The New Humanitarians Volume III - The Project on Justice in Times of Transition

Welcome back to the Deep Dive. If you are joining us today, you are probably that person who is, you know, always looking to understand how the world actually works.

The kind of person who really wants to look under the hood.

Exactly. You are a lifelong learner, and we are so incredibly glad you are here with us. We know your time is valuable. So we have structured today's conversation to be as engaging and, well, insightful as possible.

And we really have a remarkable stack of material to go through today. It's this extensive document written by Tim Phillips.

Right.

It details the history and the absolute groundbreaking methodology of an organization called the Project on Justice in Times of Transition, which is such a mouthful.

But the work is incredible.

It really is. It is a masterclass in human psychology, diplomacy, and quite frankly, just pure survival.

So the mission for today's deep dive is clear. We are going to explore how nations navigate the incredibly messy, painful, and often completely overwhelming transition from brutal dictatorships or civil wars.

So the really dark chapters.

Yeah. Transitioning from that to functional democracies, but we aren't just looking at history for history's sake here. We are going to extract the surprisingly practical lessons on conflict resolution from this historical record that you can actually apply to your own life, your community, and your work.

Because the psychology scales. It really does.

It totally does. But before we dive into these specific conflicts, we want to make something very clear to you listening.

We are going to be discussing various politically charged groups today, from right-wing governments to left-wing guerrillas.

Right. And we are not taking sides or endorsing any political viewpoints here. We are simply looking impartially at the historical events detailed in the material to understand the mechanics of conflict resolution. Okay, let's unpack this. Let's set the stage. Take us back to the end of the Cold War.

Right. So it's 1989. The Berlin Wall falls. Communism is collapsing across Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the Soviet Union.

It's a completely revolutionary moment in global politics.

Yeah, it is. You have all these newly independent states that are incredibly eager to hold free elections, establish the rule of law, modernize their economies, and join the West.

And Western governments are just rushing in, rushing in.

Western governments alongside various nonprofits are throwing resources at drafting new constitutions, building democratic institutions, and establishing free markets.

It sounds like this incredible moment of triumph and forward momentum. You know, everyone is focused on building a bright, shiny new future. You can imagine the sheer relief and euphoria in the streets.

Exactly. There was a palpable euphoria.

Yeah.

But reading through these historical accounts, points out something fundamental that was just totally missing in those early days.

The blind spot.

Yeah, the massive blind spot. There was no serious public debate about the recent, highly toxic past. I mean, think about what these societies had just lived through.

Decades of it.

Totalitarian regimes controlled almost every aspect of daily life. For decades, it was a daily, grinding battle for basic survival and dignity. Suspicion was rampant.

So the missing piece was this: how do you build a new democracy? Which absolutely requires trust in the state and trust in your fellow citizens, when for decades the state's intelligence services forced neighbors, coworkers, and even family members to spy on each other.

That is a staggering psychological barrier.

I was really struck by a particular argument from Adam Michnik, who was a leading Polish dissident. He essentially argued that people shouldn't be expected to be martyrs just to live a normal life.

That phrase really sticks with you.

It does. But what did that look like on a day-to-day basis? How did the state actually coerce that betrayal?

Michnik pointed out that ordinary people were forced into collaborating with the regime just to achieve basic life milestones. He gives this incredibly chilling specific example.

The passport story.

Right. Imagine you just want a passport to visit a sick relative in the United States. You go to the authorities, they tell you, "Sure, you can have the passport, but only if you agree to spy on the people you meet and report back to us." It's an agonizing choice.

You are instantly trapped.

Yes. Say yes, and you compromise your integrity. You officially become a collaborator. Your signature's in a file somewhere.

And if you say no?

If you say no, or if you refuse to play along, the consequences are devastating. You lose your job. You lose your apartment. Your kids suddenly lose their access to higher education. You are officially labeled an enemy of the state. Wow. Michnik argued that, in these impossible situations, Ordinary people should have the right not to be heroes. You cannot build a society on the expectation that everyone will willingly sacrifice their family's well-being for a political ideal.

No, of course not.

If we connect this to the bigger picture, democracies require maximum freedom, and their legitimacy depends on the free will and trust of the people. But this legacy of forced betrayal creates a massive psychological barrier.

Because your baseline is paranoia.

Exactly. If your baseline for survival for 40 years has been paranoia, deception, and assuming your neighbor might be reporting on you, you cannot simply flip a switch and suddenly trust a new democratic government. The bonds of trust were entirely nonexistent.

