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The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Peacebuilding [Book Review]

Article  in  Journal of Human Security · January 2008

DOI: 10.3316/JHS0302049

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 Book review
The moral imagination: The art and soul of peacebuilding
Paul Lederach
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 216 pp., ISBN 0195174542

Reviewed by Zulfiya Tursunova

UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA

In his book The moral imagination: The art and soul of peacebuilding, Lederach explores
the nurturing of moral imagination in peacebuilding. In his viewpoint, peacebuilding
is a creative act which does not reject skills and technique. Finding this art requires a
worldview shift which originates from the moral imagination, the ‘capacity to imagine
something rooted in the challenges of the real world yet capable of giving birth to that
which does not yet exist’ (p. ix). Lederach’s book fills the gap in peacebuilding, which
goes beyond technique and observance of the steps of conflict transformation.
Lederach shares the insights he gained in his journey of exploration into how
constructive social change works and factors that contribute to it. He shares with readers
his moral imagination and the capacity to picture a canvas of human relations. This
imagination must emerge and speak to the hard realities of life. This is the paradox of
Tursunova, Zulfiya 2008, ‘Book review: The moral imagination by Paul Lederach’, Journal of Human Security, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 49–51.

both imagination and transcendence: ‘Each must have a foot in what is and a foot
beyond what exists’ … this is a ‘messy process’ which is the ‘nature of innovation. It is
the nature of pursuing change’ … it requires ‘naivete and serendipity’ (p. x).
To transcend the cycle of violence while living in it requires nurturing of human
relations. Lederach states that nurturing human relations requires moral imagination:
the capacity of persons to envisage themselves in a web of relationship even with their
enemies. In his view, both art and peacebuilding arise from human experience and later
shape and give expression and meaning to that experience. Peacebuilding must
experience, envisage, and give birth to a web of interdependent relationships. The stories
from Wajir, Ghana, Colombia and Tajikistan show the turning points, Lederach’s term
for the movement toward redefinition of the moment and the relationship.
Redefinition of the moment and the relationship requires involving people who may
not be like minded at the beginning in a social web and identifying ways of moving with
them. Women in Wajir built relationships with community elders; they linked elders
with district commissioners, women with police, youth with widows, markets with
cattle rustlers. Women talked to fighters who later involved elders to stop inciting clan
fighting. Women thought about creating a safe space in their everyday life and practising
rituals by creating a meaningful relationship among different actors, among them were
clan leaders who initiated wars. They shifted individuals and the institution of eldership
from one that proclaimed war to one that nurtured peace (p. 98). Women in Wajir, not
being mediators, turned weak standpoints in individuals and structures into strong
standpoints that they could build and rely on. By doing so, they built friendship and
opened communication channels.
Lederach enriches friendship and contact theories by showing how the differences
can be diffused and interests channelled for constructive change. Friendship theories
describe how the whole network is engaged in seemingly isolated relationships (Wellman,
Carrington & Hall 1988). The important point in friendship is the inclination of people
to establish friendship with like minded people (Lazarsfeld & Merton 1955/1978). The

