retirement to increase his availability to teach and be connected with peace studies worldwide. Let me ask you, Ian, a little bit about what peace studies could do for the world. I think that right after the attack on the Twin Towers in 9/11 happened, the rhetoric went around that a peaceful, nonviolent response was just not relevant, that we've had a catastrophic murderous attack on the United States, and that peace studies is no longer relevant. Is that true from your point of view? Not at all. It's funny, I was reflecting on that the other day. This guy, George Cohen, I think his name is, he's an editorial writer for The Washington Post, wrote a very strong editorial attacking piece nicks because they would be capitulating into the, I guess, the terrorists, some of them, whatnot, who attack the United States. Well I'm just thinking about what the aggressive pro-military front has done to fan the flames of terrorism by their hostile, aggressive war-like actions, how there are so many more people being killed in the world now because of the invasion of Iraq, how there are so many more terrorists who are being attracted to Al-Qaeda because of what the United States has done by using aggressive force. I wish our government had followed the kind of things that I was recommending after the attack on 9/11. Please understand that there was a severe crime committed, and the people who committed the crime have to be brought to justice. The world set up an international world court to try such cases, specifically for that purpose. And what we should have done was we should have created a special force under the United Nations to track down Osama bin Laden and his henchmen and bring them to trial, followed the rule of law in terms of prosecuting those people who attack the United States. The whole failed slaughter of thousands of innocent people in Afghanistan and Iraq is not the way to win enemies and to convert terrorists. Gandhi spoke quite a bit about terrorists. You may know and your listeners may know that Gandhi was faced by terrorists. In fact, he was killed by terrorists when he tried to hold together the Indian state against the separation into Pakistan and India. He said, you know, what do you do when you're faced with the terrorists? You try to talk to them, figure out why they're upset and negotiate around their needs and their demands. You don't wage war on them and try to wipe them out, that's not a way to convert anybody. So what do you think we could do in modern society when we've got forces on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan? What could peace studies tell us to do or teach us, give us as options, to do about the situation on the ground there at this point in time? As a matter of fact, it's kind of interesting because we had a conference here in 2003 on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus. It was a peace building conference. We had people from the War College and the Defense Establishment come to our conference because they're very interested in notions of peace building that we promote in peace studies. Basically, a peace building response to the crisis in Iraq, number one, would try to rebuild the society and make that a top priority with roads and schools and hospitals and get the oil wells working and, you know, not necessarily blow all those facilities up, which our government did. It must be remembered that our government destroyed the water system, the electricity system and everything in Iraq, and therefore the Iraqi society has really fallen to shreds. First, there's a question of trying to meet people's needs. Secondly, there's a question of reconciliation. How can we reconcile those different forces? If we study peace studies carefully, we study the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that have been taking place, I think, in 17 countries around the world. Some of them haven't worked very well. Some of them have. One in Algeria has been particularly good. The one in Sierra Leone hasn't really achieved very much at all. It hasn't released its findings yet to the public. The one in South Africa was fairly good, but there has to be some kind of process to let the people whose lives have been destroyed and have suffered so much from this combat, and some kind of process to let them tell their story so that other people are aware of their suffering. Otherwise, they just hold resentments for hundreds and hundreds of years as they do in Bosnia right now. Go to Bosnian, people will tell you, well, 500 years ago this serves the diss to us and they're still angry about it. They haven't had a process of reconciliation, which they're trying now in Northern Ireland, by the way. So, if we're going to pursue a peace-building strategy, we have to rebuild the society and then we have to put in some kind of reconciliation and forgiveness process so the different groups will start working with each other. Those are some suggestions, there are others. Ian, since you just did this worldwide study of where peace studies programs are being done, can you say anything about what motivates institutions to include peace studies in their curriculum? Is religious spiritual content inherently a part of peace studies? What is the breakdown in terms of religiously affiliated programs versus programs which are done in public universities like UW-Milwaukee, where you teach? I don't have the statistics in front of me, but I think that about one third of the peace studies programs are in religious-based schools, like, for instance, Manhattan College, which is a Catholic school, Erlen College, which is a Quaker school, Juniatic College, which is a Mennonite school in Pennsylvania, Notre Dame has a peace studies program that's a Catholic school, University of San Diego has a peace studies program that's a Catholic school, Marquette has a peace studies program that's a Catholic school, but right here in Wisconsin we have Stevens Point and Milwaukee public universities both having peace studies programs, so it's not necessarily a religious space. In fact, one of the most interesting debates within the field of peace studies has to do with the nature of nonviolent resistance. You may know that Gandhi