While Democracy Works is on summer break, we bring you an episode from our friends at Making Peace Visible, a podcast that ignites powerful conversations all over the world about how the media covers peace and conflict. This episode features journalist and author Amanda Ripley.
While Democracy Works is on summer break, we bring you an episode from our friends at Making Peace Visible, a podcast that ignites powerful conversations all over the world about how the media covers peace and conflict. This episode features journalist and author Amanda Ripley. We've wanted to have Amanda on the show for a long time and are grateful to the Making Peace Visible team for sharing this conversation with us!
After over two decades as a journalist, including ten years covering terrorism and disasters for TIME Magazine, Amanda Ripley thought she understood conflict. But when momentum started to build around the candidacy of Donald Trump, she questioned what she thought she knew. Ripley interviewed psychologists, mediators, and people who had made it out of seemingly intractable conflicts for her book, High Conflict: Why We Get Stuck and How We Get Out.
In this conversation with host Making Peace visible host Jamil Simon, she shares insights about how people in conflict can move forward, and how journalists can get at the "understory" of what's beneath any conflict.
Order Amanda Ripley’s book, High Conflict: Why We Get Stuck and How We Get Out. Watch Amanada’s talk on High Conflict for The Alliance for Peacebuilding. Follow her column in the Washington Post.
Jamil Simon: Welcome to Making Peace Visible, a podcast that illuminates the stories behind the work of peace building and the challenges journalists face covering it. This is your host, Jamil Simon. Think about a conflict in your life. Does it keep you up at night? Do you feel good when something bad happens to the person or group on the other side of the conflict, even if it doesn't actually benefit you?
If you thought the other side did something good, would you have trouble admitting it? Does it feel like the other side is so brainwashed that it's impossible to reason with them? If you answered yes to any of these questions, that's a sign you might be in what investigative journalist Amanda Ripley calls high conflict.
A seemingly intractable dispute that's driven more by emotion than reason. And if those questions remind you of the political divide we face in the United States right now, you're certainly not alone. Amanda's latest book is called High Conflict, Why We Get Stuck and How We Get Out. Amanda, I want to thank you for joining us today.
For listeners who might not be familiar with your work, can you tell us a little bit about your background as a journalist? What kinds of things were you doing before you wrote the book?
Amanda Ripley: Sure. Yes. So I have covered many things. I worked for 10 years at Time Magazine covering disasters and terrorism. And then I covered education for the Atlantic and wrote a book about that.
And, um, so I thought I was pretty, pretty comfortable with conflict. I thought I understood it pretty well. And then about six years ago, it started to feel like, There was a lot I didn't understand it felt like journalism wasn't functioning the way it was supposed to function and the political conflict in the U. S. was no longer behaving in a linear fashion. You know, it just didn't make sense to me. Yeah. So I, so I sort of went back to school, so to speak, and started really immersing myself with conflict mediators, negotiators, psychologists. People who understand conflict differently than journalists and realize there was a lot that I did not know
Jamil Simon: in your presentation for the Alliance for Peacebuilding last year that I had the pleasure of seeing, um, Liz Hume mentioned that, uh, You saw early on, and as you were just talking about in a sense, signs of what was to come, you recognized the dangers of toxic polarization.
So, what were the red flags that you saw, and what about them concerned you?
Amanda Ripley: Well, they were not subtle. Um, there were things like, you know, half the country didn't believe that the places I was writing for were telling the truth and, uh, no amount of investigative reporting or freedom of information act requests or documenting of leaks and lies.
None of that was really changing people's opinions. And it became clear that emotion. Mattered a lot more than facts, but most journalists were still, you know, sort of engaging in the magical thinking that like, if we can just lay out the facts and make them look pretty, then people will believe us again.
Those are all sort of signs that the conflict is no longer operating. Uh, in a, in a healthy function, and, and it's sort of something that you have to change how you engage with it, as you know. I mean, any intuitive thing you do in high conflict usually makes things worse.
