NEWS FEATURE: Replacing reconciliation with coexistence

c. 1998 Religion News Service UNDATED _ Eugene Weiner might not describe himself as”hopeful,”but that does not stop him from working for peace in the Middle East and around the world.”The challenge is to be a pessimistic activist,”said Weiner, the editor of the recently published”Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence”(Continnuum), the first scholarly volume devoted to the […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Eugene Weiner might not describe himself as”hopeful,”but that does not stop him from working for peace in the Middle East and around the world.”The challenge is to be a pessimistic activist,”said Weiner, the editor of the recently published”Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence”(Continnuum), the first scholarly volume devoted to the emerging field of how different ethnic groups can learn to live together.

The Handbook _ and a March conference at Brandeis University exploring the issue _ represent an effort to make interethnic coexistence a mainstream field of academic study.


Until now, peace activists and policymakers have been unwilling to accept what Weiner terms the”tragic view”of a humanity that continues to divide itself by ethnic and religious lines in ravaged regions such as Israel, the former Yugoslavia and, until the recent peace accord, Northern Ireland.

Instead, they try too hard to forge means of overcoming those differences with theories of reconciliation or efforts to blur distinctions rather than trying to provide tools for people to learn tolerance, for example, as a way to coexist without bloodshed.”There are interests in this world that are irreconcilable,”Weiner, who is co-founder of the Abraham Fund, the philanthropic organization devoted to overcoming Israeli-Arab enmity and sponsor of the Handbook, said in an interview.

The Handbook argues that interethnic coexistence as a professional category is better equipped to offer practical solutions than conflict resolution or peace studies, both of which currently have high regard on many campuses.

The academic goals of Weiner and Abraham Fund chairman, Alan B. Slifka include establishing endowed professorships of coexistence at universities around the world, continuing the Abraham Fund’s work of awarding grants to coexistence programs, and seeking to institutionalize the idea in governments. But the first step is to train professionals in the field, the project’s leaders said.”We’re trying to create a cadre of people who are sensitive to the issue,”said Weiner.”Coexistence is an educable subject, educable in the theory of it, but it is also educable in the practice,”added Slifka.

So far, Brandeis and American University in Washington D.C., are committed to establishing courses teaching coexistence as an academic field. At least five other colleges and universities have shown an interest in establishing such programs, they said.

The Handbook, which contains over thirty chapters authored by scholars, experts and practitioners, takes an interdisciplinary approach, merging sociology, anthropology, philosophy and psychology.

Universities implementing coexistence programs also seek to conflate practical and theoretical education. For example, at Brandeis, the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life offers Student Fellowships in Ethics and Coexistence, where undergraduates take courses and are then placed in internships.”Until now, coexistence work has been carried out by well-meaning amateurs,but its reliability and effectiveness can be increased by taking the necessary steps to professionalize the work,”according to Weiner.


The Abraham Fund, which was founded in 1989, receives over 300 grant applications each year and awards approximately 50 grants. The typical program receiving funding is an educational program bringing together Arab and Jewish young people.

These programs, while helpful, do not satisfy practitioners’ desire for real progress.”What happened usually was each group blamed the next group about the bad things they’d done to the next group,”said Faisal Azaiza, a Muslim professor of social work at the predominantly-Jewish Haifa University. “More and more coalitions with professional people from both sides, working on the same issues, can meet, discuss and finally construct what I call a private relationship, and be able to visit each other,”said Azaiza, who advises the Abraham Fund on various projects.”Coexistence is the outcome, the result of this activity.” The on-the-ground work of practitioners will be improved by the scholarly contribution of the Handbook, organizers say.”We look at coexistence work for the next century like the environmental movement was twenty years ago,”said Joan Bronk, vice president of the Abraham Fund.

But the movement is already meeting skepticism, especially from some religious communities that do not want to abandon the hope of absolute solutions and for whom reconciliation rather than just getting along is a matter of principle as well as policy.

But Weiner, in defense, recounts speaking a few years ago in Northern Ireland to a coexistence group, where he laid out his view that ethnic conflicts must be understood and not necessarily solved.”People felt that I wasn’t hopeful enough,”he said.”But in the end one man got up and said, `My mother always taught me to live and let live, and that’s a good enough value to enable us not to kill each other.'””People are willing to choose the lesser evil, but find it very hard to choose the lesser good,”he added.

Other experts say coexistence will bring realistic language to the project of resolving ethnic conflict, but must be viewed as one piece of a larger puzzle.”The language of reconciliation and forgiveness may set the bar too high too soon”for complex ethnic conflicts to resolve themselves, said David Little, senior scholar in religion, ethics and human rights at the Washington-based United States Institute of Peace, which is an independent, government-chartered organization.

Coexistence as a new field is therefore”welcome,”Little said, but he added it sometimes fails to confront the possible stagnation that can happen when groups accept their differences to too great an extent.”We should study both what’s going on with coexistence and tolerance and also what’s inadequate,”he said.


END LEBOWITZ

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