and King were both very spiritually oriented when they talked about nonviolent resistance, but there's been a Harvard researcher, Glenn Sharp, who has been saying that we can have nonviolent resistance without a spiritual component, so, for instance, he would cite recent people's movements, like, let's say, in 1986, people's movement that deposed for end of Marcos and the Philippines, or in the year 2000, the Serbian resistance when the people stepped forward into the streets and they kicked out, slowed down Milosevic, they shut down the government, he couldn't government, he had to leave, likewise the Orange Revolution that took place in Ukraine recently, these are examples of people's movements that have not had a spiritual component, so to answer your question mark, it's not necessary that peace studies have a spiritual component, although for some of us it does. When you say that, for some of us peace studies does include a spiritual component, does that include you specifically, Ian? Yes, I'm a Quaker and my belief is that life is sacred and part of the reason I do this is to preserve the sanctity of life. How did you get to that place? What led you to that way of thinking? You mentioned that you were an activist around the war in Vietnam, were you then raised as a Quaker? No, I wasn't, I fell in love with a Quaker in college and I was introduced to Quaker thinking and Quaker lifestyles, she came from Bucks County, Pennsylvania and I was extremely impressed and the community I grew up in, people who were well educated were well aware of foreign events and could speak articulately about U.S. policy here and there, but I didn't have the passion for justice that I found in that Quaker community, that really impressed me very, very much. I actually started to attend Quaker meeting in 1968 when Dr. King was killed, I went right after he was killed to a Quaker meeting in West Philadelphia and most of the people in the meeting had actually met King and it was a very, very powerful experience. So that's how I became involved in a spiritual aspect of peace studies. So before you were Quaker, what were you? I met Piscopalian and I didn't find the message from the pulpit particularly inspiring whereas I found that Quaker is very committed to justice issues and that was very inspiring for me. As soon as I taught a peace studies course, I became a Quaker because I needed to have support to do this work, it's very hard in the society to speak out constantly against violence. Violence is just omnipresent. Could you talk a little bit in about your Piscopalian roots and what you learned through that? Certainly you were exposed to the idea of Jesus as the Prince of Peace through that upbringing. Was that part of the seed that eventually led to you becoming a peace studies teacher? Well that's a very interesting observation Mark because one of the things I did when I headed the peace studies program to the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, whenever I would get to know students very well and mind you we have a commuter campus. Professors don't often get to know their students very well, students often come in and go to classes and leave, they don't hang around, talk to the professors. But whenever I did get to know student well enough to ask the following question, I would ask them why it was there interested in peace studies and their answers fell into two categories. This is not a scientific study, this is a sample of convenience. But they said when I was a young girl I was often women, I would sit in church and I would hear these peace messages and I want to see where does this exist in the world. So it is my belief that early religious training can play an important role in helping young children formulate ideas about peace that motivate them into their lives. I very much believe that myself, all I can say is that the services I had to attend were so stultifying I don't think I got anything out of them. All I wanted to do was leave and be out in the woods, I was raised on the farm. This religious or spiritual component, is it permissible to talk about that in a peace studies course in a public university? Yes, of course it is. There are all kinds of religious leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., for example, who are very involved with peace activities and we study their work and look at what motivates them and what they're able to accomplish. Very much so, Mother Teresa is another person who comes to mind, Dorothy Day is another. There are lots of different outstanding peacemakers on this planet who are very spiritually motivated. I guess what I was trying to get at or to talk about is the motivation, the content, the thing that shaped the way that someone like Gandhi approached his work was very much from his strong religious base, the way that he prayed and fasted as necessary clarity and preparation for his peace work. Or likewise with Martin Luther King Jr., I can't imagine him doing his work without prayer, without recourse to that step as part of the process. Can you or how can you deal with that part of peace studies in an officially religion neutral public university like UW Milwaukee? The way I dealt with it is I read the works, the visual works of Dr. King, I've read everything he ever wrote and likewise I've had an awful lot of Gandhi and I teach those texts and we discuss those kinds of things in class. I mean there are legitimate things to talk about in a classroom when you're talking about what motivates people to work for peace, it's not like I'm trying to convince anybody that a particular religion is right or wrong, we're just talking about what motivates people to want to make the world more peaceful. I see peace by the way as a kind of goal for humanity, it's not anything we will ever reach but we strive towards it, there will always be conflicts, there will always be violence. Sometimes we make a little progress and sometimes we step back a little bit too, it's not a linear progress, it's a very difficult path to achieve. Have you had the experience of any of your students in the peace studies program having a kind of a conversion let's say to the dark side toward violence to say that no