Helsinki participants included, from left: Younadim Yousif Kana of Iraq; Martin McGuinness of Northern Ireland; Provost Jamshed Bharucha; Kelsi Stine, A10; Tufts trustee Robert Bendetson, A73; Sheikh Wisam Abed Ibrahim al-Hardani of Iraq; Joseph Emru, A08; Mac Maharaj, F09P, and Roelf Meyer, both of South Africa; and Alex Maskey of Northern Ireland.

In Helsinki, a Meeting of Minds

The brain is built to pigeon-hole the world—swiftly and without conscious thought—into familiar, self-perpetuating, and self-serving categories. This tendency has helped us survive over the eons, enabling us to tell friend from foe, predator from prey. But in a complex world where different cultures need to coexist peacefully, that same tendency can breed more conflict than cooperation. It was with the purpose of escaping those ancient ways of framing the world that an extraordinary meeting took place in Helsinki this past April.

Tufts’ Institute for Global Leadership joined with the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and the Helsinki-based Crisis Management Institute to bring together 36 members of Iraq’s warring factions. Tribal leaders and senior officeholders—mostly members of Parliament—from rival parties sat down in an attempt to forge a set of principles on which all could agree. It was the second such meeting, the first having occurred in September 2007. Facilitating the conference were former enemies in the South African and Northern Irish conflicts. They hoped to set an example of how warring factions can overcome their prior mental frameworks and achieve a lasting peace. Officially, I attended as an observer, in my capacity as provost of Tufts. Unofficially, I was there as a cognitive neuroscientist, eager to witness the brain’s capacity to transcend old habits.

In Helsinki, adversaries in the Iraqi quagmire spent hours in constructive dialogue and respectful social interaction. They made a strenuous effort to move beyond the mutually irreconcilable frameworks that have trapped them in potentially endless conflict, and to rise above the forces that inflame. Peacemaking, after all, requires consciously going against our default predilections, as millions of years of evolution coax our brains to revert to the quick-and-dirty classification of people into the familiar us and them—the “us” being fundamentally well intentioned and the “them” being suspect. Fortunately, the brain can learn new categories, learn to frame issues in new ways, and learn to see people from other groups as individuals like us. Hearteningly, the Iraqi participants never once retreated into Sunni-versus-Shi’a frames (although the Kurd-versus-Arab frames were strongly manifest).

Another characteristic of the brain is that our emotional and rational systems interact, even though they arose at different points in evolution and are to some extent neurologically separate systems. Most arguments that are offered in the name of reason are actually steeped in—and rationalizations of—emotion. But the brain also has the capacity to reflect upon its own biases and on the messy entanglement of reason and emotion. One of the participants demonstrated this when he said: “Each of us has thoughts and feelings that could hurt and complicate. But we are here to find agreement and to be positive. So I don’t say what’s on my mind. I’m trying to find the common ground, the positive, be generous and keep my negative emotions out of it.”

The co-chairs, Cyril Ramaphosa of the African National Congress and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein, were living proof of the good that can come from setting aside the usual us-versus-them mindset. They stressed that it was only through “inclusive dialogue”—with all who were willing to talk, regardless of how heinous their purported deeds—that reconciliation had been possible in their respective conflicts.

The Iraqi participants agreed. “Those who want reconciliation should not draw red lines” hindering participation in talks, said one. “There should be avenues for dialogue with all parties, whether they accept it or not. That is the key to reconciliation.” During a particularly tense exchange between Kurds and Arab nationalists about whether Iraq should have an Arab identity, one of the nationalist leaders nevertheless echoed this spirit: “There should be no bright lines for dialogue,” he said.

Witness to these encouraging exchanges were two undergraduate observers from Tufts, Kelsi Stine, A10, and Joseph Emru, A08. Their presence was in keeping with the university’s role in getting the Helsinki talks off the ground. The idea for the meetings grew out of the Norris and Margery Bendetson EPIIC Symposium on “The Politics of Fear” in 2006 and the JoAnn and Robert Bendetson Public Diplomacy Initiative on “Iraq: Moving Forward” in 2007—both organized by the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL), headed by Sherman Teichman. Tufts Trustee Robert Bendetson, seeing the potential of bringing former South African adversaries together with Iraqi leaders, collaborated with Professor Padraig O’Malley of UMass-Boston to organize the Helsinki process. O’Malley, then a scholar-in-residence at the IGL, also brought the Irish participants into the talks.

For the talks ultimately to bring peace, the Iraqi participants must meet two challenges. One is getting out of their own cognitive grooves and trying to isolate their own emotions—and on this score they have had success. The other challenge, still to come, is persuading their followers to do the same. Political or sectarian leaders often rise to power in part by drawing red lines and rousing primordial emotions. But once they see that peace requires compromise, leaders must actively blur the very lines they helped draw and calm the very rancor they have fueled.

The Helsinki talks have already produced a dramatic sequel: in July, leaders who had been party to the talks met in Baghdad to sign an agreement consisting of 17 principles, including respect for the rights of minorities, the eventual limiting of arms possession to the government, and limitations on the activities of militias.

JAMSHED BHARUCHA, a cognitive neuroscientist, is the provost and senior vice president of Tufts University.