Before Meredith Preston McGhie became Secretary General of the Global Centre for Pluralism in October 2019, she devoted herself to addressing conflict and instability throughout Asia and Africa. Over more than two decades, she helped negotiate peace and develop policies to resolve conflicts in countries ranging from Kosovo to Iraq to Sudan.
All these places faced conflicts fueled by social divisions—a problem she describes as the biggest social issue on the planet. “We are failing consistently to manage our differences,” says McGhie. Her experience left her wanting to address the social breakdowns that lead to conflict with a broader set of tools than mediation and peacemaking.
“The peace agreement is an important piece of how you put a society back together again so that it can manage its differences effectively, but it's one small piece,” explains McGhie. She says her role at the Global Centre for Pluralism (GCP) is her dream job because of GCP’s broad mandate.
“We can look at the social underpinnings of diversity and how to take pluralism forward in a country like Canada as much as in South Sudan,” she says. “And we have the capacity to look at that in a bunch of different ways, from education to peacemaking to advice on how to build an inclusive economy or understand division in the online world.”
The Ismaili Canada’s Editor-in-Chief Alia Dharssi spoke with McGhie about what she learned at the frontlines of conflict resolution and her aspirations for GCP. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about why we need tools in addition to peacemaking to address conflict. Can you share an example from your career?
Meredith Preston McGhie (M.P.M.): Kenya is an interesting example. In 2007, the elections and subsequent post-election violence led to certain communities feeling like they had been shut out of the political power game repeatedly for generations. Although we came up with a solution—I was an adviser to [former United Nations Secretary-General] Kofi Annan during those talks and helped draft the agreements, we didn’t resolve long-standing issues. I used to tell Mr. Annan we put the cork back in the bottle. This cork had flown off with all of this tension and inequality in Kenya. We put the cork back in the bottle, but the fundamental issues that led to pressure building up in the bottle hadn't gone away.
The peace process did look at the issue holistically. There were attempts at constitutional change, a political settlement, reconciliation and a truth and justice process. But there is an underlying fabric of the way difference is approached in the society that a peace agreement can't quite catch—the way the national curriculum is taught in a school, the stories of the history of the country that get passed down through families.
I always thought the way to address those problems in a country like Kenya is through education. It requires rethinking how you engage one another in society. It requires a different conversation about what it means to belong, what it means to be Kenyan. It's not that education is more important than conflict resolution. You need all the pieces of the puzzle.
What are some examples of pluralism that inspire you?
M.P.M.: One of our award winners from last year—a network of history teachers in the Balkans called Learning History that is not yet History—inspired me. It's a group of teachers across different countries in the Balkans who felt they had to teach all the different perspectives on the history of their conflict. The way history was being taught was teaching people to hate and fear each other. So they went into historical archives and developed resources they share online. They’re ordinary citizens who decided to turn around a situation they felt wasn’t right, rather than waiting for someone else to do something about it.
Those kinds of choices inspire me. There’s something heroic in an everyday choice to reach out to somebody, for a Canadian community to sponsor a refugee family they don’t know to come to Canada, to get up in the morning and see something that you feel is not fair, and say, “I'm a citizen. I can do something about that.”
What do you hope to accomplish during your tenure as Secretary General?
M.P.M.: One of my priorities is to help the staff scale amazing work they're already doing. One thing we’re developing is a Global Pluralism Index that measures how well a society manages diversity. We hope societies around the world, including Canada, use it to see what they're doing well and how they could improve. You could also use it as a benchmark for a country recovering from conflict, like Afghanistan, to see how the society is developing through the peace process by measuring every couple years.
We're also developing resources and professional development tools for educators around the world to teach in a pluralist way. We want to help teachers who don't know how to have the space in their classrooms to deal with diversity or challenge narratives in their history textbooks. We’d like to use technology to reach as many people as possible—so, we could have an online professional development course that connects teachers from Canada, Germany, Kenya and India with online peer support tools.
Second, I want to help the Centre find its feet in new areas. We could look at how cities engage with diversity. Seventy per cent of the world's population lives in cities. How do we help cities become inclusive spaces even when the national space may not be inclusive in certain places? In addition, one danger we’re facing is that the online space often divides us, rather than bringing us together. We’re trying to see how that can be changed.
Finally, I want the Centre to be a thought leader in having discussions around diversity that help people think through uncomfortable issues in a constructive way. An uncomfortable conversation is a valuable learning tool. It can be transformative.
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2020 issue of The Ismaili Canada.