peace studies isn't the way of doing it, that I really want to support the military solution, the forceful solution of dealing with a problem? I can't say that I have, however I do occasionally hear about young men in Razzi and what not signing up for a peace studies class and I welcome them in the discussion, I mean someone joins the Marines because he wants to make the world more peaceful, it's a funny kind of irony, I mean it's not as if someone in the armed forces wants just to be a killer for the joy of killing that person has a motivation to try to make the world better, to protect the homeland, to protect the motherland, to build peace, so I often find certainly in their more mature years that military officers are very interested in peace studies and what we have to say, it's kind of like you go through basic training you learn how to kill and then once you reach a certain point in the military service you try to figure out how to avoid killing. Then I've talked to people who are generally pro-military and I talk about nonviolent resistance, they generally offer up as their killer argument that nonviolence could not have, would not have stopped Hitler and yet I understand that during World War II and in the whole process of Hitler's aggression that there were some successful nonviolent resistance cases facing his, the Nazis aggression, can you talk a little bit about those? Perhaps the most famous is the Norwegian teachers, when Hitler conquered Norway he insisted that the curriculum be rewritten and the teachers refused to do it and they were actually rounded up and jailed and sent to concentration camps way up in the arctic circle for their beliefs. Their resistance was so strong that the fascists ultimately gave up trying to govern Norway. I can also talk about United States efforts to, as it were, destroy the evil empire, the Soviet Union, by building up nuclear forces but in fact it was citizens, citizens and diplomacy and people-to-people exchanges that helped tear down the iron curtain. Do you have a personal favorite in, in terms of someone who really lived out what you think is the essence, the highest light of someone doing peace studies that you teach in action? I've been enormously inspired by Dr. King and I was in Atlanta just recently and I went to his center again for about the third time in my life. It's such an inspiring place to visit. But here in Milwaukee we have a wonderful man called Olus Egun Sajawade, who used to be a police officer who now works full-time and violence prevention, motivates youth and talks to young people and he's kind of my favorite. I did an interview recently in with the folks with the Peace Learning Center there in Milwaukee and I believe that you were instrumental or at least inspirational in getting that started up. Weren't you in? Yes, I was. It was sort of my idea. I went down to a peace education conference at the University of Indiana and I heard some people from the Peace Learning Center in Indianapolis talking and I said, "Wow, what a wonderful opportunity. They have a program down there where they bring children from the public school to their center which is located in a park in downtown Indianapolis and they train them in conflict resolution and positive communication skills and non-violence and they also have a park and so here I am a Quaker and we have our meeting house meets in a nature preserve and I thought it'd be a real natural when we expanded the meeting house to establish a Peace Learning Center there and we are now cycling children through from the Milwaukee Public Schools through our Peace Learning Center. We don't have as big a budget as a program in Indianapolis and we're much smaller. We're not as large in scope as they are in Indianapolis but we've been working with two or three schools and we're getting very positive results from the teachers and the classroom for the kids who are getting this training. It's up to us to show we care reaching out to everybody everywhere. Heart to heart and friend to friend circling all around the world and back again. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our work and in our play. We are teaching peace but what we do and what we say so take my hand and come along. It's time to sing the world a brand new song. So sing it loud and sing it clear all together now so everyone can hear. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our work and in our play. We are teaching peace but what we do and what we say. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our work. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our play. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every city, every city, every city, every city, every city, every city, every town, one by one in our work and in our play. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our work and in our play. We are teaching peace but what we do and what we say. We are teaching peace but what we do and what we say. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our work and in our play. We are teaching peace but what we do and what we say. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our work and in our play. We are teaching peace but what we do and what we say. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our work and in our play. We are teaching peace but what we do and what we say. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our work and in our play. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our work and in our play. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our work and in our play. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our play. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our play. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our work and in our play. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our work and in our play. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our work and in our play. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our work and in our play. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our work and in our play. