Recent research has suggested that there is more than one kind of
empathy, and they don’t all necessarily lead to peace building.
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Conflict is expensive, and it is on the rise.
In
2017, it was estimated that the global cost of conflict was $14
trillion. To put this into perspective, the global cost of primary
school education in the same year was $3.5 trillion.
The
world spends four times more on fighting, than teaching its children.
It is fair to assume that this gap will widen, as the 2017 Global Peace
Index found that the world has become significantly less peaceful.
An
overall increase in extremism has led to both a rise in terrorism and
far right political parties. White nationalism is on the rise. This may
be — as studies have shown — because current generations are 40 per cent
less empathetic than their counterparts 30 years ago.
To
counter this rise, donors have increased their focus on Countering
Violent Extremism (CVE) and development organisations have followed
suit.
However, this rise in CVE initiatives has come
with its criticisms as there is much disagreement, in terms of what
approaches actually work, and what factors lead an individual down the
path towards extremism.
Building empathy
One frequent
approach used in CVE is to focus on building empathy. Empathy is the
ability to understand another person’s emotions by feeling them in
oneself.
It is a commonly held belief by experts in
CVE that if empathy could be stimulated, extremism could be pacified,
and with it, the propensity for violent acts would diminish.
In
short, more empathy could make the world a more peaceful place. There
are many studies which have concluded that extremists in all forms of
the political or religious spectrum lack empathy, and this conclusion
has informed much of how CVE is approached.
But this
analysis is only partly true. While it is true that people with high
levels of empathy are generally more peaceful and less violent than
those with low levels, other studies have found that many extremists are
actually highly empathetic people.
Wafa Idris, the
first Palestinian suicide bomber in 2002, was a volunteer paramedic
during the second intifada. She assisted in food distributions, helped
provide social support to prisoners’ families, and by all accounts, was a
highly empathetic person. An important question to explore then, is how
can individuals with high levels of empathy still commit acts of
terror?
Striking the balance
Recent
research has suggested that there is more than one kind of empathy, and
they don’t all necessarily lead to peace building. If one extends
empathy only to their own group (whether it be religious, ethnic, racial
or political), it can actually make the individual more able to justify
violent acts.
This is the theory posited by Emile
Bruneau at the Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab at the University of
Pennsylvania. His research on multiple conflicts around the world has
found that when approaches to CVE only succeeds in enhancing empathy for
one’s own group, it exacerbates the conflict.
This is
because the individual may, as a result, experience high levels of
empathy towards the suffering of their own group, and thus hostility
towards others.
Bruneau found that if an approach
instead established a balance between the empathy felt for one’s own
group, and the empathy felt towards outsiders, individuals would be
significantly less likely to withhold help or condone harm against those
outsiders.
Missing this balance is why so many approaches to CVE focused on empathy have failed, and often made things worse.
Getting
this balance right is the foundation that is needed for true
peacebuilding to take root. The crucial step is to identify approaches
that can strike this balance in empathy.
Fiction is
found all over the world, in every written language. It is built into
school curriculums, and read by virtually every culture across the
globe.
Reading fiction has been shown in dozens of
empirical studies to enhance empathy in the reader, and that these
effects hold over time.
What makes reading fiction on
empathy particularly relevant to approaches in CVE, is that it has been
shown to enhance empathy both for one’s own group, as well as outsiders.
When an individual is reading fiction, brain imaging
has shown that not only are they strengthening their capacity to share
another’s feelings or emotions, but their ability to understand the
world from another person’s point of view, and to infer beliefs and
intentions from this, is also strengthened.
These effects have been shown to appear immediately after reading in both children and adults, and to hold over time.
Niccola Milnes is a development consultant focusing on education and countering violent extremism. E-mail: niccola.milnes@gmail.com
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