We have little choice but to learn how to make our decisions jointly. The key to getting to peace is to understand the third side in conflict situations. The third side is the surrounding community, which serves as a container for any escalating conflict. The third side is people from the community using a certain kind of power the power of peers from a certain perspective of common ground supporting a certain process of dialogue and nonviolence and aiming for a certain product a triple win. The third side is made up of both outsiders and insiders.
Outsiders tend to be neighbors, neutrals, and bystanders.
Insiders tend to be family, friends, and the parties themselves. As the biblical story illuminates in its own way, settling down, agriculture, and population growth were fateful changes with powerful impacts on the way we live, the way we relate to one another, and ultimately the way we resolve our most acute conflicts even today. As social boundaries become fixed, once open networks become closed, and the openness to a third side weakens as communication between groups lessens and fewer people understand the perspectives of multiple groups. In truth, however, the violence and domination we have known are the product not so much of human nature but the complex logic of settling down, intensive reliance on land, population increase, the weakening of the third side, the closing of the exit option, the development of authoritarian hierarchies, the growth of the state, and the contagion of war. At the bottom of this logic is the dependence on fixed-pie resources first land and then of power over other human beings.