Presentation by Marshall Rosenberg at ministry for peace open meeting held on 9th June 2004 in the Grand Committee Room, House of Commons.

Marshall began by thanking ministry for peace for the invitation to speak and continued with his first example of where Nonviolent Communication had been used:

“There was a war going on between two tribes in northern Nigeria and the Governor, with the help of a friend of mine who works with me in Nigeria, told the Governor what kind of work we do in some countries. My colleague and the Governor got both of these tribes to agree to spend some time with me to see if I could loan them the skills of Nonviolent Communication through mediation. That’s one of the applications of Nonviolent Communication, helping warring parties mediate. It wasn’t easy to set this up; it took six months of hard work on the part of my colleague and the Governor to finally persuade the Chiefs on both sides to meet with me. In the meantime one quarter of the population had been killed in this war.

So now I’m in a room with twelve Chiefs from the Christian tribe and twelve Chiefs from the Moslem tribe on the other side of the table and I introduced to them how I would work. I told them that I was confident that if we could get everybody’s needs understood so that both sides could understand the other side’s needs, I was confident that we could resolve the conflict without further violence. Needs are the centre of Nonviolent Communication. Needs are very helpful in peace work because all human beings have the same needs so when we can see what needs are not being met in a conflict we don’t see enemy images, we see a human being who has needs that aren’t being met. I told them that my function would be to help whoever didn’t know how to articulate their needs to do so and my function would be to make sure that everybody hears the needs once they are expressed.

I started them off by asking: “Whoever would like to start, tell me what needs of yours are not being met in this conflict?” I wasn’t very optimistic that I was going to get an answer to my question because my experience has been that if people know how to say what there needs, are they don’t have to kill each other. The problem is that most people are not educated to say what their needs are; they have been educated in a language that I call “jackal.” Jackal language educates people to think in terms of enemy images – what’s wrong with people who behave in ways we don’t like. So although I asked them to tell me what their needs were, I wasn’t too optimistic since they were killing each other with great abandon. I didn’t get an answer and in response to question: “What needs of yours are not being met?” a Chief from the Christian tribe screams across the table: “You people are murderers” and immediately a Chief from the Moslem side screams back: “You people have been trying to dominate us, we’re not going to tolerate it any more.” See a difference between the question I asked and the answer? I asked for needs and I got two moralistic judgements implying wrongness on the part of the other. That’s why I’ve found we have the violence on the planet. We have been educating most of the people on the planet to think that way. To think there are such things as freedom fighters and terrorists, good guys and bad guys, normal and abnormal. Our brains have been programmed for about 8,000 years in a language of domination and it’s one of the key contributors to violence. So I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t get an answer to my question.

Nonviolent Communication shows us how to use some very powerful technology in conflict situations. This is the technology – giraffe ears. (Marshall puts on a headband with a pair of fabric giraffe ears attached) We use the symbol of giraffe for Nonviolent Communication because giraffes have the biggest heart of any land animal and Nonviolent Communication is the language of the heart. So even when the other person is screeching “jackal language” like “murder,” with these ears you can’t hear what the other person thinks. This technology directs your attention to what’s in the other person’s heart, more concretely what their needs are that are not getting met. So when he screams “murderer” I said: “Chief, are you saying that your needs for safety are not being met by how conflicts are being resolved at the moment?” He looked at me rather strangely because, notice, that’s directing his attention to a different area. He was up in his head analysing the wrongness of the other side. What I did was focus my attention on what was alive in him. He was shocked for a moment and he said: “You’re absolutely right, that’s exactly what I’m saying.” I turned then to the other side of the table and I said: “Chief, please tell me back what the Chief who just spoke said his needs were.” We never assume that message sent is message received. Knowing that people are trained to think in a way that makes it very hard to hear other people’s humanness even when it’s expressed, especially if you have long-standing enemy images which they both had of each other. So when I asked if somebody from that side of the table could say what the Chief had said his needs were, one of the Moslem Chiefs screamed: “Why did you kill my son?” (I had been told on the way in by my colleague, that three people in the room knew that somebody who had killed one of their children was also in the room.) I had to give this person a little understanding for the pain he was in and before I could pull him by the ears and get him to tell me what the other Chief said, I said: “Could you now tell me what he said his needs were?” “We can’t trust these people.” I said: “I’m not asking you to trust these people; can you tell me back what he said his needs were.” “I’ll say it again. He says he has a need for safety.” “Can you just tell me his needs?” I had to repeat it twice more before he hears. Then I helped this side to translate its judgement of the other side that it was trying to dominate them. I asked if they had a need for equality that wasn’t being met? “That’s exactly what our need is.” I got the other side to hear that. Now it took me about an hour just to get that far because there was a lot of screaming in between and I was going through an interpreter as I didn’t speak their language. At the end of an hour, when I got them to just hear a couple of one another’s needs, one of the Chiefs jumps up, who hadn’t spoken yet and said something very intensely to me. I felt I had said something that stepped on their values but I loved the message when it got interpreted: “We can’t learn to communicate this way in one day and if we learn how to communicate this way we don’t have to kill each other.” I said to the interpreter: “Tell the Chief I am glad he could see it so quickly. I came here today not to teach them the process but to use it in mediating the conflict but we were going to talk to them at the end of the day, if they did see what the Chief had seen, to ask if they would like us to train people from both sides to do this kind of conflict resolution and then you won’t have to invite me whenever you have another conflict.” Immediately several from both sides wanted to be trained in this way. So that’s a central part of Nonviolent Communication, to speak a language of life, a language of needs, feelings, requests for what would make life more wonderful. Nonviolent Communication says let’s not use any of the following: no words that criticise, no words that imply wrongness on the part of the others, all diagnosis, all criticism is a tragic expression of the speaker’s needs.

