An interview with Tiffany Easthom, General Director of Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP)
How would you describe NP’s identities and positionalities?
NP (Nonviolent Peaceforce) reimagines security and civilian protection in areas most impacted by conflict by working alongside communities to interrupt and prevent violence. NP has a forward-leaning, highly adaptable model allowing us to work in both the humanitarian and peace space, contributing to creating enabling conditions for development.
Over the past 20 years, we have continually reflected on what NP’s identity means, particularly in terms of operating as a values-based organization, committed to embodying and evolving our values as we learn more and as the world around us develops.
This has meant that we have thought a great deal about positionality. NP was founded largely as a peace organization, developing the humanitarian elements over time as our programming became increasingly responsive to protection needs arising in acute crises and protracted conflict.
It felt important, to be honest with ourselves about some aspects of having a humanitarian identity. While there are important reasons for investing in coordination, minimum standards, accountability, and so on, the downside is the top-down and complex nature of the system making it challenging for robust localized participation. As a result, we can end up inadvertently replicating the asymmetrical power relations between the global north and south.
We have found it important to push ourselves to evolve and innovate as an organization to ensure that we are working in a collaborative and inclusive way through a feminist management approach. We are challenging ourselves to move beyond what we have for years recognized as the primacy of the local actors, to explore what it will take to radically center those most impacted by violence in all aspects of our work.
How does this core value translate into your operational model?
All development, humanitarian, or peacebuilding organizations would tell you that they work with communities. But let’s be honest with ourselves, in reality there is a large spectrum of what that can look like and many different ways to define “working with”. If we are honest with ourselves, we have recognized that sometimes we do it very well, sometimes less well. For NP operationalizing this core value of radically centering those most impacted is largely informed by our programs being rooted in direct action, from a position of living and working within the communities we support. The very foundation of what we do is relationship-building, allowing a sound understanding of local needs, expectations of peace, and the various positionalities and identities across the stakeholder landscape. We strengthen spaces of trust and mutual engagement, try to find common interests, and work from existing practices. We are committed to maintaining a certain level of flexibility and adaptability to support local resources in a sensitive and sustainable way.
How do you handle the proportion of expats and local staff?
To determine the right team composition, we analyze in what context foreign presence is needed. It is obviously not the business of anybody from outside to come in and presume to build peace for someone else. People who will have to live within and maintain that peace need to be the builders of what works for them. This means that we largely depend on the context, specifically the stage of conflict, to help us determine the proportion of expats and local staff in any given location. In situations of acute violence, the presence of an outsider can offer an element of deterrence. Foreigners can disrupt and disturb patterns of abuse or violence because they are not from the conflict-affected space. They represent the eyes of a broader community concerned about the security and well-being of the people at risk. It does not mean that these expatriates must come from the Global North or be white-skinned. The simple fact that an expat is not from the immediate location can trigger a change in outcomes.
When we see that external presence helps, there will be more expats in our team. When it does add unique value, we adapt the ratio to ensure that locals form the majority of, if not, the whole team to support the community that we are in service of.
For example, in the Philippines, where we have been active since 2006, there is currently no particular need for an expat presence, but that has not always been the case. When the ceasefire in Mindanao broke down in 2008, there was a return to active conflict. At this point, as our colleagues from the area were at an elevated risk of violence themselves, we had a much higher presence of expat staff in the team. Now, in 2022 with peace implementation well under way, our team is entirely composed of local staff.
When the war broke out in South Sudan, locals were being targeted based on their ethnicity. No matter how committed they were to working for peace and protection, it was much more difficult for our local colleagues to be perceived as nonpartisan, one of our core operating principles. Increasing the number of expats in our teams helped to both extend safety through deterrence as well as to strengthen neutrality and non-partisanship.
Do you train expats before going on assignment abroad, and if so, how?
Our local and international staff are trained together. We find it contributes to building a common organizational culture. Of course, the expats get additional information, homework, and assignments on context studies to help them get ready for being in a new country but once they arrive, they attend the same preparedness training as their local colleagues. It is essential for us that everybody gets the same grounding in the organizational culture, values, and the basics of unarmed civilian protection work.
How do you deal with the different positionalities and identities of your staff, especially when they can be put at risk in certain countries?
Our organizational ethos is come as you are, your whole self, with the goal that NP will be a brave, welcoming, and comforting space for all. The idea of a “brave space” comes from the poem credited to Micky ScottBey Jones, “An Invitation to a Brave Space”. This is hard work, while as one line in the poem says, “in this space, we seek to turn down the volume of the outside world” in practice this can be incredibly difficult. We work in a diverse number of places where some identities are stigmatized, targeted, and some actions associated with identities are illegal. We need to make sure our teams are aware of the legal framework of the place they are working in and what kind of intolerance they might encounter based on gender identity, religion, and so on so that people can make informed choices about joining. We do extensive work as an organization, working on ourselves and with each other, intercultural competency development, inclusivity and belonging, trying to facilitate a space where we can each thrive as a person and together with a common cause. It is far from perfect, we have good moments and some failures – it will be our forever work together. It is the responsibility of anybody joining to know if he/she/they fit into those categories and to make an informed choice.
Would you like to add something?
Peace colonialism is a risk. We must be careful not to transplant and implant what peace means to us as organizations from the global north. Every culture has practices of nonviolence, dialogue, mediation, negotiation, and healing processes, which might not look like what we are used to in our home countries. But if it works for those most impacted by violence, then we need to open our hearts and minds to learning and supporting theirs. As external actors we can offer what we have learned from other experiences, what we have come to know about things like assessing risks, recognizing violence triggers and correlations between interpersonal violence and intercommunal violence. We can work to inspire generative creativity and most importantly, offer our presence to bear witness and stand in solidarity with those working on nonviolence.
We cannot just assume that because we are a humanitarian organization with all our good intentions, we don’t come with our own biases, mistakes, and assumptions. We must have uncomfortable conversations and be willing to receive negative feedback about our impact. Reflecting on our positionality is work that will never end; at the personal, team, and organizational levels.
