March 26, 2025
Keynote: Shamil Idriss, Turning Conflict into Progress in Our Divided Times | SXSW EDU 2025, Austin, TX.
Our world faces record-high political polarization. This isn’t just disagreement—it’s seeing others as existential threats, which often leads to violence.
But conflict itself isn’t inherently destructive. Like friction, conflict is natural and inevitable—violence is not. When handled well, conflict can drive positive change. Drawing from our decades of experience as the world’s largest dedicated peacebuilding organization working in 35 countries, here are five proven key principles that can transform conflict into progress—even in the most challenging environments.
1. Embrace Multipartiality
Multipartiality differs significantly from neutrality or impartiality. Rather than standing detached from conflict, multi-partiality involves building teams and coalitions that genuinely represent all communities in conflict. These teams are harder to build, but they have special strengths:
- They gain genuine credibility since members represent their own communities.
- They combine insights that work across different groups.
- They demonstrate the cooperation they’re trying to create.
- They develop practical, real-world solutions.
- They focus on action rather than just talk.
From our interfaith team in Sri Lanka to equal representation in our work in Israel and Palestine, these diverse coalitions achieve what individual leaders or homogeneous teams cannot.
2. Initiate Cycles of Trust Through Cooperative Action
While dialogue is necessary in peacebuilding, it’s not enough. Trust develops through shared action and success, even when initial actions seem small. In Kenya, our team organized soccer tournaments between police and youth gangs because it was the only activity that could bring them together without violence. These tournaments gradually built enough trust to address deeper tensions, eventually leading to transformative initiatives like an innovative system reopening night fishing after a six-year ban.
3. Monitor the Vital Signs of Community Health
Just as medical professionals track vital signs to assess physical health, our teams track five indicators of healthy societies:
- Polarization: The level of trust between different identity groups (religious, ethnic, political)
- Legitimacy: Whether people trust the institutions that govern and serve them
- Violence: The absence of violence, which prevents escalation cycles
- Agency: Whether people feel they can take actions to improve their well-being
- Investments: Whether resources go toward preventing conflict or merely reacting to it
These vital signs help us measure whether communities will rally together or fall apart when conflict inevitably arises. Every action we take either strengthens or depletes these indicators.
4. Create Sustainable Change at Scale
Peacebuilding creates changes that continue without outside help. Our teams work to create sustainable change through engaging market forces, building healthier social norms, and creating institutional change:
- In Kenya, we developed economic solutions benefiting both security and fishing livelihoods.
- In Pennsylvania, communities now reach across divides during crises.
- In Nigeria, our work led to a new state office for community relations.
Through these mechanisms, these changes become locally owned and self-sustaining without outside support.
5. Practice “Aikido Politics” When Facing Opposition
When facing aggression, both fleeing and fighting are responses that allow others to determine your behavior. The martial art of Aikido teaches neither flight nor fight responses to aggression, but redirecting toward safety for both parties. Redirection toward constructive outcomes requires greater strength and skill.
This principle applies powerfully to peacebuilding. Under the leadership of Zuhra Bahman, our Afghanistan team has maintained operations despite the Taliban takeover by navigating each interaction with both principle and flexibility—neither fleeing nor fighting but finding a third way forward.
The Path Forward
In our increasingly divided world, these approaches offer ways to heal divisions rather than deepen them. Transforming conflict takes patience, creativity, and the willingness to see the humanity in those with whom we deeply disagree. By bringing different sides together, building trust through shared actions, paying attention to what communities really need, creating lasting solutions, and finding better ways to handle opposition, we can turn conflict into a powerful force for positive change.