We have been taught a suicidal language that when our needs aren’t being met we go up to our head and judge the pathology of the other. When we have that language the bombs are never far away, the divorce courts are never far away. It’s hard to resolve any conflict when we don’t know how to clearly say our needs but we are very skilled at diagnosing what’s wrong with other people who behave in ways we don’t like.

That’s one way in which Nonviolent Communication is being used in mediating on-going conflicts but, of course, we like to be pro-active. We like to see how Nonviolent Communication can be used to prevent violence and conflicts so in several countries such as Israel, Palestine, Serbia, Croatia, Italy and many other countries we create Nonviolent Communication schools where the teachers, students, parents all learn Nonviolent Communication as a way of interacting with each other. The teachers do not use language with students such as “that’s right, that’s wrong, that’s good, that’s bad.” There’s no punishments or rewards in the families that we work with. We show people that punishment is a losing game. No one would ever use punishment if they asked themselves two questions:

• What do we want the other person to do differently?
• What do we want their reasons to be for doing it?

If we ask only the first question - what do we want the other person to do differently? – we can make a case for punishment. We can make a case for telling people that if you don’t do what we want we are going to make you wish you did. You can get people to do what you want that way sometimes. But when you do you are going to pay for it if you’re not clear about the answer to the second question - what do we want people’s reasons to be for doing what we want them to do? – and I’m confident that if we ask that question of ourselves we’ll see that punishment never works, whether it’s with children in our schools, in our families, whether it’s with criminals in our prisons. Punishment is a losing game.

Nonviolent Communication shows us how to connect in conflict so that punishment and reward are not necessary to resolve the conflict. When we have got rid of the enemy images and connect with each other’s humanness, we’ll find ways of getting everybody’s needs met. In our Nonviolent Communication schools, not only do we teach the process of non-violence but we also structure the school so that it fosters peaceful resolution of conflict between students and interdependent work between the students - not getting them to compete with each other for grades but getting them to interdependently support one another in learning skills and knowledge that will enrich their lives. Most recently in seventy of our schools in Israel, research has shown a 50% decline in measures of violence. I have outlined these schools and described them in my book: “Life Enriching Education.”

We use the training in mediation, in some countries we create schools that are designed to give the next generation alternative ways to violence for resolving conflicts. At the governmental level there are, in some countries, some of the ministers in the government who have found our training very helpful in dealing with conflicts with people from other countries. We also have prison projects in several countries. The day before yesterday I was in Finland working there in two prisons where we teach the prisoners our process.

We show them alternative ways to what they are now doing which is getting them to prison. We help the prisoners identify what their needs are that they are trying to meet through their criminal behaviour. We show them more effective ways of getting their needs met, which also get the needs for safety met by people in their community. We have been very successful in getting people who have long criminal histories to radically change their behaviour once they get out.

I have given you a little taste of the process, I’d now like to take questions.