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our work and in our play. Teaching me all the world around, you and me every city, every town, one by one in our work and in our play. five years of teaching peace studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. I'm Mark Helpsmeet, producer of Northern Spirit Radio programs, available via my website, northernspiritradio.org. I think that a significant number of people, when they think of peace activism, they think of naive, flower child type of people swaying together, singing, give peace a chance. You talked about your peace studies graduates working in mediation programs, working with homeless shelters, things like that, and I'm not sure that it's obvious the connection for much of the population given the common preconceptions of peace workers between this type of work and peace studies. What peace study skills are involved in mediation, working homeless shelter, etc., rather than the peace work like trying to resolve the conflict in Iraq? There are many different levels in which people experience violence. If I could just for a second try to create an image for your listeners of an onion with an outer layer, and that's the international level, and then you go inside the onion to an inner layer, and you get the national level of violence. What is our government doing to promote peace or create violence? Then you go inside that, and you get the various institutions, some of which promote peace, others which are very violent, like the military. Then you go inside that, and you get the interpersonal level where we all have relationships with other people. We might be fighting with our spouses or have struggles at work that are conflictual, we can't resolve the tensions. Then there's the inter-psychic level, how we ourselves think. I like that metaphor of an onion because the world is very complex and it reminds me of what happens when I turn on the news. I'm having a fight with my wife and the struggles at work, and there's a war going on and just violence. There's also the cultural level, there's all this violent culture that were surrounded by movies and entertainment that's violent. All those different aspects of violence are appropriate study in a peace studies program, for instance, domestic violence and sexual abuse, and those kinds of issues are extremely difficult forms of violence that deserve discussion in peace studies classes. Just like those many layers of the onion, the many layers of violence in our society, they all make us cry. You've also spent a fair amount of time connected with men's groups, haven't you, Ian? Yes, I have. I was in a men's group for 11 years, and I've also was one of the first professors in the United States to teach a course on male identity. I developed a 1978 course on male identity, and I talked about different aspects of male gender identity. You're familiar, therefore, I assume with what used to be called the new warrior adventure, the new warrior network, and which is now called the mankind project. Right, I was actually in that, and the founders are very good friend of mine, actually. All of them, three of them were founded that are all very good friends of mine, they all come from Walter. Could you talk, then, about how that kind of men's work is peace work, and peace studies validly would look at it, because my understanding is not only does it work on an interpersonal level, local, you know, in relationships that men's work makes things better, more peaceful, but I understand from an article I read about the founding of the group that, at the beginning, there are some guys sitting around thinking about what can we do to stop nuclear war from happening back in the 80s. They were discussing this, and could you discuss what the group is about and how that's relevant to peace work? Well, I think that's a little bit far-fetched. I don't think that was certainly the conscious motivation behind it, but there is a sense that young boys and men are raised in this society to be killers, and this work, which is deeply psychological, interpersonal, helps men deal with a lot of the wounds they've received, and ways they've wounded others, and go to other people and seek their forgiveness. It's very powerful in terms of personally transforming men who may have been violent and out of control at one point in their lives, into men who are much more open, much more able to embrace the contradictions of life, and look at their own weaknesses. It is a very powerful, transforming experience. It has a positive effect on men. It's not designed to be a peace experience. It's designed to help men resolve some inter-conflicts. Speaking of conflict, Ian, there are two concepts which are similar, perhaps, but I think have some significant differences between them, and one of those is conflict, and another of those is violence. Could you lay out what you think is the difference, assuming you think there is one, between violence and conflict? Well, conflicts are disagreements that arise between people or nations or groups, as in interpersonal conflicts, interpersonal conflicts, between ethnic groups, religious groups, what about? Violence is the deliberate attempt to harm somebody, psychologically or physically, to actually cause physical or psychological harm on somebody. Violence is often invoked in responding to conflict as a way of resolving the conflict. In other words, let's assume that you're having a conflict with your child. Your child wants to go visit his friends and you want your child to go to the store with you, and he refuses, and so you slap him up the top side of his head and pick him up and carry him into your car. You've used violence to resolve that conflict. A lot of people use violence to resolve their conflicts. Our government uses violence to resolve its conflicts. That's what the purpose of having an army and an air force and a navy is concerned, or even police. Police are supposed to deter people and use a force to keep the bad guys in jail and keep them under control so that we can have a stable society. Again, violence implies a contentionally use of force, often with the goal of resolving a conflict. What about the threat of force, threat of violence, as a method of peace? Certainly that was a theme of the Reagan years, peace through