USD Magazine Spring 2010

USD MAGAZINE 4 AROUND  THE PARK eace. The word sounds simple, but don’t let that fool you. “I think peace is actually really complicated. I think it’s a hard- core subject,” says Milburn Line, who took the helm of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice in August. “Peace gets written off as, ‘Flower Power, Birkenstocks, we should all just get along,’ and it is much more complex than that. It requires a much more studied approach and a much more political approach.” Line is up to the task, having

A COMPLEX FORMULA Mi l bu r n L i ne nav i ga t e s t he i n t r i c a c i e s o f pea c e [ t h o r n y i s s u e s ] by Kelly Knufken P

spent more than 15 years “on the ground,” working for peace and justice on human rights projects at the local level in a number of hot spots around the world. Most recently, he directed a $37 million human rights pro- gram in Colombia funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. He also worked on the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s and has spent years in Guatema- la, including a stint as director of a USAID-funded human rights and reconciliation program. All of that work — especially

getting to know people trapped in conflict — has helped him forge his ideas about the best way to achieve the complicated balance of peace and justice. “It’s not just a simple vision of coexistence; it’s a forged and locally owned, consensus-build- ing process for coexistence. And that’s much more complicated and hard to achieve.” The way he sees it, now is the time to explore the intricacies of peace. “As a species, we have spent a tre- mendous amount of our time dedi-

AROUND THE PARK AROUND THE PARK AROUND THE PARK AROUND THE PARK AROUND THE PARK