Q. How does Nonviolent Communication work when you have asymmetric power structures, a dominant power and a minority where the dominant power doesn’t see it in its interests to give way? For example, in Palestine, the Israeli state doesn’t want to give Palestinians a state.

A. We show people how to use the process of Nonviolent Communication at three levels. First, how to use it within themselves. That means, when you’ve made a mistake, how do you communicate with yourself. Can you learn from your mistakes without losing self-respect? We show how the process is applied in inter-personal relationships but we also want people to be conscious that many of the conflicts we have inter-personally are because of the structures that we are living within: the governmental structures, the school structures, are such that it is going to be hard for anyone to relate peacefully given how the structures are set up. Much of our training is not just in how we can communicate with ourselves and other people, but how we communicate with the numbers of people that are necessary to radically change structures that are not meeting our needs. This requires that we know how to stay with our power, even when we are in a low power position within institutions that make it very challenging to talk with people who are now in power in such a way that we have power.

We show people how, when you are confronting people within these power systems, to make the most of your time. And if they won’t talk to you, how to use the protective use of force in order to get the communication necessary. At a lower level, I’ll show you how we train people never to give up their power even when they are in a low power position within these structures. I sent my three children off to schools that I helped to create. They went there for the first five years of their schooling. My oldest son’s first day in a state school that was structured in a way that I wish schools weren’t, he came home and I asked him how the new school had been. He said: “It’s OK Dad but boy, some of those teachers.” I said: What happened?” “Dad, I was halfway through the door, nearly halfway through the door and some man teacher comes running over to me and says: “Look at the little girl.” This teacher was reacting to my son’s hair, which was long, and this teacher had certain beliefs that there was a right way for boys to wear their hair and a wrong way. So what do you within an institution like that where this teacher had power. He was claiming to know the right way to wear hair. He tries to shame my son for having a different position than he has. So I said to my son: “How did you handle it?” He said: “I remembered what you said, Dad, that when you’re in that kind of structure never give them the power to make you submit or rebel.” That’s one of the things we teach students from six years of age on. Be careful never to give your power away in these situations. People may have power over you in the form of being able to have control over you and punish you but don’t give them power with you. Realise that power with people is far more powerful than power over people. So I said to my son: “I’m glad you could remember that under those conditions. Then what did you do?” “I put on giraffe ears, Dad, and I tried to hear what his feeling and need was.” I said: “No, you didn’t remember to do that?” “Yes, Dad.” “What did you hear?” “Pretty obvious, Dad. I guessed he was irritated and wanted me to cut my hair.” I said: Am I’m glad you could just see a human being and not just see some power man over you like that. How did that leave you feeling? He said: “Dad, I felt sad for the man. He was bald and seemed to have a thing about hair.”

We don’t deny the way those organisations are structured and that often have the power to kill us if they don’t like what we’re doing. We still show people how to be clear about the power we have with people, if we can see these people in those structures as human beings and we don’t dehumanise them by labels, and we try to hear their feelings and needs and we don’t allow the structure to lead is to disconnect with ourselves. That’s a very big part of our training. How when you are in a low power position, to get power with people, to change those structures.

Q I was interested that you said that when we respond with ‘jackal ears’ we are responding with the head rather than the heart.

A. Any time you’re angry, if you stop and look inside, you’ll see that you are playing the game we have educated to play, according to the scholars, for about 8,000 years called “punitive God.” If you’re angry look in your head and you will see that you are playing that game. You are passing judgement on other people. You are up in your head analysing them in a way that implies they are bad and deserving to suffer. That thinking is at the heart of our judicial system, retributive justice. I was so delighted when I was here in England a couple of years ago at a conference on restorative justice with about 600 people there. I was so glad to see that in your country you are starting to get so excited about restorative justice. But anyway, anger tells us that our thinking is under the kind of control that is necessary to support retributive justice. We are angry and we are passing judgement on another person that implies they deserve to suffer for what they are doing. Whether that suffering takes the form of blame, shame, guilt or physical punishment. That kind of thinking is up in our head. Now if we go behind that thinking we will find what I think you are getting at. That below it there are needs of the speaker that are not getting met. And that’s what we are calling the heart level. When we go inside and see the needs that are not being met when a person is being angry, and when we help, when they are angry, to identify with this thinking that is making them angry, and we show them how that thinking can be transformed into the need at the root of it, then when people get connected to that root, they might be scared because, certainly, if some of our needs are in danger we are scared. But if we are not in touch with the need and instead we go up to our head and judge other people, we get angry.