© Copyright RMIT Publishing 2008, http://www.rmitpublishing.com.au/jhs.html

50  |  Journal of Human Security, vol. 3, no. 2, 2008

focused activities in professional or other fields tend to involve persons with similar
status, attitudes and values (Fernandez & Weinberg 1997; Lin, Ensel & Vaughn 1981).
Lederach shows how non like minded individuals, and individuals with different statutes
and attitudes, can redefine their values and attitudes for constructive change.
While addressing violence women in Wajir also addressed the system of patriarchy
and the power imbalance in society. Liza Schirch (2005) says that feminist rituals alter
women’s perspective on patriarchy, assert their identity as women, and empower them.
Also rituals build and transform relationships, altering the ways women communicate
in the world—the way they connect to others and the world itself. Feminist rituals create
an opportunity to build relationships with other women and to start constructing the
world in which social relations among men and women are based on egalitarian
principles. In the case of the Wajir women the vulnerability of practising rituals such as
going to the market and participating in weddings created a possibility of redefining and
rebuilding human relations along egalitarian principles. Women turned individuals and
the institution of eldership that ignored them and made them invisible into a platform
of relationships that supported them and their activities. Quite interestingly, women
also transformed the relationship among each other where clan subdivision was reduced.
They created a ‘zone of peace’ in the market which became a safe space for all women
irrespective of their clan background. In the Wajir story women created space and
meaningful human relations that flew from small market to a big system by inverting
and turning upside down hierarchies and setting up a new inclusive institution, the
‘Wajir Peace and Development Committee’.
Web watching requires peacebuilders to ‘locate change processes in the web of how
organic relationships occupy social space, how the connecting points create the flow of
and function of constructive, life-giving energy, and how pieces and strands of change
are located within a larger system’ (Lederach p. 107). Web watching requires observation
in mapping relationships and finding the whole when it is not visible. It requires finding
the ‘soul of place’ by asking who am I in the particular situation, what is the nature of
this place where I am situated? Humility is a journey to understand and situate the ‘soul
of place’. Connectedness, and respect are the core of humility where learning and truth-
finding takes place in a long life journey. Web watching requires constant learning to
create adaptive processes of continuous response (p. 107). The story of Colombian
peasants shows how web watching and making civilian resistance can break silence by
non-violent means. Like the women in Wajir, the peasants in Rio Carare ‘sought change
in the attitude and structures that promoted the war and formulated their strategy by
finding where they had points of access, creating in the process new spaces, including
one that even came to be called a zone of respect and mutuality’ (p. 98).
Johnson (1993) critiques the notion that reason is a force to suppress passions which
is one of the essential concepts within western moral and religious traditions; reasoning
is also based on the split between body and mind. In art creativity is used to create,
shape, form, disrupt, organise, illustrate, re-form; the same happens in moral reasoning.
When people act, they are involved in different forms of ‘creative making’: they compose
situations, build relationships, transcend interests, balance competing values, develop
institutional practices, and ‘orchestrate’ interpersonal relations. ‘Imagination too, is the
key to moral acts by which old conceptions and values are reshaped, our ways of
perceiving and responding to situations and people are transformed, and new realities
come into existence’ (p. 212).
The above-mentioned examples show how contact is crucial in re-establishing human
relations. Lederach shows how ‘working through’ conflict enables individuals to reduce
hostility between antagonistic groups. Allport (1954), Amir (1969), and Pettigrew (1998)

© Copyright RMIT Publishing 2008, http://www.rmitpublishing.com.au/jhs.html

 Zulfiya Tursunova, ‘Book review: The moral imagination by Paul Lederach’  |  51

consider that a particular set of conditions is necessary for effective intergroup contact:
environmental support, equal status between groups, close contact, and cooperation.
Lederach emphasises that the environmental support and the equal status between
groups may not necessarily be crucial factors in effective group contact.
Lederach stresses that peacebuilding could be summed up as finding and building
voice. ‘The journey toward change that those people make requires more than a strategy
of good ideas or technique. Fundamentally, it requires a willingness to risk and great
vulnerability. They are stepping into the unknown, into the mystery of risk. The journey
of voice finds its source at the level of life and vocation.’ Lederach explains, ‘looking for
a true home, this is vocation. Finding a way to that home is a journey toward
understanding of who I am … Vocation is knowing and staying true to deep voice.
Vocation stirs inside, calls out to be heard, to be heard. It beckons us home’ (p. 167).
Moral imagination answers the question Lederach poses: how do we transform the
cycles of violence that poison our human community while still living in them? Moral
imagination lies in the capacity to imagine and create constructive responses and
initiatives that transcend and rupture cycles of violence. One of the main cross cutting
themes in his book is the centrality of human relations and social networking, which is
an integral part of indigenous knowledge. Peacebuilding, like art, must envision,
experience, and cultivate the web of relations. The web of relations is based on
interdependency, finding key persons, and diminishing the social divisions that
transform power and hierarchical relations. Lederach strongly builds on indigenous
knowledge of web making and feminist ideas of ‘responsibility orientation’ where human
relations are based on listening to a deeper voice, compassion, vocation, contact and
friendship.
Lederach’s book is an excellent source for peacebuilders interested in reflecting on their
practices and finding their moral imagination in ‘the art and soul of peacebuilding’.

REFERENCES
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in context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Cambridge: Addison-Wesley.
Amir, Y. (1969). Contact hypothesis in ethnic relations. Psychological Bulletin, 71, 319–342.
Fernandez, R. M., & Weinberg, N. (1997). Sifting and sorting: Personal contacts and hiring in
a retail bank. American Sociological Review, 62, 883–902.
Galtung, Johan. (1996). Peace by peaceful means. London: Sage Publications.
Lazafeld, P. F., & Merton R. K. (1978). Friendship as a social process: A substantive and
methodological analysis. In M. Berger, T. Tabel, & C. H. Page (Eds.). Freedom and control
in modern society. New York: Octagon Books, pp.18–66.
Lin, N., Ensel, W. M., & Vaughn, J. C. (1981). Social resources and strengths of ties: Structural
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Pettigrew, T. F. (1998). Intergroup contact theory. Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 65–85.
Reardon, Betty. (1985). Sexism and the war system. New York: Teachers College, Columbia
University.
Schirch, Lisa. (2005). Ritual and symbol in peacebuilding. Bloomfield: Kumarian Press.
Wellman, B., Carrington, P. J., & Hall, A. (1988). Networks as personal communities. In B.
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