John Paul Lederach - Peacebuilding, critical yeast, and the language of imagination

I've been following John Paul Lederach's work for years, finding the words he uses inordinately relevant to all of the details and spaces of my life. He has been a teacher to me across time and space and I believe the ideas he brings into the world are teachers we all need for the world we are walking into.

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John Paul is Professor of International Peacebuilding at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame. He knows as much about conflict transformation as anyone in our world; who has been present and has participated across multiple decades in multiple continents where real social transformation and real cultural evolution has happened.

For over three decades, John Paul Lederach has spent four to five months a year on the road, mediating crises of life and death in over 25 countries and five continents.

He is the author or editor of more than 18 books and 6 manuals (translated into a dozen languages) numerous academic articles and monographs on peace education, conflict transformation, international peacebuilding, restorative justice, and conciliation training.

He is the Founding Director of the Conflict Transformation Program at Eastern Mennonite University.

In 2006 he received the Martin Luther King Order of Peace Medal and in 2014 the Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Studies Association.

He has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Colorado in 1988.

So this is a conversation about peacebuilding, but it is also a conversation about language and imagination and the capacities that might allow each of us to transcend conflict in our world and the ways that these show up in the minutiae and details of a life, the everydayness and the banal, about how peace and imagination are cultivated there. It is a masterclass in the capacities of a peacebuilding and reconciliation, capacities we all must be students of.