Community Peace Project

There Is No Sustainability Without Peace

The Glencree Centre for Peace & Reconciliation works to transform political and community conflict, bringing people shaped by violence together to find pathways toward reconciliation. I was commissioned to design and facilitate a programme in the west of Scotland as part of the Northern Ireland peace process, built on the framework of the Good Friday Accord.

The group included representatives from seventeen violently opposed communities from Northern Ireland, among them the British Army, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, religious paramilitary organisations, and civic groups. Getting them simply to travel together in the same van was a huge challenge and a profound achievement.

The approach found neutral ground both literally - in the outdoors, in the wilds of the Scottish Highlands; and psychologically - as participants found themselves brought together in equally unfamiliar territory. By keeping the focus on shared ecological trauma and a mutual love of the outdoors, the programme created conditions for relationships that would otherwise have been unthinkable. Those relationships in place, the narrative naturally turned to peace.

On the last day, when everyone had left, someone had left a message on the whiteboard. It said, ‘There is no peace without sustainability. There is no sustainability without peace.’

At the close of the first programme, each participant was asked to nominate a new representative from their community or organisation for the next. That format - and the peace it continues to generate - is ongoing to this day.