2025 was the year that I escaped Washington, DC. The beginning of the year was marked by the dissolution of many of the systems and structures that would have been probable avenues for employment after securing my PhD in peace studies. Now as I sit in my new home, looking out at the house covered in murals across the road and enjoying the beauty of the flowering jade plant on my front porch, I find every dispatch from the world I used to occupy seeks to force a reaction. I’ve grown weary of being derailed by events beyond my control, and I believe that the peacebuilding field in the U.S. is trapped in a vicious cycle. What might be truly heroic in the context of our current cultural moment is rejecting our historical impulses and spending more time engaging with multiple possible futures and embarking on a constructive project.

Before my hot take, some background: The original impetus for my dissertation “Us Against When: The Futures of Complexity-Informed Conflict Transformation” was the question of how to build peace in an advanced post-modern country like the United States (I will leave this clumsy definition here for the time being). The problem that domestic peacebuilders were facing was lack of participation, marketing, and engagement in their efforts. My gut feeling was that the model of peacebuilding was based on the premise of restoring a past that was unevenly distributed across generations. Older generations remembered a time before bi-partisan ship and romanticized “reaching across the aisle” and building a successful liberal international order. This has not been the experience of my generation, which has experienced the blowback from empire building and the failure of domestic policy to deliver basic goods like healthcare or education. In the paper, I cited a recent Pew study that nearly 40% of Americans don’t identify with the two political parties. Despite this fact, conflicts in the United States were still framed as “Red vs. Blue” – a label of the polarization that has been fossilized by a failing two-party democratic system. 

The other aspect I was investigating was the “structure of feeling” of the post-covid society – what cultural theorists have called metamodernism. The common experience has been feeling an oscillation between deep hope and despair. My theory was that this structure of feeling, rapid oscillation between these two states, and the constant bombardment of bad news facilitated by social media and the attention economy depleted the energy of those who might be interested in building peace or a better future, however that is defined. The final lens I was applying was that of anthrocomplexity – the nature of social complexity and human systems (attractor landscapes, narrative assemblages, etc.). Peter Coleman in the peace psychology world has put forth the idea of “conflict attractors” within conversation. When you fall into a conflict attractor, it becomes hard to get out and recover – partially because hot topics cause an intense emotional reaction. 

Peacebuilders in the United States have been falling into the trap of facing conflicts head-on and focusing on the biggest hot-button issues. Would you want to come to a discussion group about the most negative and exhausting topic possible with what you consider to be your worst enemy when you are exhausted? That would be unlikely. Those that do engage in these activities are heroic, in the sense that they are building peace through the force of pure will and belief. They are overcoming the physical constraints to peace and conquering their own minds. 

What are the modes of peacebuilding in this situation? What does the peacebuilder look like? During my PhD, I was searching for a methodological answer (which had mixed success in the application of SenseMaker technology and foresight tools). Now that I am nearly two years more mature, what is more interesting to me are the practices that are most appropriate, not just the practices that are “new.”

I met many amazing peacebuilders during my time at George Mason and while in Washington, DC. Dedicated, hardworking, and probably more stressed-out than they should be while working for little reward. Over the past year, what has hurt the most is that these models of peacebuilding that I was emulating as a student no longer seem appropriate. In the responses to the recent capture of Maduro and the strikes on Venezuela, these modes of peacebuilding also seem to be actively harmful. What follows is not a commentary on Venezuela or any type of policy prescription about what should be done. It is a reflection on what would be an appropriate mode of behavior and interaction with the systems that have made these events possible. 

In the beginning of this post, I said that the dispatches from Washington were an imposition. If I were a smarter man, this could be a pun – dispatch in the sense of the direct acts of physical violence and assassination (a theme recently taken up by my colleague Oakley Hill in an op-ed on TRANSCEND Media Service), dispatch as a report or piece of media, and dispatch as a verb meaning to send something to a destination for a specific purpose. The dispatching of Maduro has dispatched an entire complex of peacebuilders and adjacent government employees to produce dispatches.  

Like everyone, I’ve absorbed the typical narratives by force of my interconnection to the world via little screens. These include the legal arguments (“This is illegal under international law!”), the justifications (“Maduro was a bad man responsible for humanitarian catastrophe and his abduction is actually good in the long run”) and the moneygrubbing I-told-you-so’s (“You’ll wish you wouldn’t have dissolved USAID and USIP now that you’ve potentially broken a country and made things worse. Who will get all the contracts to rebuild and democratize the country?”). I’ve rendered these narratives that have been spelled out in painstakingly thoughtful detail in caricature because stripped of jargon and social media posting fluff, they are comical. This understanding is reinforced by Solon Simmons recent work on Root Narrative Theory. Conflict stories have their own narrative grammar – protagonists, antagonists, and plots – that are characterized by the perspective of the storyteller to the nature of abuse of power. The present moment is exhausting because all these narrative types exist in the same information environment at the same time, unconstrained by the laws of physics and proximity. Conflict narratives used to be determined by collective political organization. Now, the atomized individual is faced with the full spectrum of narrative grammar at the onset of every event. While swimming in this sea of narrative, picking what we engage and reinforce carries a heavier moral weight simply because we have more of a choice. 

