We must move beyond a short-term, crisis orientation and toward development of our capacity to think about social change design in terms of decades. We must move beyond a hierarchical focus on politics and toward the construction of an organic, broad-based approach that creates space for genuine responsibility, ownership, and participation in peacebuilding. We must move beyond a narrow view of postconflict peacebuilding as a political transition and toward the formation of a web that envisions a whole body politic, whole persons seeking change in a radically changing environment. To do this we must face the challenges of fear and hope. We need vision and hope to orient our steps and sustain our action. Yet hope must be linked to the realities of the context and provide us with a way forward. We must recognize the presence of fear all around us — fear of what is to come, fear of the unknown, fear of losing something important to us. Yet we must not succumb to nor be paralyzed by fear.
John Paul Lederach
“Remember and Change” in Transforming Violence