That brings us to how this massive problem actually started to get addressed. And the origin story is completely fascinating because it doesn't start in a massive UN assembly hall or some high-level summit in Washington.

No. Not at all.

It starts with a 31-year-old named Tim Phillips. In May of 1991, Phillips goes to the Salzburg Seminar in Austria. And the funny thing is, he was actually there on a fellowship to talk about climate change and the environment, right?

He had recently organized a program at Harvard to educate journalists about global warming. Environmental policy was his stated focus for being there.

But while he's there, he finds himself totally captivated by the off-agenda conversations.

The real work always happens in the hallways.

Always. He is spending his coffee breaks, his morning walks around the beautiful Schloss Leopoldsron, and his evenings drinking steins of beer in the beerstube, talking with former dissidents from the Eastern Bloc who are now suddenly government ministers and national leaders.

And over those beers, these Eastern European leaders confessed a terrifying reality. They told Phillips that the initial euphoria of 1989 was already fading rapidly. The hard work of building democracy was getting more difficult every day, and they were terrified that the ugly, vindictive communist past was going to reemerge and derail their new, fragile democracies through endless cycles of political retribution.

They were realizing that constitutional frameworks aren't enough if the society is tearing itself apart seeking revenge.

And Phillips was uniquely positioned to understand this fear. In the late 1980s, he had independently organized fact-finding trips to Central America, He brought prominent US opinion leaders, journalists, authors, congressional staff down to see the unfiltered realities of the conflicts there.

He wanted them to see the extreme poverty and numbing violence in El Salvador and Nicaragua and contrast that directly with the peaceful democracy in neighboring Costa Rica.

He wasn't just taking them on a carefully curated diplomatic tour. He was introducing them to major political actors across the entire spectrum.

Right. Everyone from the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega to the center-right Salvadoran president Alfredo Cristiani.

And crucially, he met leaders like Violeta Chamorro in Nicaragua and Oscar Arias in Costa Rica, who both believed deeply in negotiation and the grueling step-by-step process of building trust.

So witnessing the struggle of moving from violent conflict to peace in Central America gave Phillips the intellectual and practical framework to recognize what the Eastern European leaders in Salzburg were facing.

He saw the structural parallels. He realized these new post-communist leaders could learn immensely from people who had already navigated the incredibly difficult transition from dictatorship to democracy in other parts of the world.

So he pitches this idea to Tim Rybak, who is the deputy director of the Salzburg Seminar. Rybak loves it. They write a memo proposing a conference, and then the networking just catches fire.

It really accelerates.

Phillips connects with Wendy Lewars, who headed the Charter 77 Foundation in New York. She had deep experience with human rights in Latin America and completely understood that the horrors of military dictatorships shared chilling characteristics with life under communism.

She was the perfect partner to elevate this idea. And the timing was incredible.

Yeah, talk about being in the right place at the right time.

The very day Phillips meets Wendy Lewars, she and her husband happen to be hosting Václav Havel.

The famous dissident playwright who had just become the president of a democratic Czechoslovakia.

Exactly. By some absolute stroke of luck, Wendy asks if she can show Phillips' memo to President Havel. The next morning, she calls Phillips and says Havel enthusiastically endorses it.

Add in financial backing from financier George Soros and legal heavyweights like Lloyd Cutler and Herman Schwartz, and suddenly this 31-year-old's idea is a reality. In March 1992, just months later, the first Salzburg Conference on Justice in Times of Transition takes place.

And the setup for this conference is entirely unprecedented. They bring these key Eastern European and Russian dissidents, face-to-face with leaders from Latin America and Western Europe who had survived dictatorships.

We are talking about heavy hitters, people like Argentine President Raúl Alfonsín, who led the incredibly delicate transition after the fall of the military dictatorship in his country.

You would think it would be this immediate, beautiful meeting of the minds, everyone sitting around sharing wisdom.

But reading the accounts of day one, it was an absolute disaster. Everyone basically just talked past each other.

It was incredibly frustrating for the organizers, but it highlights a core psychological concept that is vital to understand: deafness.

Let's really dig into this.

When people have suffered profound trauma and repression, they develop an incredibly insular view of their own reality. It's a fundamental psychological defense mechanism. They believe their pain is entirely unique and that absolutely no one else could possibly understand what they endured.

It makes sense. If you admit someone else understands your pain, you might feel like it minimizes your own suffering. Precisely. So the Eastern Europeans and the Latin Americans were practically competing over who suffered more. The Eastern Europeans were coming up with every excuse as to why they couldn't learn from the others. They were saying things like, well, Latin America has capitalist traditions, so your experience with right-wing military dictatorship has absolutely nothing in common with our experience under left-wing communism.