Q While I agree entirely that punishment is something that doesn’t work, you also said not to work in terms of rewards. We hear a lot about rewarding children and not punishing them so I’d like to hear about that.

A. If you read the book “Punished by Rewards” I bet you won’t use rewards any more. You’ll see that they are the same game as punishment, they’re based on the same thinking: moralistic judgements. If you are judged as good, you get to go to heaven, if you’re judged as bad you go to Detroit, Michigan or to hell. I grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and it was hell there! If you are taught to think that way, rewards are the same game. You are still trying to control people on the basis of rewards and punishments. It’s a very violent way of trying to maintain social order. It’s only necessary when what you want people to do is not serve life. If you want people to work for 8 hours a day for 30 years of their lives in organisations that are really not serving life, might even be destroying life, destroying the environment, oppressing people in some countries with hiring practices. If you want your economy to be based on masses of people being educated to not do meaningful work, then you have get them very early in their life to work for rewards, whether it be marks in school or compliments or praise. I was recently working with some people who mentor people in corporations. One said: “We’re trained to compliment or praise employees daily. Research shows that production goes up when you reward people with praise and compliments.” I said: “Take another look at the research. You’ll see it only works for a short time until people see the manipulation in it and then it doesn’t work. What’s worse, it destroys the beauty of gratitude because it’s hard to really enjoy gratitude. You have to wonder what the person is trying to get from you by telling you this. We don’t want to destroy gratitude in our training. We want to show gratitude as powerful. It is rewarding when we can trust that it isn’t “a reward.”

Q. Could these techniques be applied in prison interrogation situations - e.g. prisons in Iraq

A. Well, of course, in the kind of prisons that we want, they’re radically different. The prisons are not set up to punish. In the prisons that we support, the prisons are set up on the basis of the protective use of force, not to punish the prisoners but to protect ourselves from them until we can help them to find other ways of meeting their needs more effectively and in ways that are less costly to society. In that kind of prison you don’t have that kind of interrogation because you don’t have punishment.

Q. What is the greatest achievement of Nonviolent Communication in Israel where I understand there is work going on at the moment considering that this is one of the most dangerous situations in the world right now.

A. I would say at the moment that what we feel the best about is our educational project there. In 1990 I brought eight Israelis and eight Palestinians to Switzerland for intensive training together. At that time we also started to explore what would be the best way they could see for us to bring our training into that region in a way that could contribute to peace. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians said: “You know Marshall, this has been going on a long time and if we really want to make a contribution to peace we have got to get to the next generation. We would like to first work with schools. Let’s see if we can get into the schools, as you have done in other countries.” Now we have got our training into over 1000 schools in Israel. We have more than 70 schools radically transformed in the way that we would like. We have other schools in Palestine. We have kids bussed periodically from schools in Palestine to the schools in Israel. The Israeli schools get bussed into the Palestinian schools. We are very pleased if this is going to make a contribution if we can look 30 years into the future, getting the next generation. Incidentally, when our first five schools were doing so well, they made the Head of our first school the Head of the National Commission to Prevent Violence in Schools. So now we really have open access to the schools. That’s one way we have contributed. Another way is Israeli’s were concerned about their police force. Their own research showed that police brutality had become the norm rather than the exception. They were desperate and when they asked about the work that we do they asked if I would train in the district that had the most complaints of police brutality. The Israeli government’s research on the effect that our training had on the police was very favourable. The complaints of police brutality decreased. We have trained the heads of all of the refugee camps in Palestine. We have trained all of the physicians that work in the refugee camps in Palestine. I have worked with the military in Israel so it’s a start. We haven’t got as far as we would like. Peres has my book and would love to influence Sharon to use me for backdoor diplomacy – a different kind of peace talks to the one’s we usually have. We have my colleagues in Palestine also trying to nag Arafat to agree to such mediation. That’s as far as we have got now.

Q. What sort of role do you feel humour plays?

A. I would certainly agree with you. I love to see humour. We teach in our training the blessings of humour as long as you are sure that when you are using it, you are not expressing anything under the table. Make sure when you are using humour that play is your only motive, that you’re not using sarcasm or other ways of handling anger because you are frightened of bringing that out on the table. That then destroys the beauty of humour and play when you have to wonder if there’s mixed motives in it.

