David Hamburg Interview (1986); Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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You had an experience when you were at Stanford that related to this problem of applying knowledge to action. Would you discuss that? I have in mind where a group of your students were seized in Africa by a group of terrorists, and you were involved in negotiating with their captors for the release of the students.
Right. We were conducting a long-term research station in East Africa in collaboration with the University of Dar es Salaam and Cambridge University of England, studying the behavior and ecology of wild chimpanzees and baboons, and four of our students were taken suddenly and held hostage. We didn't even know who it was, in the beginning, but it turned out to be rebels against the government of Zaire. And it was really a political case not involving us. We were caught up as pawns, the conflict was basically within the government of Zaire and also involved the government of Tanzania, and only peripherally the government of the United States. So it was a complicated African political situation in which we were really pawns in which the captors hoped that we could bring pressure on certain governments to do certain things, which I'm not really, even yet, free to discuss. But clearly, some way had to be found to make contact with the captors and figure out what could constitute a quote-"victory" for them and for us. For us it was clear, to get the kids free. For them, since they wanted great things from other governments which we really couldn't deliver, it was a question of finding first, how they could come to see what were the limitations of our bargaining turf, and secondly, to try very hard to find some mutual accommodation. That was the heart of it. What could constitute something that they would value even though it was different than what they had originally expected to get? And I think that is, in a way, at the heart of negotiating processes. It was, to some extent, an application of knowledge, although with a lot of improvising, because nothing more than reading the books of Eric Ambler quite prepared me for that. But still, the mutual accommodation is at the heart of it, something that is beneficial to them and to us, and if not what you had hoped for in the beginning, well then, how could you come to settle for less but still something useful to both parties. And that's what we did, shuttling back and forth among the various governments and whatever we could do to find the point of mutual accommodation.
You recently said that the study of violence and of terrorism is not being satisfactorily undertaken in our universities. What did you mean?
Well, terrorism is only one piece of it. It had a rather more prominent coverage in the media than it did in my essay, although I think that terrorism is an important piece of it, which is spreading and becoming more complicated and all that. But it was the many different manifestations of violence. I feel, essentially, the following: that we've had, for a very long time in our history as a species, a record of violence and even mass violence. And we have a virtuoso capacity to justify even mass violence. One important piece of that revolves around ethnocentrism, a very easy way in which we put ourselves and our group at the center of the universe and put other groups outside and more or less depreciated and, in some cases, make harsh depreciations of some other group in a way that provides a rationalization for injuring them. By that time we recognize it as a severe prejudice. And that's all old, and I think it's an anachronism.
As you were indicating earlier, we carry that over out of historical and even evolutionary experience, that depreciation of an out group by an in group, and attacks on an out group. But what's new is, for one thing, the enormous destructive power of the weaponry. Not only nuclear, of course, which is the worst, but biological and chemical and enhanced conventional weaponry. The miniaturization of weapons of all kinds makes it possible to move them around the earth much more readily. The spread of technical capacity means that almost any group on earth can use rather advanced, highly destructive weapons. And with broadcast technologies, there can be a kind of contagion in which justifications for violence are spread in a very attractive way.
And so, I think that as a paradox of success, the advances in science and technology create a more dangerous situation in terms of that old wine of prejudice and ethnocentrism in the new bottles of high-tech destructive capacity. I therefore would like the scientific community to gear itself up to provide the other side of that coin, how the strengths of science and scholarship can be brought to bear on conflict resolution.
We've talked about knowledge of the problem, informing leaders of those problems; what about the third element in a democracy, namely, educating the people?
That's extremely important. Our foundation is thinking very hard about that. Indeed, the next board meeting we'll have a discussion about education of the public on severe conflict issues, and especially nuclear war issues, how that can be done responsibly. One doesn't want to simply go with slogans, one doesn't want to resort to drastic oversimplifications. The fact is that these issues are pretty complex and difficult. And I think that's one of the greatest challenges before foundations and universities at the present time: how to contribute to a worldwide dialog. Lord knows, it's difficult enough in a free society like ours to have a really intelligent, really informed dialog. We also have to face the challenge of closed societies, which are part of this and cannot remain closed indefinitely. These issues of nuclear war have got to be opened up to some degree in the closed societies as well, particularly the Soviet Union.
I guess the hope of all of this, in the end, is that knowledge and the application of the knowledge will transform relations, just as it does in a psychoanalytic setting, so too in the relations of societies. Is that too big a generalization?
No, I don't think so. I think that if we put our minds to it, as I hope a lot of university scholars will do in the years ahead, we can formulate some of the essential characteristics of decent human relations that facilitate survival in the ordinary settings of our lives, and ask how that could apply, and to some extent I think it could apply, to international relations, and try to move beyond the situation of fervent hostility in the context of the nuclear era.
Dr. Hamburg, thank you very much for joining us today, and thank YOU for joining us for this conversation on conflict and conflict resolution with Dr. David A. Hamburg.
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