Beyond Intractability: A Free Knowledge Base on More Constructive Approaches to Destructive Conflict
Introduction:
William Ury explains that the third side is a self-organizing social movement that works at all levels of the society from the grassroots to the elite. Outsiders can help get the movement started and can give it support, but basically the work is done from within.
This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
The Third Side as a Self-Organizing Social Movement
William Ury
Director of the Global Negotiation Project, Program on Negotiation, Harvard Law School
This all came from them. I'm saying the third side comes from them. It has nothing to do with me - it comes from them. And things like, they had a big dance - like 2,000 young people on the third side and they it's quite amazing what's going on. They're organizing dialogues and it's on-going. At the same time that's going on on one level of that society, and on the other level we were working with government ministers, with media owners, with the President himself, the President himself went on national TV and said, "I'm a third sider." I'm not sure that necessarily advanced the situation, but we were just trying experiment after experiment to see. That's the way it works can you create a container in which people can see other more peaceful ways of handling this? And the jury's still very much out and I think at the same time international observers, if you'd asked them two years ago, they would be very surprised there hasn't been much more violence then there's been. So it may very well be an example in the future of how a civil war, or a possible civil war or possible major civil violence, might actually be prevented. And that's what the world needs. We're just at the infancy of learning that. And to me the key tool is not the magic appearance of the magic mediator, it's the self-organizing movement from within the society, supported by outsiders, including mediators, facilitators and so on, but it's a self-organizing phenomenon that I call, "the Third Side."
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. -- Bishop Desmond Tutu
The Beyond Intractability Knowledge Base Project Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess, Co-Directors and Editors c/o Conflict Information Consortium(Formerly Conflict Research Consortium), University of Colorado Campus Box 580, Boulder, CO 80309 Phone: (303) 492-1635; Fax: (303) 492-2154; Contact