strength. How do you think about threat of force as related to peace making, peace studies? Well, I think that's a legitimate strategy for peace. I'm referring to a butter battle book between the zoots and the zacks. Dr. Zoot's book story where there's a group of people develop a set of weapons and other people feel threatened and they develop another series of weapons and they escalate. Weapons get more and more sophisticated, but I do think that there is a way in which human beings sociologically are, I guess I'll say, arranged on this planet. So if one group has some grain, another group might want to steal it, so the group has to get some weapons to defend itself, to deter violence. I do think that there is a role on this planet for peace through strength. I'm not, in that sense, an absolute pacifist. Let's come back to so-called terrorism because I think that you mentioned that one of the motivations that might have been there, well, actually has been there for a number of different terrorist groups, has been grievances. Do you have a sense of grievances that we could have addressed related to, you know, I don't know, it's not only the tack on the Twin Towers, but it's the grievances of a number of Muslims, fundamentalist Muslims as well as others living in the Middle East. Have you been able to, using the skills that you've developed and cultivated as a peace studies educator, have you been able to hear grievances which could have been addressed, which in fact could be addressed, to lead to resolution, to diffuse a situation in the Middle East? Boy, have I? I mean, I don't even know where to start. I mean, there's a whole colonial structure in Africa and in Central America too, in South America, where the U.S. particularly came in with multinational corporations, and for example, killed a elected leader in Chile in 1964, Salvador Allende, in Guatemala, we deposed an elected leader there, and, you know, 50 years of chaos have erupted in Guatemala as a result. I think the most egregious example from the Middle East is the Shah of Iran. The Iranians actually had a democracy back in the 1950s, and they elected a socialist, his name was Mozadec, and he was proceeded to nationalize the oil industry, very much like Hugo Chavez has in Venezuela, and John Dulles was the secretary of state at that time. He called in the CIA, and they deposed Mozadec, and they brought in the Shah, who was a very autocratic ruler, and he rolled Iran with an iron fist, and he had a huge secret police, and people were disappearing, and there was no freedom of speech, and there was no resistance, and there was just a tremendous amount of hatred of the Shah amongst the Iranian people. I was in Iran in the early 1970s, so I witnessed that. And then the Ayatollah came, and the Ayatollah was very much a resistance to the Shah. In other words, the United States set up an oppressive regime that fostered a movement of hatred about the United States, and that, of course, was exemplified in 1979 when Jimmy Carter was president, and the Iranians took, I think, about, like, 120 Americans who are the U.S. embassy hostage, and we had that hostage crisis. But there are many, many, many, many, many examples of what I might call the exploitation and rape, even, of native cultures, slavery. I mean, there's so many examples of how this country, and England, and Belgium, and France, and Spain, how the West has gone abroad, and stole resources from these countries, and created a great deal of hatred against the West. That's certainly the seize of it. And now, what do you do to resolve that? Well, you listen to the anger, and you try to build some institutions that meet people's needs. People need jobs, they need to have their oil wells working, they need drinking water, you build water purification plants, you know, blow them up as we did in Iraq. I'm wondering, Ian, if you could just pretend that I'm a neophyte, a beginner person in the area of peace resolution, peace studies type skills, and could walk me through a sample exercise to start building some of those skills for me, that would give me the kind of skills that you try and build in your peace studies students. The first thing I do in my class is I have the students get into small groups and start talking about a problem of violence in their lives, and they're willing, they're able to pick anything, and they can talk about the Iraq war, they can talk about when they got raped, when they were in college, they can talk about their car being broken into whatever. And I ask them to rank order those problems in terms of what's the most important. The first thing that happens, Mark, when you do that is people actually have an opportunity to talk about violence in their lives. This is something that we don't get an opportunity to do very much in the United States. We all live in this very violent culture, we read about all these horrific things in the newspaper, you wouldn't believe what we read about in our newspapers and here in the local news down here in Milwaukee about children getting raped and disappearing and, you know, people's homes having bodies under the basement sealed in cement. I mean, it's unbelievable the violence that takes place on a daily basis in our city here in Milwaukee and it also happens in rural Wisconsin too, I understand that. But people don't have any chance to talk about that. There's no venue for talking about it. And so just to give people an opportunity to express their fears, their anxieties related to violence in their lives can be enormously therapeutic. I mean, I remember once teaching a class, a peace education class had met, say, four weekends a semester in between two of these classes, a young woman in my class had a nervous breakdown because she'd been sexually assaulted by her grandfather when she was 15 and she completely forgotten about it. And of course, this is a very therapeutic experience for her to come to grips with that experience and to seek therapy out and get some of those issues resolved. So that's the first step. And then, of course, there are many more sophisticated learnings that take place in a class, their skills, their nonviolent communication skills, their mediation