Peace Warrior. Can you fight for peace?

Peace Warrior. Can you fight for peace?

I have promised to be transparent with my journey to becoming a #PeaceFounder as I start up my peace technology company @PeaceIQ a company dedicated to helping leaders develop a positive and invested relationship with peace to improve the social performance and sustainability of their communities.

#PeaceWarriors

I have to start by sharing with you the parts of my journey that had no peace and what lead me to understand what peace is, the people I met who have developed what I call Peace Intelligence, and how to practice and improve peace every day.?

Being born in one of the world’s bloodiest civil wars is not exactly the most peaceful entrance into life. My father missed my birth because government forces would shoot on sight if you were out past a mandated curfew in Liberia. We also could not make it to a hospital because the curfew had already started, no excuses you could not even leave to go to the hospital. So I was born in a house while people continued to kill each other outside. Three days after I was born, my family escaped across a swamp and onto one of the last cargo planes to a refugee center in Sierra Leone where we stayed for a year. The war eventually extended to Sierre Leone and we had to leave again, this time to America.??

As a refugee in America, I was exposed to stories of similar difficulties from people all around the world. The dominant narrative of America at the time was that it was a melting pot of diversity from around the world. But the lived reality was a much more complex narrative. Forced migration was the background to many of our stories, whether descended from people who were enslaved and forced here to build this country or driven from their homes by governments that instigated uninhabitable violence. And the violence didn't end just because you reached a new destination. Even if you ran from one form of violence it seemed like you just ended back in the thick of it. Every year new war, every month police raids in our neighborhood, and literally every day there was constant fighting in our homes and neighborhoods between people that just could not get along. Why??

There was a common fury, people wanted better for themselves and for the people they loved. You fought each other believing that it would stop the madness of the outside world from happening to you and the people you cared about. In this environment, I learned to use my fists and could string together insults that probably are still felt today! I am a fighter, a part of me that I have learned to accept. At the same time, I struggled with the idea of fighting for peace? and even being violent at all? wasn't that the same thing that led to why we fled in the first place? It was cyclical. Also, my outward actions contrasted with my spiritual and foundational values. The life I lived in what should have been a “refuge” did not reflect the moral principles that I believed in or the goals that I wanted to achieve for myself. My family was also this way, torn between war and peace. My parents tried to recreate the life they had before the war. My family made efforts to preserve tribal and spiritual knowledge. They prioritized teaching us principles about unity and we were always engaged in community service. But somehow the war and the trauma were still the dominant force in our lives. When we closed the doors, there was what I call the war reenactment going on. I tried to play peacemaker but often at the expense of my own sanity.?

Eventually, I moved to DC where I became more involved with organized and nonviolent human rights protests. I was a part of leading social projects in high school such as efforts in the largely student-led Save Darfur Campaign, starting up advocacy associations and community service projects, serving on leadership boards,? and marching on the Hill on weekends with my friends. My fight at that time reflected my focus on how do we stop these wars from happening, how do we hold violators accountable, and how do we get people and governments to solve their problems without violence.

In college, I continued those efforts and also pursued degrees that would qualify me to be a better fighter. I got degrees in English so I could have a more fierce response, degrees in African and African American Studies so I could be “qualified” to speak about my own history, a law degree so I could have a method for how to go about this, and one in peace and conflict resolution so I had approaches for how to be apart of this transformation.?

I was ready for anything.?

Except, peace.

In all of my experience and research, nothing I came across mirrored the peace that I felt to be true in the language I heard in the stories of my childhood, the deeply beautiful ancient poetry of peace, the spiritual texts and imagination of the divine that I witnessed exists within the human mind of what I now call peace intelligence.

I saw glimmers of it in my study of peace and conflict resolution. I learned about peacebuilding and the institutions responsible for stabilizing societies. I learned many ways that conflicts could be de-escalated through conflict management, conflict resolution, and conflict transformation. Yet, the irony was that many of the same institutions and governments that were engaged in negotiating the end of a conflict also had major roles in starting it. And, somehow along with these resolutions there also came this impending doom that peace was tied together with their string and could be upended at every moment without their presence. There was something codependent and progenerative in future conflict about this “peace”. Was my peace also codependent? I began thinking more and more about what and who I was fighting for. I knew inside there was a growing rebellion to this enmeshed view of peace as just resolving neverending conflict. I can even somewhat remember the first moment that my spirit led me on a path to begin to investigate the true meaning of peace.

I had NO idea that this would be the most painful experience of my life.?

As much as I spent my entire life fighting for other people and working towards a future self that could take on more battles, I forgot to take care of the soldier, the person here in the present and all the forms of myself throughout my past that have shouldered these fights. The journey to find peace within myself illuminated many latent qualities within myself to create peace around me that needed more development and skill. Many times we search very far for answers and disassociate that the same investigative tools that we use to learn about things outside of ourselves are the same tools that we can use and actually feel, connect, sense and know to be true within. In this investigation, I felt the difference between the energy that I used to manage internal conflicts and the energy of being at peace. They were not the same thing, I understood that peace is its own knowable entity. Peace has a balancing calming energy that encourages you to bring forth all your qualities knowing that they will find oneness with all the qualities that exist.??

As I said though this wasn’t easy, this process was painful. Choosing a different path gave me the perspective of many mistakes I made and the weight of sacrifices in my life felt much heavier than when I was focused on fighting for others. I also experienced separation from many of the same people in my life that I spent my entire life fighting for.?

And I gained many friendships and associations with people who were exploring different methods for how to connect people with these deeper understandings that change you at the individual level. While watching an episode of The Madelorian, Lual Mayen, an award-winning game developer, shared with me how he created his first game in a refugee camp where he lived for 27 years. Gaming for peace was an interesting approach that many people haven’t thought of before. The game allows players to simulate what it's like to be a refugee fleeing violence. Being a gamer myself, I asked him what he thought about the controversy around having violence in a game and whether a game for peace can have violence in it. He explained that this is peoples’ reality and while he is developing ways for the player to also contribute to helping refugees, that this is moreso about the player developing empathy within themselves, to sense what the experience is like for the other and to engage in a simulation of what it means to lose everything. Again I began to reflect about this balance of fighting and peacefulness, this tug-of-war-and-peace within me. Here was a piece of technology where you fight...for peace.?

Technology can assist us to do many things that otherwise would seem impossible to do. It can help someone walk again, it can help someone hear, it also can help develop empathy and promote peace. It helped teach me about fighting and gave me the freedom to experience many different qualities of who I am, both the warrior and the peace advocate at the same time. By simulating many paths and perspectives at the same time, I am able to embrace the peace warrior - someone who integrates peace as its own knowable concept that informs our collaboration and also balances experiencing conflict almost everyday and uses methodologies to transform systems that can sustain reinforcement of the peace we work hard to create. In creating my own Peace Technology company I believe that we have an opportunity to make peace the work of the every day person, to reskill as peace warriors creating our own sustainable futures and not to leave peacebuilding solely in the hands of institutions and nations that cant or in some cases dont want to stop wars.