The unilateral action taken by the United States has forced position-taking solely by nature of creating a fact. The assumption is that now that it has happened, “we must deal with it.” The problem with our current cultural moment is everyone is implicated based on the actions of the few. These state-level actions take place at a great distance, yet they infiltrate the day-to-day lives of nearly everyone. The attention economy thrives on big actions that dominate our attention spans and force us to devote energy to considering questions that shouldn’t be asked in the first place. Peacebuilders, especially, have historically been caught in cycles of reaction. When violence occurs, peacebuilders play clean-up. When you are cleaning, you have no time to think about creating what should come next. 

The mode of peacebuilding represented at USIP and USAID has responded to this situation by entertaining the pros and cons of Maduro’s abduction. Taking these official prescriptions so seriously makes them the only options in effect. It is a narrowing of possibilities and a narrowing of vision. A peacebuilder that cares about transformation cultivates the emergence of a new reality and creates the space for action under a longer time horizon. One of the challenges of violence and trauma from a conceptual standpoint is that it shortens attention and the ability for longer-term thinking (an insight from Johan Galtung). This is in contrast to the peacebuilding wisdom of slow, generational approaches like the community-based efforts described by Angela Lederach in her book Feel the Grass Grow: Ecologies of Slow Peace in Colombia. My colleague Graham Day (now sharing his experiences from a long career in international peacebuilding and various UN missions on his website: https://www.grahamdaybyday.com) has also theorized this temporal dimension of peacebuilding by integrating his experience in security sector reform with the Cynefin Framework. In these terms, we have fallen off what Dave Snowden calls the “cliff of chaos” by mischaracterizing a complex situation as one that is simple and requires a yes/no answer to a policy prescription. This dynamic confuses our own thought and must also be confusing to the public that would welcome a narrative alternative to the assertion that our lot were just political tools for a violent empire all along. 

In closing, last night before bed I was reading Infinite Jest for a reading club with my wife and her brothers (outstanding young men finding their place in the world through the experience of the elders of bro canon, no doubt).  The following passage reflected my present conundrum of how to be responsible as a peacebuilder in these times: 

“The post-modern hero was a heroic part of the herd, responsible for all that he is part of, responsible to everyone, his lonely face as placid under pressure as a cow’s face. (…) We, as a North American audience, have favored the more Stoic, corporate hero of reactive probity ever since, some might be led to argue ‘trapped’ in the reactive moral ambiguity of ‘post-‘and ‘post-post’-modern culture. But what comes next? (…) the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood sings with retrograde amines.” 

I’m writing this from an extremely limited perspective of what this could mean for our field and contributing nothing to trade-offs and the life-or-death consequences for many Venezuelans. Reaction and stance-taking re-create the conflict attractors that justify the existence of the broken system we are trapped in and the violence that it perpetrates. The first impulse is to get involved and to participate. After all, we are implicated! But what if the next stage is one of detachment from stimulus as mentioned in the quote? What if the next heroic step in this ambiguous, uncertain, and chaotic world is to resist the impulse to react, thereby denying the fundamental premise behind the broken system that refuses to fade and allow for something new to emerge? While I don’t endorse the notion that peacebuilders should emulate a vegetable state in their hero’s journey, considering ‘what comes next’ is valuable food for thought. Maybe this non-action will prepare use for the long-term work of creating a mode of peace work in the United States that is not so deeply connected to methods of governance that are deeply antithetical to the principles and experience of peace. Peacebuilding is a heroic effort. We might just need to become different types of heroes than the ones we read about in children’s books and political science literature. 

There is much work to be done on what operationalizing this initial cultural and ethical theory means in peacebuilding practice. Early comments on this work from several colleagues have show a missing linkage between “Big Peace,” structural analysis of the real risk for global war, and political organization. I agree and hope that many of you readers will point out additional gaps and areas for my thinking to improve. 

In the coming months, I am furthering my approach through the Us Against When brand and will be working on initiatives in San Diego to create alternatives that will contribute to the “California School” of peacebuilding germinating at USD’s Kroc School. If any of what I’ve written resonates with you, please get in touch with me at my new email address: keil@usagainstwhen.org.

In the meantime, I’ll be searching for other ways to not respond to the present crises in our domestic politics and the international system.