Exactly. They blamed different legal systems, different cultures, different economic traditions. They were completely deaf to each other's experiences. They were building intellectual walls to protect their emotional trauma.

But then day 2 happens. Something shifts. You have to wonder if it was those informal evening chats in the beerstube that did the trick, breaking down those formal barriers. Because on the second day, you actually see a shift.

The walls start coming down.

The participants stop lecturing and start looking at each other. They start noticing the pained expressions, the body language, the heavy sighs as they share their stories.

That is the pivotal moment. They realize that while the historical particulars differ, while the uniforms or the ideologies might be different, human responses to trauma, fear, and humiliation are fundamentally the same.

The pain is the same.

The biological and emotional reactions to having your survival threatened, to having your family threatened, do not change across borders.

And once that wall of deafness came down, the results were incredible. They started proposing real, actionable solutions. They looked at Argentina and Chile and recommended creating truth and reconciliation commissions.

They drafted democratic guidelines for dealing with ex-communist officials and those massive troves of state security files.

They agreed that the rule of law must prioritize justice over political vengeance. but crucially, without sweeping the victims' very real pain under the rug.

This breakthrough birthed the pioneering methodology of the Project on Justice in Times of Transition. It relies on two incredibly simple yet profoundly difficult principles.

Let's hear them.

Number one: people can learn from the experiences of others. And number two: people can change.

Here's where it gets really interesting. Because it's one thing to talk about shared experience in theory, but hearing the actual stories of this methodology in practice is staggering. Let's look at the first anecdote involving David Irvine.

Right. To understand the stakes here, we need to know who David Irvine was. He was a former member of the UVF, the Ulster Volunteer Force, which was a Protestant loyalist paramilitary organization in Northern Ireland responsible for numerous acts of violence during the Troubles.

He spent nearly a decade in prison for terrorism offenses.

But after he got out, he went through a profound personal evolution. And became a leading voice calling for peace. In 2006, the project brought him to speak with senior commanders of the ELN in Colombia.

Now, the ELN is a hardcore, heavily armed Marxist guerrilla movement that had been waging war against the Colombian government for decades.

So you have an Irish Protestant, former paramilitary, sitting down with Colombian Marxist guerrillas. On paper, they have absolutely nothing in common.

But Irvine told the Colombians his origin story. When he was 17 years old, a boy with his exact same first and last name and his exact same age was killed by an IRA bomb. Traumatized, terrified, and fueled by grief, Irvine joined the paramilitary forces.

He told the Colombian guerrillas that he started out believing he was killing to live, defending his community from an existential threat.

But gradually, as the violence consumed him and his community, he realized he was just living to kill.

That phrasing is so powerful. He explained how paramilitary groups, regardless of their ideology, build these powerful mythologies to justify their violence. But those mythologies eventually imprison them in a mindset that is incredibly difficult to escape.

And the Colombian guerrillas were completely transfixed by his vulnerability.

Because Irvine was willing to share his own dark descent and his eventual transformation without lecturing them, they recognized their own dynamic in his story.

And because of that deep human connection, they were actually willing to listen to his advice on the mechanics of negotiating a ceasefire with the Colombian government.

It's incredible that personal vulnerability worked in Colombia. But did this methodology hold up when you put opposing sides of the exact same conflict in the same room?

That brings us to the second incredible anecdote. It's 1995 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The project organizes a conference and brings in two South Africans: Roelf Meyer, who was the chief negotiator for the ruling white National Party, and Dullah Omar, a lead negotiator for the African National Congress. The ANC, who later became Nelson Mandela's Minister of Justice.

Keep in mind the magnitude of this. These two men represented completely opposing sides of the brutal apartheid regime. The National Party had imprisoned members of the ANC for decades.

And here they are, standing together, side by side, in front of Northern Ireland's political and paramilitary leaders.

They didn't just give speeches; they recounted exactly how they developed trust behind closed doors. They talked about how they handled massive breakdowns in the peace process when violence flared up, and the immense political and personal leadership required to promote reconciliation to their own angry constituencies.

Hearing bitter enemies speak together collaboratively, hearing that it took time, that there were agonizing setbacks, but they pushed through deeply inspired Northern Ireland leaders like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.

They told the organizers later that seeing Meyer and Omar functioning as a team made them believe for the absolute first time that a lasting peace in Northern Ireland was actually possible.

