Incorporating Peace building Sinclair Talk

On Tuesday, Oct. 14, a Sinclair Talks titled The Ways and Means of Peace: Incorporating Peace Building Approaches Personally  and Professionally was hosted by David Smith, an independent consultant. “The message for students is for students to think about what they can do to make a difference when it comes
to building peace and to thinking in terms about how they can use their particular skill sets,” said Smith. There were about 15-20 students. Smith was very involved with the crowd and getting them to participate. One of the exercises was proposing different situations and students had to decide whether it was peaceful or not. One of the situations was metal detectors in school, is it peaceful or not or in the middle. A lot of people stood by the “peaceful” sign because they believed that the metal detectors would prevent a violent situation so therefore it was peaceful.
There were some students who stood by “not peaceful” because they felt that the metal detectors would make the environment of the school prison-like, or that the metal detectors would make the students rebel. A few students stood in the middle because
they weren’t sure whether the metal detectors would be peaceful or not. Smith compared peace building to building a house. The concept was that in order to build peace you have to build a plan, have resources and etc. Smith mentioned in the lecture that
peace is a very personalized process, as is conflict. A lot of conflict is caused by background, social structure and many other factors.
One situation was a business trying to market Hispanic customers, so they hired Hispanic workers. Some of the other older employees didn’t like the fact that the new employees didn’t
speak English, so they were talking about it amongst themselves. Some of the solutions were talking to the older employees, teaching the newer employees English, and a few others. The event was concluded with small groups each with a different situation. The groups then had to decide with each situation how they would resolve it peacefully. “Conflict is a disagreement between two people, based on cultural differences,”
said Smith. “Once you figure out the problem, you can figure out the objectives then you can figure out the mission, then you can figure out the methods.”