Q. How do you deal with selfishness? There’s a lot of selfishness in our world

A. If you use Nonviolent Communication, you are conscious that there are no such things as ‘selfish’ people. There are no ‘kinds’ of people. That’s a static language, thinking of what people are. Our training suggests that every judgement that we make of other people – that they’re selfish – is a tragic expression of our needs. What you see is what you get. If you see a selfish person, my experience is that you will react to that person in a way that doesn’t make it enjoyable for them to be concerned about your needs. Then that confirms your diagnosis that they are selfish. What we would do on our training is to show you how, when you have any judgment like that about another person, to translate that into the following:

• What observations have you made of that person that led you to diagnose them as selfish? What specifically have they done?
• How do you feel when they do that?
• What need of yours has not been met by that behaviour on their part?
• What would you like them to do differently?

We would promise you that if you could learn to speak that way rather than diagnosing people, you are far more likely to get that person interested in your needs, especially if you also understand what feelings and needs are alive in them when they behave in the way that you diagnose as selfish. That’s what we call ‘empathic connection’. If you can empathically connect with that person rather than diagnose them, I think you are far more likely to connect them in a way where you both get your needs met. What I have said to you is very hard for me to do because I was educated to think in a way of diagnosing people who behave in ways I don’t like. I was taught street ways of diagnosing – I call it ‘street jackal’. You see, where I grew up in Detroit, if somebody’s driving in a way you don’t like, the idea is that you have to diagnose them and show them what their pathology is so that they will apologise, repent and change the error of their ways. If you’re out driving and someone drives in a way you don’t like and you speak ‘street jackal’ you roll down the window, and you shout “Idiot”. The theory is that they are supposed to apologise, they’re supposed to say: “I’m sorry, you see I’m an idiot, I shouldn’t have driven that way. I will change the error of my ways.” It’s a very good theory but it doesn’t work in our prisons, it doesn’t work with our children; it doesn’t work with anyone we judge that way. At first it was just ‘street jackal’ that was the problem so I went to the university and got a Ph.D. in ‘doctors’ jackal’ – I think it was called ‘clinical psychology’. Now when I’m driving and somebody drives in a way I don’t like, I roll down the window and yell: “Psychopath.” It still doesn’t work!

There are no ‘selfish’ people. There are people who don’t take our needs into consideration as much as we would like and they do that for good reasons. If you empathise with why they behave that way, you’ll see that they are doing it to meet needs of theirs. They don’t realise that the way they are meeting some of their needs is not meeting other needs. Labelling or diagnosing them only contributes to the problem.

Q. What if the needs are irreconcilable, for example two people want the same land – Palestine/Israel.

A. Needs are never in conflict. What you have just described is what we would call ‘strategies’ not needs. Needs contain no reference, as we define them, to specific actions you want people to take. So the Israelis saying they want this other group to move out of this land, or the other group wanting them to move out – that’s ‘strategies’. Our experience has been not to talk about strategies until you get both sides hearing each other’s needs and when you connect at the need level don’t mix needs and strategies up. You will then find that almost magically you can then find solutions that seemed impossible to find before. Let me show you this at the level of married couples. Not infrequently I am asked to work with just couples and what I do when I am working with married couples is that I ask them all to identify - if they have one – a conflict that they haven’t been able to resolve in their relationship. And then when we have found the couple that’s had the longest running conflict, I make a prediction that people are pretty sceptical about. I say: “I’ll bet we can resolve this conflict within 20 minutes from the point at which both of you can tell me what the other party’s needs are.” One couple, married 39 years had a conflict. The husband said: “Marshall, I’ll tell you right now, we just have a conflict in our needs. She wants to spend more money than I want her to spend.” I said: “That’s not a need, that’s a strategy. What are your needs?” The wife said to me: “No, Marshall, we are not going to be able to resolve this within 20 minutes.” I said: “Hold on, 20 minutes from the point where you can tell me what the other side’s needs are.” She said: “Marshall, I know what his needs are. He doesn’t want me to spend any money.” He screams back: “That’s not true.” I said: “Even if he had said that that was true, that’s a strategy, spending money is a strategy. Needs contain no reference to what we want people to do. Needs are universal, all human beings have the same needs. It’s not a conflict in needs that the problem, it’s our thinking that leads us to strategies that are destructive. He said his wife was totally irresponsible when it came to money and I had to translate that into his needs. I said: “Do you have a need to protect the family economically?” He said: “That’s exactly what I’m saying.” I said to the wife: “What is your need? She said: “I need to be trusted that I can handle money. Yes, I made some mistakes earlier in our marriage but I can handle it. I said: “I want to be sure that you both understand each other’s needs. Husband, you say you have a need for safety, wife, what do you hear your husband say his need is? “He thinks I’m irresponsible when it comes to money.” He has been telling her that for 39 years and now she can’t see him as a human being. I said to the husband: “Your wife says her need is to be trusted so that she can learn how to handle money. Can you tell me back what her need is?” He said: “We’ll be poor by then.”

