TRAUMA DOCTOR BLOG
While working on a PeaceLab project in Sri Lanka a few years ago, my partner in that project, Dr. David Ratnavale, a Washington, DC-area psychiatrist, pointed out the central role of societal trauma in shaping the course of conflict resolution and peacebuilding efforts. This is an exceedingly important insight and one that is only very recently coming into view among trauma specialists. Heretofore, the attention of the international community has been on traumatized individuals caught up in the humanitarian crises of natural disasters and armed conflict - and note that efforts to provide counseling have always been a teacup of help against an ocean of damaged individuals.

Dr. Ratnavale's insight was to see that the traumas of war and disaster also operate on a societal level. For several years he and I have searched for practical ways to begin to include these factors crisis response. Dr. Ratnavale's return to his native Sri Lanka after the horrific destruction of the December 2004 tsunami gave us an opportunity to examine these societal trauma factors as Sri Lankans, aided by the international community, began their recovery and rebuilding processes.

As a start, we collaborated on a "blog" so that David could post his observations on the Internet as a way of enabling his professional colleagues - any anyone interested - to track David's direct observations as he toured the tsunami-devastated communities and as he digested the citizen's responses to their plight. To lighten David's burden as he traveled throughout Sri Lanka, I edited his informal e-mail reports and posted the blog entries. At the completion of the first round of several weeks, David filed a formal report with Sri Lankan President Kumaratunga.

This experimental blog - which is still being updated occasionally - may be read at: http://traumadoctor.blogspot.com

Much more to follow.

Download PowerPoint presentation Part 1

Download PowerPoint presentation Part 2

REFRESHING DEMOCRACY
Like almost everyone we know, Carla and I are increasingly concerned that Americans are losing their voices. We are deeply alarmed by the degree to which the political manipulations of the White House "permanent campaign" (which builds to no small degree on the 'advances' of the Clinton, Reagan and earlier administrations) crushes normal political discourse in our country and distorts the international political dialog. In my view, this deliberate strangulation of the polity is not just politics as a contact sport. Some of the current practices may be damaging our democracy itself.

What to do? We've joined a group of our fellow citizens in a grassroots effort. See our website: Refreshing Democracy, a citizens' project to reopen democracy's dialog.

More to follow, including a way for people to participate on-line. Comments? Send me an e-mail.

JERUSALEM COLAB
A group of young professionals in Jerusalem have asked me and my CoLab colleagues for help creating a new approach to peacebuilding in their region. They represent a consortium of two organizations-one of young Palestinian professionals, one of young Israeli professionals. They are determined to find a creative way to break through the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation; they hope to use the community-building capability of the CoLab process to launch practical, concrete projects that could contribute to changing the climate. More to follow.

COMMUNITY SUPPORT FOR-and from-MILITARY RESIDENTS
The recent return of about 3600 Washington State National Guard soldiers from their one-year combat duty in Iraq brought community attention to the special needs of these soldiers and their families. I joined an effort led by the co-chairmen of the Military Committee of the Port Orchard, Washington Chamber of Commerce and the chairman of the Military Committee of the area Democratic Party caucus to mobilize the community to support the soldiers and, especially, their families.

We are enlisting a rapidly growing roster of businesses, community and military service organizations, and citizens in this effort to address the serious challenges of emotional adjustment, employment, education, and other problems confronting many of these brave citizen-soldiers and their families. We hope also to help the Guard, the state and national VA, and the Congress strengthen the support they provide these patriots; we are also working to charter an innovative community organization to coordinate the delivery of these much-needed services.

This work has led to a companion effort to create an updated version of the 1930s CCC - the Civilian Conservation Corps which helped hundreds of thousands of Americans, including my father, with paid employment as they built national park facilities. The military residents in our communities - retired, veterans, Guard, Reserves, and active duty - are a huge and somewhat untapped resource; we hope to find a practical way of connecting the leadership and training expertise of these folks to the urgent, unfunded problems of the community. More to follow.

PROFESSIONAL PEACEBUILDING
URGENT GLOBAL PRIORITY Unlike the military profession which cycles high-performing officers at mid-career through a war college in order to equip them for the more complex responsibilities of senior officers, there is no institution devoted to helping "commanders" of individual enterprises to become "captains" of peacebuilding and conflict prevention. Our systematic professionalization of war stands in stark contrast to our haphazard development of the practical concepts and pragmatic methods of peacebuilding and conflict prevention. Worse, the central roles played by the business, science and other "hard" professions are not now blended with the "soft" professions more commonly associated with peacebuilding and humanitarian assistance.

Fundamental changes in the nature of peace and war make the correction of this "peacebuilding professionalization vacuum" an urgent matter for peaceful societies everywhere. This initiative recognizes that there are many entry-level peace studies curricula and that some institutions do work toward the professionalization goal. It is important to recognize, however, that in practice, peacebuilding professionals generally tend to work within independent organizations and on separate projects without a mid-career 'finishing school' opportunity to rethink their and refurbish their skills.

WORLD-CHANGING OPPORTUNITY Recognizing that the characteristic forms of peace and war are undergoing a series of profound transformations, our goal is to help propel a strategic change in the nature of global conflict prevention and peacebuilding policies and institutions.

OUR PROJECT Create a prominent, independent international institution to provide a diverse group of mid-career professionals an intense, career- and life contribution-enhancing experience. Augment the education function with an innovation-spawning research and applications groups, with the overall aim of creating a "gold standard" institution which could help catalyze fresh thinking about and an increased professionalism in the conduct of peacebuilding and conflict prevention activities in all their diversity.

More to follow. Comments? Send me an e-mail.