Taking up what I started last week, this blog is dedicated to the second week of the Summer Peace building Program. Last week, I was grappling with a lot of issues related to self-doubt, uncertainty, and representation within the field of peace building and conflict resolution. I tried to spend most of my free time in Mount Madonna exploring these feelings and concerns to try and find a way to navigate out of the block I have been having, but unfortunately the last week didn’t do me much good. We had a lot of great sessions and most of them were really eye opening in terms of the scope of peace building, and expanding the understanding of an individual’s or group’s role in building peace in communities, but all this week really ended up doing was showing me even more ways that peace building could be done, themes that I found particularly necessary and relevant, but no clear answer on what my role in peace building looks like. The past week wasn’t the most relevant in terms of applying the sessions to my areas of interest. Yes, decolonization addresses structural societal issues that are the roots of gang violence and prison involvement, but related to my interests these were mainly US centric cases; Guahan doesn’t have major prison gangs, and while it has issues related to drug abuse and poverty and crime, the level of structure and severity of the prison gangs in Salinas definitely felt more like a States issue than it would an island issue.

During Thursday’s debrief, a fellow classmate brought up their uncomfortability seeing themselves in this field for some of the similar reasons I have been internalizing. It was good to see that I was not the only one stressing themselves over these questions, and it is probably something I need to continue to remind myself, because as soon as I heard them it became obvious to me that others must be feeling the same way I am. Some solid advice that I am trying to internalize is that it is okay to be unsure of your place in peace building. If I felt like I knew everything about everything in a field where so much of it is built on our not knowing and being comfortable in the uncomfortable state, then I would probably be in a worse state than I’m in now. That check to my growing self-doubt and insecurities was sorely needed, but it also needs to be backed up with the hard skills and conceptual understanding required to excel in this field, and while I feel I am adeptly rooted in my conceptual understanding of peace building and conflict resolution, the hard skills – the technical knowledge and confidence to be able to provide recommendations on approaches and courses of action within a conflict area and help navigate those spaces – is where I feel I’m still lacking. And maybe these self-doubts are only based in my insecurities, as my case study has proved to me that at some level I think like peace builders would in given situations, but again, maybe they aren’t.

As we move into the last week, I am still anxious about my interest of finding how to apply peace building and conflict resolution to decolonization. As many session speakers have echoed throughout this last week, it is a field that is sorely underrepresented and worked in, and because of that I am having harder times applying everything that I’ve learned in these last two weeks to building the image of what my role in the field would look like. A lot of that stems from the fact that conflict resolution and decolonization have so much overlap, that it is easy to see where cases and practices apply, but their differences play a role in changing approaches or interests for some. I am a little more hopeful that this week I will have a clearer understanding and potentially find a way to answer the block I’ve been having regarding this matter, and finally be able to see myself in a field I am so interested in.