Learning from Conflict in the Amazon and in Medellín
Note sull'episodio
Conflict is inevitable. We live in a world of diverse interests, ideas, and perspectives. An unequal world, and unjust world. If you try to resolve a conflict, you’re saying that it is, somehow, false. That the situation where we live should be one of harmony and balance, if people could just see it through the one right lens. But there isn’t just one right lens!
The most important lesson we had to learn — and then to teach — is that conflict is productive. It’s good. I learn from the dispute that I have with the other person, and I grow from it: and so does he.
If you think that you should be able to resolve a conflict — I mean, make it go away, show that everyone’s interest are really the same — and yet that conflict stubbornly persists, then violence appears to be the right way to resolve it.
In the Amazon as in Medellín, part of rethinking politics comes when we understand that conflict is not bad: in fact, it’s an opportunity. For growth, for learning, for encounter.
Interviews in the podcast come from various movies made by Shine a Light, especially “The Trenches of Peace (2006) and Bombonera, Corazón de Moravia (2026).