***
The meeting was supposed to be boring.
In 2019 a bunch of academics and think tank policy folks were gathered for what should have been an uneventful conference of long-winded PowerPoint and bad coffee. Sadly, it would not stay that dull and predictable…
The presenter finishes his talk. A colleague comments that, due to how close the presenter was to the issues he was describing, there would be a lot of extra scrutiny and challenges ahead.
And the presenter… totally flips out. He felt this was insulting. Now he’s yelling. Demanding an apology.
But now the colleague is offended. He was just making a point and now he feels attacked. So he refuses to apologize.
The presenter starts packing up his things in a huff, ready to leave the conference. The other attendees try to calm the two down but are utterly ineffective. The two men both storm out, shouting the whole way.
Now it isn’t too surprising that something like this could happen at a conference…
But this was a meeting of global experts on conflict resolution.
UN envoys and high-level peace treaty specialists. As Columbia University professor Peter Coleman recounts:
One beautiful bit of irony is that an hour earlier one of the participants had presented an excellent paper on the power of identity issues causing stalemates in Middle East conflicts—and here we all were in the midst of one unfolding, and we were helpless. It was amazing. All of our inspired attempts at resolution fell flat.
Ahem.
