Mari Fitzduff

Professor and Director of the MA Conflict and Coexistence Programme at Brandeis University

Interviewed by Julian Portilla, 2003

I think the best knowledge you have in peace is really just like a jigsaw, and there's different times when you can do different things. So some days all you can do is pick up the bodies, comfort the wounded, and try to make sure it doesn't spiral into violence. Other days you look up and you realize, God, we've got time to think about integrated education. There's what I call short term, medium, and long term, and you really need to have people working on them all. Some days you cannot work on the crisis stuff; you've got to work on the training of people to deal with the crisis stuff as opposed to actually doing the crisis stuff.

So in a way it's taking advantage of all of the different opportunities that you get within a conflict, given that there often are times when some days are not as bad as others and some years might not be as bad as others.