Um, so you, you really, your only choice is to do counterintuitive things as an individual, as a politician, as a journalist, um, whether it's high conflict divorce or high conflict politics, that is the big lesson that I learned from people who have shifted out of high conflict into good conflict or healthy conflict is that you really have to step out of the dance. You can't do what your first instinct tells you to do, unless, you know, unless you really want to be in high conflict. And in that case, you know, that's understandable and human, but it does tend to mean that you will eventually harm the thing that you hold most dear, right?
That you will, you will do harm to the thing you went into the conflict to protect.
Jamil Simon: Uh huh. Explain that a little bit, a little more clearly, I'm not sure I, I got that.
Amanda Ripley: Well, okay, so for me, it was just really helpful to sort of notice the difference between high conflict and good conflict, right? So high conflict being the kind of conflict sometimes called intractable conflict, right?
Um, or malignant conflict. High conflict is the kind of conflict that takes on a life of its own and, uh, the facts no longer really matter. Um, it becomes an us versus them sort of a binary conflict and the conflict itself is the destination. There's no movement. There's a feeling of being stuck and you're just sort of repeating yourself over and over and endless miserable loop.
It's the same emotions over and over. There's much higher chance of contempt, disgust and violence. Whereas. Good conflict or healthy conflict, right? You see more, uh, more of a range of emotion and you see more questions get asked. There's more sense of movement, you know, in high conflict, your instinct as say, a leader who has to make an unpopular decision might be to never let them see you sweat, right? Like, be convicted, be certain. Don't reveal any vulnerability. But in fact, what you see again and again and again, is that that makes you a target of convenience. That dehumanizes, you're dehumanizing yourself. You're acting like a robot, right? And it makes it easier for people to blame you.
And so the cycle kind of perpetuates. Whereas... You know, one of the things that I've learned from politicians and superintendents and CEOs who have tried to step out of the dance of high conflict is that if they reveal just 10 percent of their own real vulnerability, if they, they say publicly that they don't know what the right answer is, that they are not sleeping well at night, that they know there are no good answers.
That they're going to do this knowing that, and here's why they're going to do it. That, that it tends to go much better, but that is, that requires a lot of practice and preparation and courage, right? Because that is not your first instinct.
Jamil Simon: Right. Do human beings have, or is there a way to acquire, um, how to distinguish between conflict that is normal and healthy, and sometimes very useful, and high conflict?
Amanda Ripley: So I ended up following, you know, half a dozen people and communities who shifted out of high conflict into good conflict, and Uh, what they taught me was that, you know, the first step, as you know, is, is always learning to recognize the high conflict in your own head, right? So noticing when, say, you are lumping large groups of people together into one homogeneous category in your head.
Um, noticing when you delight in the suffering of that other group, even if it does nothing to benefit you, right? Um, I have sort of an appendix in the book, In High Conflict, that, that sort of details the different questions you can ask yourself to figure out if this is a high conflict. Or if you still have some room to maneuver.
You know, sometimes, in some ways, you know, you're sort of headed in that direction, but you still have some time. Because the truth is that once you're in high conflict, it's hard to get out. It's not impossible. But it is hard, the wisest course is always to sort of avoid the trip wires that lead to high conflict and notice when you're trending in that direction.
So the 4 trip wires that I talk about in the book are humiliation, conflict entrepreneurs. Binary group identities, the false binaries, us versus them and corruption, right? And so when all those four are present, you're, you're very likely to fall into high conflict and it's just a miserable place to live.
And also an ineffective strategy for fighting for whatever it is.
Jamil Simon: You know, some people might disagree about ineffective because, you know, I mean, the right and the QAnon and all the rest, they are being effective in a very negative sort of way.
Amanda Ripley: Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on what the goal is, right?
Jamil Simon: Yeah, exactly. If the
Amanda Ripley: goal is lasting, sustainable change.
Jamil Simon: Right.
Amanda Ripley: I'm not sure they're being effective, right? They're not, no. Because we have to live with each other in this country. Exactly. But you're right in the short term. And this is why it's so magnetic, right? High conflict. It's very hard to resist the pull.
