Lessons from 20 Years of Peacebuilding
A conversation with Michael Shipler, Vice President of Leadership Development and Partnerships at Search for Common Ground
We were mid-conversation when Michael Shipler, Vice President of Leadership Development and Partnerships at Search for Common Ground, stopped and pointed at his computer screen. “This thing,” he said, “is made from twenty countries’ worth of stuff. Every supply chain is a miracle of cooperation.”
It’s the kind of observation that sounds obvious until you pause long enough to understand what he’s implying. Even though it may seem everything is splitting apart, the world is held together every day by people coordinating with strangers they will never meet.
Michael has spent twenty years helping people work together across divides that look, at least from a distance, impossible. And here he is, amazed by everyday collaboration.
Yet, if cooperation is everywhere, why does it feel so scarce? And what would it take, not to resolve our differences once and for all, but to stay in the room long enough to collaborate with people we’re convinced are our adversaries?
The word that opens a door
Michael told me about a phrase his Nigerian colleague had introduced: perceived adversaries. He’d adopted it because of what the word “perceived” does to the whole category of “enemy.”
The origin was practical. Search for Common Ground had been using the word “adversaries” in their training sessions, talking about transforming adversarial approaches, but the framing wasn’t landing. Some participants pushed back and argued that they weren’t their adversaries. Others dug in and said they really were. The word was either too strong or not strong enough, depending on who was in the room. Then his colleague Emmanuella Rita Atsen reframed it. She pointed out to Michael that they should talk about perceived adversaries, because a person or group could be an adversary in your mind, but not in reality.
The shift works in both directions. For those who insist the other side isn’t their adversary, it invites reflection. Maybe you’re still treating them that way, even subtly. For those certain they’re facing a real enemy, it opens a door. Maybe the adversary status isn’t as fixed as it feels.
We can’t escape us vs. them. It’s how we’re wired. We will always draw lines, so the question becomes, can we still work across them?
This reframing opens an important door. If something is perception, it can be transformed. Of course, there are real harms that occur. But there are also gaps—between how things feel and how they are; between the stories our information ecosystem rewards and the quieter reality on the ground. This is what I keep bumping into across this series: we’re living inside a misreading problem. It’s subtler than misinformation. And maybe more corrosive. We overestimate how extreme “the other side” is, and then we respond to the caricature. We brace for enemies, and our nervous systems start supplying the evidence. Over time, we make the misreading real. It echoes something Emily Chamlee-Wright and I talked about earlier in this series: perception gaps aren’t just errors in judgment. They become a kind of social force, shaping what we think is possible with the people across from us.
Who are my perceived adversaries? Who are yours? And what might become possible if we loosened our grip on the identity of “adversary” long enough to do something together?
Dialogue isn’t enough
When I suggested to Michael that the key is “getting the right people in the room,” he agreed—and then finished the sentence: “Right people… Right process. Right question. Right framing.”
It’s a good corrective. Dialogue matters, but it’s often insufficient. Search for Common Ground’s philosophy starts with something more demanding: finding a shared interest strong enough to carry the relationship into action.
Michael described what he calls “higher-order common ground.” Not the thinnest overlap (”we’re all human beings”), but something specific enough to justify the hard work of collaboration. A good example of this is criminal justice. Some might disagree on how the system is built, but a particular community or group of people can all agree that they want safety and security, so they start there. This is where I think a lot of well-meaning efforts fall apart. We reach for what we share, but if it’s too abstract, it can’t hold weight.
The approach has a name: the Common Ground Approach. Central to it is what Michael calls a trust cycle. “We don’t just build trust through dialogue,” Michael explained. “We build trust through collaboration that creates real wins… concrete wins that people then are like, oh wow, we can actually accomplish something together.”
He calls it a center of gravity. Something that pulls people in and holds them there. “They try to spin out,” he told me, “but then they realize… if I’m not part of this process, I might actually lose out.”
