Don't ask for neutrality — but do ask people to seek common ground

For Shamil Idriss — the head of Search for Common Ground — there’s perhaps just one thing more dangerous than polarization. Ignoring it. “People who are from the communities that are affected by conflict — and especially when there is violence — are not neutral or impartial, and they shouldn’t be asked to be,” said Idriss, just before speaking at Devex World 2024 last week. “It takes a while to build trust across those networks and those teams, but once you do, it’s really powerful. And it’s a lot harder to undercut.” Still, that’s easier said than done. In recent years, the surge of “cancel culture” — and the proliferation of social media, along with the deep echo chambers it can create — has caused polarization to skyrocket. “If the cause is more important than our relationships, then what we’re going to find is that our progress on that cause will get blocked.” --— Shamil Idriss, CEO, Search for Common Ground Today, nearly every region of the world has seen polarization levels rise since 2005, with the Americas’ largest democracies — Brazil, Mexico, and the United States — at their highest levels in history, according to an analysis from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That’s crippled trust in institutions and trust in societies, and seeped into the world of activism, development, and humanitarian response. And, it’s created divisions that few are willing to walk across, Idriss said, whether that’s between Republicans and Democrats in the United States, or Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. Those divisions can block not just conflict resolution, but development, Idriss explained. “Some of the best causes in the world are being advanced through very adversarial tactics,” said Idriss, who used the term “exclusivist activism” to describe when groups refuse to work with those on the opposing side of a conflict. “If the cause is more important than our relationships, then what we’re going to find is that our progress on that cause will get blocked,” he added. Searching, across the world For more than a decade, that’s what Idriss’ work has revolved around: Finding communities on opposite sides of a conflict and linking them despite their differences. Search for Common Ground doesn’t ask those communities to give up their differences, but to work through them — and to focus on shared tasks to build up a sense of trust. Idriss refers to that mix as “multipartial,” an approach that’s also used for recruiting Search for Common Ground’s country-level teams. By drawing people directly from different sides of a conflict — and pushing them to see each other eye-to-eye despite their differences — human bridges can begin to form, Idriss said. “Relationships are as important as any issue right now,” Idriss added. “Because despite any progress we might want to make on an issue, if relationships keep deteriorating, we won’t be able to actually see that progress.” It’s something all organizations — whether it's a community group in the swing state of Pennsylvania, or a nonprofit in an ethnically tense region of Sri Lanka — should be tracking, Idriss said. He elaborated further in his session at Devex World, where he addressed some 500 development professionals from a stage in Washington, D.C., last week. “Do no harm is great, but there’s a lot more than do no harm,” he said. “Any development effort can be done in a way that builds trust across societal dividing lines, or actually depletes trust across societal dividing lines.” He gave the example of a medical clinic being rebuilt after conflict ravages a community — with no grasp of the fact that before the destruction, that clinic was only serving one group in a community that was ethnically divided. Soon after, he explained, that clinic will get destroyed again. Instead, Idriss said, organizations should be allocating funding for cross-community collaboration and looking at ways to rebuild society before it fractures even further. If not, communities will continue to see the fallout, he explained — and even the largest nongovernmental organizations will pay the price. Over the last decade, Idriss has seen more and more people leaving much larger agencies to apply for a role with Search for Common Ground, namely because they are tired of seeing years of development work wiped out after a single wave of violence. “Even in the most well-meaning international advocacy efforts and human rights campaigns are oftentimes quite unhelpful,” Idriss said. “Multipartial teams in today’s world, and multipartial activism, is increasingly necessary.”