Yeah, in the short term, it is effective. Let me give you an example. Um, you know, one of the people I followed for the book is a conflict mediator named Gary Friedman, who, you know, has helped thousands of people through really tough labor conflicts, divorces. Um, he and his colleagues went in when the San Francisco symphony went on strike, canceling 43 concerts, they went in and helped everyone involved understand the deeper interests, values, identities, and come to an agreement that lasted much longer than any had lasted in recent memory.
And. You know, he taught negotiation at Harvard and Stanford. So it made sense when a few years ago, some of his neighbors in his tiny town in Northern California asked him if he would consider running for office, uh, because even in their little town, you know, toxic polarization had trickled down to the meetings, which were becoming really hostile and unproductive.
Things weren't getting done that needed to get done. So he agreed to do it made, made a lot of sense. And as he puts it, it took him about an eighth of a second before he got sucked into high conflict himself, uh, losing two years of his peace of mind. To what look like pretty small time conflicts to an outsider.
Um, but you know, there's two parts of the story. The first reason I tell the story is because it shows how we are all susceptible to high conflict, to the magnetism of it. Right. Especially in institutions that are currently designed to incite it like politics, like social media, like journalism. Right.
Right. Um, but then the second part, the hopeful part is. You know, he figured it out. He figured out that he had lost his way and he was doing all the things that he had helped his clients. And so he spent the next two years painstakingly excavating himself out of high conflict and building good conflict in his town, in his political position.
But he was much more effective in those last two years when he was in good conflict. Things got fixed, you know, road work got done, water rates got raised, things that had to happen for this town to function happened and he slept better at night. So, um, there were different things he did and we can talk about that if you want.
But, but one of the things he had to do to begin with was to recognize. How he had fallen into this trap.
Jamil Simon: Let's talk more about journalists and journalism. What are the most important things you think journalists can learn from your book? What is a good takeaway for the practice of journalism?
Amanda Ripley: Yeah, well, I ended up hearing from a lot of journalists who really wanted to turn these ideas into practical tools for their work, because, you know, anyone covering conflict, it just gets really exhausting and also boring, frankly, after a while to keep covering it the same way. you know, obviously at some point you're going to lose a bunch of your readers because it's so depressing or alienating or off putting. And so I ended up with a TV and radio journalist colleague of mine named Hélène Biandudi Hofer creating a curriculum for journalists.
Good conflict journalism, and there's a bunch of things in there, but basically the first step we do with newsrooms is, is we work through mapping the conflict, which mediators are familiar with, but journalists are usually not, and it's just a way to a little bit of distance from the conflict as, as William Ury says, you know, going to the balcony, right?
Like getting a little space from the conflict.
Jamil Simon: Exactly.
Amanda Ripley: And creating a map, you know, Who are all the players? What are the players we, we don't think about, but are influencing the conflict, like the conflict entrepreneurs and are there conflict
Jamil Simon: interrupters
Amanda Ripley: who are influencing the conflict positively? And what are the emotions and where's our newsroom on this map, right?
They tend to enjoy that because it's like a different way of thinking about it. And then we look at. What on this map is not being covered well, and then, you know, could you show the map to people in the conflict in your community and ask them, what are we missing and try to surface some of the deeper stories and dynamics that would help us move somewhere in the conflict, get out of that stuck feeling and also. Understand the problem ourselves or the other side a little better, which I think is our main goal right in in in conflict. Journalism is trying to say what is going on here and how do we revive curiosity, in a time of really entrenched false simplicity.
Jamil Simon: You know, I think one of the things you talked about for journalists was needing more complicated, rigorous reporting.
Talk about that. Rigorous in what sense? I mean, what do you think reporters need to look for that's different from what they're seeing now?
Amanda Ripley: Well, typically it's getting to the understory. What is this conflict really about for different people? Not the thing we keep fighting about. But like, what is it really, really about?
I was just reading a book called curiosity by Ian Leslie, I believe. And he was talking about how, uh, general McChrystal, Stanley McChrystal was saying that when us first invaded Iraq, the first, for the first couple of years, the questions they were asking themselves, you know, who is the enemy? Where is the enemy?