skills, their negotiation skills. There's an understanding of world order and different opportunities to bring peace at a national, international level. It's actually an extremely complicated field. I think it should be taught every day at every level, kind of like we teach mathematics right now. If we wanted to have a peaceful society, we should make that kind of commitment to teaching about peace. One of the things that I've heard said, even by generally pro-military friends and family of mine, is that no greater love has any one but that he laid down his life for his country. And usually the people who say that type of thing are thinking of soldiers who are both putting their lives on the line, but who are also taking the lives of others. And I think that typically this greater love, they don't apply it to pacifist because they assume often that anyone working for peace is some sort of coward, that the reason that you're pro-peace is because you're yellow. Are your peace studies students willing to go out there and suffer and risk their lives? Would you be willing to die fighting, if you will, for peace? Well, my students make enormous sacrifices in order to work for peace. First of all, they aren't paid very well. Secondly, they get ridiculed from their family members and their friends. Thirdly, they take enormous risks. My student, Jill Sternberg, who went over to East Timor, I mean, it's a very dangerous place over there. My students who are working in the inner city here in Milwaukee, it's a very dangerous place. And certainly most peace workers that I know are just enormously courageous people, willing to speak truth in the face of power, truth to power. Some of them go to jail for their beliefs. I have friends of mine who spend time in jail because they went to demonstrations and they protested against our government's policies. So I think it's a very absurd notion. In fact, one of the problems is the word "peace" itself implies tranquility. But I think of peace as a verb, to make peace, to get involved in all these situations and to take leadership and to struggle and to try to point out the non-violent alternative and to teach people about alternative dispute mechanisms. To be peaceful, to act peacefully is a very courageous and bold and energizing and heroic endeavor. I want to come back in one last time to your inner conception, just how you think of peace, the wise and wherefores of it, because I realize that some people say, "Yeah, I believe in being peaceful with my family, with my neighbors." But their peaceful beliefs and attitudes don't extend to perhaps criminals or maybe they don't apply as clearly to someone who lives outside the borders of the USA. On the other hand, there are some folks whose sense of relation, their conception of right ordering of peace, reaches beyond our species and includes other animals, even plants, peace with the planet itself. I'm not really asking for your complete theological framework or anything, but maybe your best statement of the spiritual principles which determine why and what you, Ian, believe is the right embodiment of peace. I guess the easiest way and the most direct way to answer that question is to mention that I had an uncle who was a war hero. He was actually on the cover of Time and Life Magazines. He was head of Bomber Command in a British Royal Air Force. I don't do this very often because it's very painful to do, but he's probably killed as many people as saying Napoleon or something like that. He's one of the great mass murders of all time. He bombed Dresden one night and 200,000 people were killed. I don't ever want to have that happen again. It's a very painful memory. Of course, I knew him and loved my uncle and knew him well. Sir Arthur Harris was his name. He's a historic figure. I think about who he was and what he did and the amount of tremendous amount of pain that was created by his bombing, boss saturation bombing of Hamburg. Many Germans Dresden, many German cities were completely castle, were just completely destroyed because in the Second World War they didn't have any accuracy to the bombing, so they just saturated bomb the town and say they were producing tanks. So that's certainly a very important motivation for me and I also, my mother, was sexually abused and she was a young girl and that caused a lot of pain, a lot of alcoholism and I don't ever want a little girl to be raised in a household like that either. So that really hits you right at home right where you live. Yeah, this is a very personal topic. It really is a bunch of, because I say it, the first thing you do when you get into peace studies is you find people have these amazing experiences related to violence that you're deeply part of their psyches. Thanks Ian for doing your work for these many, many years. I was kind of disappointed when I first heard that you were retiring because I know what a source of energy and mentoring that you've been for so many students and the world needs as many peace teachers as we can possibly muster. So I was maybe a bit prematurely lamenting the loss of a great peace teacher but from what you laid out as your schedule for the next year or two I can see that there will be no reduction in the efforts that you'll be putting out to equip this world for peace. So thanks for the work of decades past and for the good work of the decades to come. Thank you. You've been listening to a spirit in action interview with Ian Harris who recently retired after teaching peace studies for 25 years at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. You can hear this program again via my website northernspiritradio.org and on that site I also include links to my guests and their work as well as info on the music featured on my shows. The theme music for spirit in action is "I have no hands but yours" by Carol Johnson. Thank you for listening. I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. You can email me at helpsmeat@usa.net. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is spirit in action. I have no higher call for you than this. To love and serve your neighbor. Enjoying selflessness. To love and serve your neighbor. Enjoying selflessness. [Music] [Music]