Which leads to the third powerful example. This one takes place at a 1995 conference for the leaders of the three ethnic communities in Bosnia—Muslim, Serb, and Croat—right after the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords.

Initially, the Bosnians were doing exactly what happened on day one in Salzburg. The deafness. Yes, the deafness. They weren't listening to the international speakers. They were venting, shouting, and insisting no one outside of the Balkans could possibly understand their unique trauma and the bloodshed they had just endured.

They were deeply entrenched in that psychological deafness. Until the moderator, James Lemoine, totally pivots. He realizes academic discussion is useless here, so he introduces the panelists from El Salvador with stories that are profoundly brutal.

He introduces Ricardo Castaneda. Right.

By describing how right-wing death squads dumped the tortured, eviscerated bodies of campesino labor leaders right in front of Castaneda's house just to intimidate him away from participating in peace talks. It is horrific. It is. And then Lemoine introduces Joaquin Villalobos, who was a brilliant but notoriously brutal former guerrilla commander who had eventually abandoned violence for peace. Lemoine tells the room the harrowing story of how Villalobos's girlfriend was captured by the Salvadoran army, tortured, and dismembered into over 70 pieces.

It is just stomach-churning to even comprehend that level of brutality. To imagine carrying that grief and still choosing to sit at a negotiating table What's fascinating here is how this utilizes that exact visceral horror to cut through psychological deafness. The sheer volume of it. The sheer volume or intensity of another's suffering is sometimes the only thing that can break through. When the Bosnians heard the sheer unvarnished horror of what the Salvadorans had endured, they finally stopped talking. The room went silent. They started listening.

They realized that if these men could suffer that deeply, sit side by side with their former enemies without resorting to violence, and still forge a peace agreement, Then perhaps the Bosnians could too.

It proves, in the most dramatic way possible, that compromise is not a sign of weakness or humiliation. It is a profound sign of courage.

It's heavy. It is incredibly heavy, but it's undeniably powerful. So what does this all mean? How do we take these massive geopolitical lessons and distill them into practical takeaways?

Tim Phillips left us with some incredible advice for future leaders. And honestly, for anyone trying to navigate conflict in their own life. Let's go through them. The first practical takeaway he emphasizes is to collaborate, don't compete. Philip stresses that collectively there is always more wisdom in a group than in one single person or organization.

Far too often, whether it's in the nonprofit sector, the corporate world, or even local community organizing, people view their peers as competitors. They waste immense amounts of time and resources guarding their turf. Instead of partnering up to solve the actual problem.

It's ego getting in the way of progress.

The second takeaway is to be humble. Never insist you have all the answers. The Project on Justice in Times of Transition succeeded precisely because it acted as a neutral facilitator, not a lecturer.

They didn't walk into Northern Ireland or Colombia and hand out a checklist of what to do. They simply provided the space for shared experience and stepped back. Human beings naturally resist being lectured to, especially about their own pain.

And the ultimate lesson here is that transformative change is genuinely possible.

It is so easy to look at the world today, or even look at the interpersonal challenges in your own community or industry, and feel a self-defeating sense that the deadlock is permanent, that things will never get better.

But if deeply entrenched, incredibly violent conflicts in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and El Salvador can be formed into functional partnerships for the common good, then the impossible challenges you face can also be resolved.

Human connection, the willingness to share vulnerability, and the courage to genuinely listen to the pain of others, even when it's uncomfortable, are the ultimate tools for breaking those deadlocks.

We want to thank you for joining us on this deep dive into the profound mechanics of peacebuilding. It's a heavy topic, but an incredibly hopeful one.

Before we go, I want to leave you with a final thought to mull over, building on what we discussed earlier. Okay. Remember Adam Michnik's concept of the right not to be a hero, and the terrible dilemma of those state security files? In the 1990s when these countries transitioned, healing required airing out physical paper files kept by the state. You could literally burn the paper or lock it in a physical archive to try and wipe the slate clean.

Right, there was a physical end to it.

But think about your life today, living in a fully digital age. Every action, every text message, every minor compromise or mistake is permanently etched in the cloud. If a society were to undergo a massive transition today, how could it ever truly wipe the slate clean when our digital footprints make the right to forget almost entirely impossible? That is a staggering question to consider.

The ghosts of our past are no longer confined to dusty filing cabinets. Thank you again for spending your time with us, for your curiosity, and for doing the hard work of learning. Keep questioning, keep looking for those shared experiences, and we will catch you on the next deep dive.