Then. What is the enemy doing? And he said, we only really started making progress when we started asking, why are they the enemy, right? Like, so it's asking different questions that get beyond the who, what, and where, and, and help us understand why, why is my neighbor seeing the world so differently than I am often on the left?
That conversation ends because people think they know they think that Republicans in the U S are just racist,
Jamil Simon: for example.
Amanda Ripley: I know what's in their heart. They're racist. You know, go do the reporting is what I'm saying. Why are they racist? Why are they trusting this news source and not the other? Where did that start?
You know, and what is the fear underneath? All of that. Usually it's a fear of not belonging. Usually it's, uh, again, humiliation, rightly or wrongly. But until you can illuminate that understory, you're just going to keep having the same tedious fights over and over about different things. You know, it's going to just.
Shapeshift, right? It's going to move from masks, the vaccines to baby formula to Johnny Depp. I mean, just, it's just boring. I could just go on and on. It's never just gonna never actually move anywhere. Interesting. So trying to investigate the understory is sort of the second step that we teach journalists after mapping the conflict is, you know, how can we listen more deeply in interviews,
So we can notice little hints. Of the understory and then dig deeper with different questions to get also
Jamil Simon: talking to different people. I mean, you know, talking to different
Amanda Ripley: people. Absolutely.
Jamil Simon: I mean, when there's a conflict, we shouldn't focus entirely on the general. So to speak. We need to talk to the players of people on the ground, you know, people with different perspectives on what's happening.
Amanda Ripley: Yeah. Yeah. Which is a whole different kind of archetype of sources. Right. Right. Typically traditional journalism. Right. Right. Who do you call? You call, the archetypes are like the activists, the victims, the villains, right? Like there's a certain formula.
Jamil Simon: Well, actually a lot of people ignore the victims.
Ignore the
Amanda Ripley: victims. Right. Yeah. Right.
Jamil Simon: Or make a lot of assumptions about victims.
Amanda Ripley: About who they are.
Jamil Simon: Yeah, exactly.
Amanda Ripley: The thing is, When I used to cover terrorism, we always called the victims, like, we always called their families, you know, but we, we didn't always ask them the right questions. So even when, even when we do call the victims, it's like, can we do something other than just...
Spotlight your pain and suffering. Um, in other words, do they have to play the role of victim every single time? Or could they play the role of, uh, veteran, you know, somebody who understands this now and understands what the rest of us do not, what do they wish? Had happened differently. What do they wish they had known before?
What do they want the rest of us to know? What are we all getting wrong about this conflict? Like, so it's, it's sort of like, not just interviewing them, but asking, treating them like experts as opposed to just victims.
Jamil Simon: Exactly. Cause they are.
Amanda Ripley: Cause they are. They are. Absolutely. And it's very disempowering, right, if you just keep them in the victim category forever.
Although there is, obviously, you know, there's an important role for spotlighting grief and suffering. Of course.
Jamil Simon: Yep. No question about that. But yeah, it still doesn't tell the whole story.
Amanda, I've heard you speak admiringly about countries where there are news outlets that are trusted across political divides. What are some of those countries where there's a higher level of trust in media across the board? And what can we learn from them?
Amanda Ripley: Well, it's interesting. I mean, you have some countries trust has actually increased over the years and some countries things got so bad that a lot of news outlets had to literally reinvent their whole understanding of what their job is, right?
So sometimes I find it really helpful to talk to journalists in Sierra Leone or places that have seen a lot of violent conflict very recently, because they see it as part of their job to prevent the escalation of violence, because that is how democracies end,
Jamil Simon: right, is
Amanda Ripley: often through the escalation of violence.
So journalists here don't typically see that as part of their job. They don't even think about it that way. So it's, it's not just. You know, that it's taboo, it's, it's like not even on the radar.
you know, I was talking to a journalist, uh, who does a lot of work in Sierra Leone and he was saying how they know, we know all around the world that typically political violence goes up right before and right after an election.
