Last weekend I went back to DC for PJSA Conference to present “Sensemaking: the New Frontier for Peace” on the panel Peace Futures, Narrative, Hope, and Political Imagination. 

This was the first time I had been back since moving to San Diego one year ago. It was great to catch up with old friends from the Carter School and also to see how the conversation in the field has changed. When I left DC, the field was reeling from the drastic funding cuts to federal agencies and contracts that supported peace work. At the conference, I was seeing real appetite for what comes next- both in peace infrastructure and potential future scenarios that peacebuilders will need to consider moving forward. 

I established Us Against When because I knew that futures thinking and methods are a tool to help people navigate the uncertainty of transitions, clarify their visions of the future, and uncover new ways to work together. The question I’ve been asking myself is: What is the next big idea and what are the best sites for peacebuilders in this new world?  

To prepare for my presentation, I revisited the past to see how others had developed new peace politics. I read Johan Galtung’s speeches from the 80’s when he was touring Europe and proposing peace politics that would provide an alternative to an escalating nuclear arms race and fears of invasion during the Cold War. This case seems similar because the exact same arguments are being made in the US/Europe vs. Russia context and with AI/ drone warfare as the new frontier of warfare. In his time, Galtung proposed the concepts of “defensive defense” and citizen defense infrastructure pioneered in Latvia as a way to interrupt the pattern of escalation. This concept competed with the security narrative that the only way to make a country safe was through offensive weaponry (and more than the other side). Reducing the offensive threat posed by one’s own side and providing citizens with the means to defend themselves in case of an invasion was a means to change the “enemy’s” threat perception and reduce one’s own risk of destruction. 

My talk focused on Cognitive Warfare being a new frontier for peacebuilders and also an opportunity to create new infrastructure for peacebuilding within the US. Social media platforms and AI have been accelerants for influence operations that directly target the sensemaking layer (Sensemaking of course is near and dear to my heart as a practitioner who has done large-scale narrative projects powered by SenseMaker and now Spryng to bring experience to the forefront of decision-making processes in the public sector). The goal of these operations is no longer to simply influence someone to take a specific action. Now, the goal is poisoning the information environment, creating confusion, and making it more difficult to act at all. Aside from any directed military operations, our media platforms have degraded our sensemaking ability for a long time by creating echo chambers and promoting division through outrage-driven algorithms (Lisa Scirch and the Council for Tech and Social Cohesion have done a great job of tackling this problem through the platform angle).

Peacebuilding always has a duty to be on the frontlines and to have an answer for the expanding boundaries of conflict. The framing of Cognitive Warfare is interesting because it begins to encroach on what has always been our field’s bread and butter from the beginning: building trust, establishing alternative possibilities, and increasing access to reliable information that de-escalates tensions and conflict. 

I rounded out my talk with a proposal that connects this domain with my work on Us Against When and the Office of Anticipation in San Diego. Local offices of anticipation can counteract the threats to our sensemaking by 1. Capturing images of the futures from different sectors of society. What do people think will happen in the future, and do their actions align with these images? 2. Sensemaking: examine how possible future scenarios impact decisions now. How can programs, policies, and funding create a future that is not simply a projection of the present that we want to change? 3. Experiential Futures: create an opportunity for the public to engage with futures before they happen through public art exhibitions, immersive experiences, and artifacts from the future. 

The Office of Anticipation will create new opportunities for citizens to check their assumptions about the future, connect with others to strategically align initiatives, and build creative approaches to an uncertain future. This creates peace infrastructure in an oblique manner, and most importantly calls out the arms race narrative for what it is- a lie. The image of the future that can only be one through war is one narrative of the future, and the narrative conflict transformation work of these offices can restore complexity to what people think is possible, probable, and desirable. Keep following me for more updates on this work! 

Other highlights from PJSA were: 

• The Alliance for Peacebuilding Futures of Peace and Security workshop: I’m looking forward to contributing my futures expertise to this group, specifically the working group on future trends. 
• Stories for Stability: panel with many former feds and my advisor Solon Simmons on narrative approaches to conflict transformation.
• Transforming Conflicts in the Age of Empire panel with my colleagues Rich Rubenstein, Michael English, and Derek Sweetman that analyzed our present moment through the structural lens. This session was important framing for the next steps of peacebuilding. 
• Peace Institutions in Uncertain Times: Critically Rethinking Leadership and Peace Infrastructure 50 Years After the National Peace Academy Campaign- A helpful historical review of peace institutions like USIP and the lessons learned from getting entangled in DC politics. This was a call to decentralize peacebuilding infrastructure in the US.
• Galtung Today: Violence and Conflict Transformation- I had to leave to the airport early, but it was great to see how Galtung’s theories are being applied today. There is so much to learn aside from his famous 1969 article! 

Next year the conference is in San Diego. I’ve got some ideas! Beach bonfire anyone?