Finding The Roots

In my first Culture and Religion class with Professor Abu-Nimer we talked about being able to find commonality between seemingly irreparable goals when confronting conflict. That classroom conversation caused me to think about one of my most formative reads over the past year, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher and William Ury. In the book, they laid out techniques on how to discover and then work off a common ground to help aid successful negotiations. That morning I had entered my writing class where we talked about the idea of a ‘second conversation’ in writing where it becomes a reader’s responsibility to not only consume the surface topic the author is writing about, but to discover the underlying conversation the author is entering in as well. In many cases, this might be the topic you care about. For instance, someone might not be interested in boxing, but they might be a social justice activist interested in how boxing worked as a mode of social mobility. Even in our world politics classroom discussion on how to create a healthy ‘community of learning,’ people mentioned that when debating we should try to understand the background of the individual and how that has shaped their current perspectives. Basically, my week should be themed: Finding the Roots; finding the root cause of conflict, the root goals and interests of a country, group, or individual, the root issue a writer is trying to get to, and the root values of a person. Being a human that likes to narrow things down to a nice conclusion, motto, or moral to follow like an algebra student in search of x, I narrowed my theme of the week to one lesson: In deeper understanding there lies commonality.  

Now, how does this relate to our class discussions or the question of the week?  Well, when Wednesday passed, and I began to read different people’s blogs and listen to our cohort’s conversations concerning their take on the most pressing issue in world politics, I got excited. People discussed topics ranging from climate change, border disputes, gun control, to, as one blogger put it, the “Cold war Redux”. These topics may seem disparate, but upon a closer read, I realized there is a commonality within many of my classmate’s blogs. People are concerned with growing partisanship. This partisanship takes on a troubling role within a singular country’s government such as the case with US gun control policy, or, more often the case in this week’s blogs, it rears its head across state borders. In many of my peer’s blogs the partisanship was labeled as nationalism, yet in others it was more vaguely depicted with the issue of being unable to unite in finding a solution for a common issue such as in some of the blogs on climate change and the blog on the rising migrant crisis. Asim Siddiq in his blog “A World on the Brink of Disaster” described, what I believe is the issue of partisanship, as the “constant power struggle, [where] countries remain too busy trying to one-up another rather than solving any real issues.” In issues across the board we are being confronted with a frustrating rise of partisanship that makes any attempts to solve common problems on the international scale ever the more difficult.  Now the question becomes, if no one wants to work together to solve an actual global issue how can we solve the issue of not working together? If my lesson of the week rings true, maybe throughout the year if we can practice in our class looking a little deeper and striving for a deeper understanding of world politics, we can find a solution and a common process of getting there.  

A parable used in Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher and William Ury (paraphrased by me) 

Two people are fighting over the last orange exclaiming immovably that they both need it. What do you do? 

You split the orange and half and send them on their way, but both remain unsatisfied despite the sharing appearing to be fair. 

You bring the both back, but this time you ask them WHY they each require the orange. The one says she wants to make freshly squeezed orange juice. The other says she wants to make orange cupcakes. This time you send on of them off with the juice produced from squeezing the orange while you send the other one off with the left over peel to make orange zest. Both leave happy and satisfied.