So they do a lot of work preparing for that and they do a lot of. Cooperating and collaborating with competitors around the country so that even though they're normally competitors, it's so important to be able to investigate rumors.
So they have
to work together, right? So this value of preventing the escalation of violence supersedes the value of getting something before your competitor.
Um, so they'll work together because they can't be in every polling place. On their own at the same time, uh, in this way, they can kind of squash rumors that will lead to violence if they're not true, you know, more quickly.
Jamil Simon: Absolutely. They did that in, um, in Kenya, after there was a lot of electoral violence.
They created a... program, and I can't remember what, but it uses basically cell phone, cell phones and, and active monitors in various places to quash rumors and, um, to share information that was important, but especially to quash rumors, because that's one of the most divisive kinds of things. There's one phrase that, you know, is in the glossary, as a matter of fact, I love that little glossary you put together, kind of, um, helped.
To clarify some of the things, but you talked about, um, the phrase saturation point and, you know, from what I know of the Colombian situation, you know, our last episode was focused on the Colombian peace agreement. We also showed a film. Yeah, I heard it.
Amanda Ripley: I enjoyed it. I love that film.
Jamil Simon: Oh, great. Yeah. That was a wonderful film.
And, um, that's one of the things that a few people in the film talked about is that people just plain had enough. I mean, I don't think the United States has kind of reached that point yet, a saturation point. Some people certainly have, but not enough, I think, to change the way things are here.
Amanda Ripley: Well, you know, it's an interesting question.
Usually those saturation points come with like a shock of some kind, right? Where maybe in Columbia, you know, where they saw a lot of defections from the FARC was after a big military victory, right? Over the FARC. So that's putting pressure on the FARC. Or when there was a change in the currency valuation so that they weren't making as much money from the sale of narcotics.
So life just got harder to be a guerrilla member in the FARC. Um, so that's in some ways a saturation point, right? Where the suffering, the daily toll of the conflict starts to feel like it's no longer worth the benefits. Um, but then other times, if you, like, I. Spent, uh, a lot of time for the book with Curtis Toller, a former gang leader in Chicago who works, um, with young men and women now to prevent gang violence.
And they look for any shock, even if it feels small. So it could be a snowstorm where nobody gets killed for five days in a row. And that can create an opening where there wasn't any space before. But that pause in the conflict. Or if, let's say somebody gets shot and no one visits him in the hospital, that's when they come and visit.
So it's important to have relationships before then, but that's an opening. So for the U S there have been moments, there have been shocks that could have been used as saturation points, but you have to prepare for those in advance. Right. So January 6th, the riot in the Capitol in the United States. Could have been an opportunity for sure because you had every member of Congress frightened for their lives That is a moment where you start to really ask yourself.
Is this conflict worth it? Do I want to change how I'm fighting for the sake of myself and my family if no one else
But you have to be ready with that with let's say a very simple non aggression pact With relationships across the aisle with all of the kind of basic infrastructure you need to make that shift before it happens.
Right? That window closes. So I definitely think certainly most Americans have reached their saturation point, you know, most Americans are absolutely fed up and exhausted by the conflict, but you know, you need to give them another option. You know, I don't see why we couldn't ask members of Congress to agree.
To come up with like three rules of engagement, you know, where it's condemning violence or not, you know, vowing not to disrespect each other on social media now they're going to violate it. Right? Every piece, as you know, every peace treaty gets violated. But if you have a mechanism in place. To deal with that violation, you can slow down the reaction, right?
So we ask, you know, we ask young men in Chicago to do this all the time, you know, because most of the gang violence today starts on social media. So Curtis and his colleagues at Chicago Cred, this is all they do is. Is ask rival gang members to agree to some basic rules of engagement, because all of them want out.
They all want to live a different way. And I don't know why we haven't asked members of Congress to do the same thing.
Jamil Simon: But you know, the work that Duke University is doing in Colombia, for example, tracking the agreement and tracking how it unfolds and who it helps and who it's not helping and where various people are deviating.
