“... [As modern peacebuilders], we do not expend [enough] time supporting people in trusting and developing their capacity to invent and create adaptive processes responsive to real-world situations and shifts. This requires something beyond rote skill training. It requires that we open a space for the development of the moral imagination, the capacity to recognize patterns and relational contexts yet think beyond the repetition of what already exists.” 

- John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination (125).

Lederach, like most of his peers in the field of Peacebuilding, recognizes that the promotion of peace on a global level is built on the back of individual engagement. Needless to say, living in a highly industrialized, institutionalized, patriarchal system has had a profound impact on the agency (or in our case, the lack thereof) of the individual . Lederach’s promotion of agency is, of course, a fundamentally critical break from the dominant narrative of Western culture. Feminists, historians, peacebuilders, and protesters agree -- Western culture’s primary narrative is that of sequestering power to the few in order to dominate the masses.

Lederach’s seminal text The Moral Imagination highlights not just the tremendous loss of potential implied in this hierarchal cultural strategy; with the resilience that the field of Peacebuilding demands, he fiercely promotes the resurgence of this power with his critique.

The impact of Lederach’s work is inherently political. Peacebuilding and politics are in an unhappy marriage of sorts. Framing it this way, peacebuilding reaches for therapy and politics insists there’s nothing wrong. In this context, politics and patriarchy are synonymous as tools that perpetuate the status quo. Peacebuilding reaches for transformation of these limiting hegemonies.

The moral imagination that Lederach describes is the essential agency lost in these oppressions. To promote this imagination -- with critical engagements, creativity, and innovation -- is to invoke the agency and power of the individual that is intrinsic, stifled only by the pedagogy of our culture.

The process of invoking this dormant power is simultaneously simple and complex. To invoke it is simple in that it needs not creation but freeing; freedom, longing, and expression are just as innate to Westerners as to any and every other culture on the planet. Concurrently, to invoke that presence and engagement is complicated by the thousand ways we in the West have been enculturated to believe it dead. Nevertheless, Peacebuilding remains built on the backs of individual self-reflection. Only by amassing our shared reflections can we recognize the unity of our experience.

To recognize our shared experience, we must unearth and discern precisely the inherited structures that have severed us from our creative, feeling potential. Since an oppressive ideology has formed the dominant narrative of our culture, then we must respond to the narratives themselves. If we can uplift the narrative underpinnings that construct the inherited agency of the individual, then we can pierce those structures in their weakness. Only then can we clench the culprit in its own story. Only then, in dissecting this troubling inheritance, will room be made for our best informed selves to consider the stories we would rather be living.

And, while I might offer some conjecture about what a world full of empowered, imaginative, and culturally sensitive Westerners would look like, the reality of that can only be written by time itself. However I can assure you that there are innumerable artists, professors, entrepreneurs, and scholars who share the interdisciplinary recognition that the answer to the question of our time likely won’t ride in on a yacht. To solve today’s problems, we must encourage the creativity of every person from every background to see the world not as a sky full of problems but a planet throbbing with opportunity for problem-solving. The only thing standing in our way is Western culture’s relentless clinging to patriarchy, power, and the militarized illusion of control. We must reach “beyond the repetition” of these falsehoods, and inquire towards a future where encouragement outnumbers oppression -- for everyone, on everyday. Only then do we have a fighting chance to turn this crazy world right-side up.

To follow Lederach’s encouragement to develop the skills of presence to “what is,” and innovation to move skillfully onward, we cannot journey forward without first recognizing ourselves. And to breathe into ourselves, to find light in that dark, forested night,  we must judiciously investigate our composition. When considering a cultural renaissance of peacekeeping and equitable justice, we must not falter in examining our cultural narratives. It is through this applied awareness that we will discover our individual imagination propelling a resurgence in collective understanding and morality.