It wasn’t easy, it really wasn’t easy. It took me about another hour before I could get the diagnosis they had of each other out of their heads so that they could hear each other’s needs. It didn’t take 20 minutes then to solve the conflict.

I am confident it would be the same with Israel and Palestine once you get past all the intellectual justifications, arguments, diagnoses and get down to the needs that can be resolved. The more I do mediation work the more convinced I am that the conflicts on our planet now that are causing thousands of people to be killed, most schoolchildren could solve if you told them the needs of both sides and what their resources were. It’s how we’ve been educated to dehumanise the other side the other side of our thinking that causes the violence and makes it difficult to resolve the simplest of conflicts.

Q. Last year millions of people all over the world marched against the war in Iraq. Could those millions of people who expressed their need by marching with banners in the streets have been more effective in getting their message over?

A. There are two questions I would like to deal with here. First is going into the streets with banners the most effective way? And second, if you are going to go into the streets, what do the banners say? If it is that you are against something, you lose power. In fact, I think very often we create violence when our objectives are created to get rid of something. Our training shows you how to get clear what you do want people to be willing to agree to, not what you don’t want them to do.

I was working with a school near Chicago, Illinois and they had a lot of violence directed towards the school in the form of broken windows and vandalism. When we got to the part of being clear what the teachers wanted the students to do differently, one of the teachers said: “It’s obvious Marshall, we want them to stop breaking windows.“ I said: “When you tell me what you don’t want, you make my job as a consultant very easy.” He said: “What should we do?” I said: “Kill them. Research shows that dead children break no windows.” As stupid as that example is, look in the newspaper on any given day and see how world leaders are creating their objectives: “We are going to get these people to stop doing…….” “No, being against war is the same as trying to stop …. Being ‘against’ creates more violence. In our training we show how to get people to do what you do want because they see how that is going to meet their needs as well as yours. This requires a transformative spirituality that you go forward in your social change work with a vision of beauty, how things can be, not what you’re against. So whatever strategy we use I hope it would start from a transformative spirituality where we are mobilised by a clear vision of what we do want, we’re not trying to get rid of something. Now is going out on the streets with banners the best way? We’d have to see what the people’s objectives were. What do they want? At times I think that might be but I’d have to know what they were after. I certainly hope they were aware of Gene Sharp’s work on different approaches to nonviolent action when we’re up against organisations and structures we’re concerned about. Once we are clear about our objective, there are many different strategies, and that may be a good one, but I’d have to first see what they’re after.

Q. In my experience it seems that people are most effective in working for a particular focus or task in mind if they have a certain level of their own needs being met. I wonder if you have any tips, guidelines, ideas of ways that small groups such as us in the ministry for peace might work together effectively to best gain what we are focusing on.

A. Almost every peace group that I work with has wars within the group. In our organisation, the Centre for Nonviolent Communication, we have people working on how the training can be use for peace in 40 countries and I’ll tell you right now at one time or another we have wars within the group. That used to fill me with despair about 30 years ago. What’s the use of bringing together the most committed people for peace and transforming the prejudice in the schools and so forth and then within your own group you have wars? Now I wonder how I could have been so naïve to think that we had evolved so far. We have been educated in this domination structure so it is going to be very hard for us to live the process ourselves. For that reason much of our peace work is to work with peace groups to show them how to use the training within their own groups first because it is going to be very hard to get anywhere if we can’t resolve conflicts within the group so that it is in harmony with the world we are trying to create out there.”

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Further information about Nonviolent Communication can be obtained by going to: www.cnvc.org

What happened next?

ministry for peace was so impressed with Marshall’s Nonviolent Communication technology that we then organised a weekend in-house introductory training for ourselves. We found the process stimulating but - as Marshall said - we have had a lifetime’s practice in ‘jackal language’ so we are committed to having further training to become more adept!