And that's a really valuable, that's, it's rare that that happens, but um, I think the Norwegians were willing to pay for it. I mean, cause they, they really, Santos really came up with a terrific agreement that had a lot of good economic development attached to it. So it was important to watch to see. How much of it stuck, but not
Amanda Ripley: a lot of it did not a lot of it did not.
Jamil Simon: Unfortunately, it's really too bad,
Amanda Ripley: but I agree with you that it's so important. One of the reasons I went to Colombia for the book is because. Unlike most places, they really have done a pretty careful job of tracking the process and also all the disarmament process, like along the way and reintegration and, you know, that's really the only country I could find that, that had good data on who has left the conflict voluntarily.
And what happened to them, that's like the, that's the holy grail, right? Like, how do you have to learn what, what pulls people out and how do they, how do you help them stay out? And so I think Colombia knows more about what works and what doesn't work. They did a lot that didn't work than any other country.
Jamil Simon: Well, that's, I think something that needs to be done needs to be understood is that. Sustaining a peace effort is, is, uh, almost as difficult as bringing the parties to some sort of constructive, successful resolution. Sustaining it is also very, very difficult because it does break down. Boy, this is, we could talk for a long time.
This is so interesting. Are there any things that I didn't ask that you think are important to say in this context?
Amanda Ripley: Well, I do think, you know, circling back to something that you mentioned earlier that it's important to talk to different sources. This is something I've noticed starting to happen sort of organically, a little more than than it has been happening, which is good and encouraging.
But, you know, the changed source is an incredibly interesting story in high conflict, like somebody who has shifted, right? So the former QAnon members or the people who used to think one thing and now think another thing or, you know, You know, The uncle who lost his mind watching Fox news eight hours a day and now doesn't watch it anymore in his family talks about how his he's come back to life.
Right. And so those stories, because we get a fixed mindset, right. In high conflict where we, we start to believe that the other side will never change. We will never change. And the problem will never change. And that sense of fatalism and cynicism and despair is As dangerous, right, as anything else. So we see this with climate change, right?
The sort of doom reporting that has typically been done on climate change over and over again, just relentlessly. And then the stories that suggest some hope, some agency, some solutions just don't get the same amount of play, right? So, but lately I've seen a couple stories like the Washington post had two stories on the front page this week.
That were changed source stories. So one was about a climate activist who used to be stridently against nuclear power. Who are now in favor and are talking very openly about how they made that shift because it's in the interest of the climate. And then also it was a long, thoughtful story, right? And then also there was a story about a man in Texas who just reached a tipping point, he's a NRA member, Republican, but with the latest school shooting, he decided to.
Drive to the police station and turn in his AR 15 because he just felt like this is a weapon of war now does that change anything for you know, the victims of these attacks? No, it does not, but what it does is it shows us how we are all in motion, right? Like we are all trying to figure these things out.
It's a very difficult time To figure out what is the right thing to do for a variety of reasons, but shining a light on people going through that journey, struggling to figure out what they should do. And make sense of the world. That is something journalists can do better than anyone.
Jamil Simon: I think people should definitely read your book, High Conflict, Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.
It's a great book filled with lots of interesting ideas and insights. Thank you so much.
Amanda Ripley: Thank you, Jamil. I'm, I'm grateful for the. For the podcast and what you're doing and glad for the chance to talk about the stories.
Jamil Simon: We have links in the show notes to Amanda's book and to a presentation she gave on high conflict for the Alliance for Peacebuilding.
You can find some of her reporting at amandaripley. com. She's also the host of the podcast How To from Slate. I mentioned in the interview that we talked about the Colombian peace process in our last episode. That was actually two episodes ago. It's called A Filmmaker's Perspective on the Colombian Peace Process.
And the documentary we mentioned is called A Call for Peace by Juan Carlos Borrero. We have a link to that episode and to the film in the show notes as well. Making Peace Visible is produced by Andrew Muraskin. I'm your host, Jamil Simon. Peter August is the creative director of the War Stories, Peace Stories Project.
If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. We're a new podcast and your help spreading the word means so much. Thanks for listening.