The question that gave people back their future
Michael told me about a colleague named Nawaz Mohammed, someone he’s worked with for years at Search for Common Ground. Nawaz is from eastern Sri Lanka. He’s Muslim—in a country where a long civil war was fought primarily between Tamils and Sinhalese, with Muslims targeted by both sides.
When the brutal war ended, Nawaz had lost his brother, who had disappeared – taken, they believe, by state security forces - from his dorm room in Colombo during anti-communist sweeps. His sister was killed in a massacre. He lost uncles too. For his country there was no negotiated settlement and no peace process. A victor consolidated power and established a narrative. There was little space for people to grieve or imagine what might come next. Reconciliation, if it happened at all, would be defined from above.
Remarkably, Nawaz walked away from the war with a different approach. In his work for Search for Common Ground after the war, he traveled to Jaffna, considered to be the capital of Tamil nationalism which was at the heart of the conflict, and asked, simply: What does reconciliation mean to you?
Most people were forward looking while some were still seeking justice or retribution. Many talked about future hopes for their livelihoods and their families. They talked about wanting to rebuild their future. The question gave them agency to define what mattered. It couldn’t be imposed; it had to be owned. That work eventually grew into the Memory Map, an archive of hundreds of village histories and life stories from across Sri Lanka’s conflict-affected communities.
Nawaz’s mother was the one who helped him reframe these horrifying tragedies. His mother believed that it wasn’t the people who committed these crimes. It was the war itself—the spiral of violence and the systems that perpetuated it—that caused the suffering. She had no place in her heart for blame.
This conviction allowed Nawaz to stay in the room with pretty much everyone: government officials, military personnel, former combatants. It was his “center of gravity”. These were not people who “voted differently” from him; they were associated with the forces that had killed his family. And still he created space for them to speak.
Where does responsibility go?
Part of me hears Nawaz’s story and thinks: this is the only way a human being survives the unimaginable. A way of refusing to let the conflict own you forever.
But another part of me hesitates. If we shift blame from people to “the war,” where does responsibility go? Of course systems can shape behavior, but how do we balance that truth with the reality that humans can choose to walk away from the system and choose their own path? How do we hold the truth that systems shape behavior without letting that become an excuse?
I don’t have clean answers. But I do think this is where the phrase “perceived adversaries” does its important work. It doesn’t ask us to deny harm, or to baptize anyone as good. It asks something narrower: to stop treating “enemy” as a permanent category. To find one shared interest worth the effort of collaboration.
“If you can transform that perceived adversary to ally,” Michael told me, “that’s the power.”
Where this shows up at home
The Nawaz story is an extreme. The real test is what we do with it in lower-temperature life.
There’s a spectrum here. At one end, the supply chain: cooperation at a distance, mediated by systems that don’t require thick relationship. At the other end, what Nawaz does: staying in the room with people associated with your family’s killers.
But most of us live somewhere in between. Voting, for instance, is still impersonal, but more reverent. You show up, you accept the outcome even when you lose. It’s a practice of commitment to a process, a civic muscle. Workplaces, neighborhoods, and families—these are thicker still, places where association runs deep, and trust has to be built and rebuilt. The messy middle. That’s what our conversation kept circling back to.
So what holds people there? I call it the container. Michael calls it a center of gravity. We’re talking about the same thing: the shared space, the norms of reciprocity and humility, and the commitment to keep showing up because there’s a shared problem worth solving together. We stay, not because we agree, but because we agree to stay.
That takes more than willpower. It requires structures: internal spaces where disagreement is expected with explicit values that people can hold each other to. At Search for Common Ground, that means involving people from all sides of a conflict, from across the very divides driving the conflict itself. They call it multipartiality. At R Street, we work with anyone who shares our goals, left, right, or center. That’s only possible because we’ve built the capacity for hard internal conversations before the pressure arrives.
But it also works at a smaller scale. I think about this whenever I’m tempted to turn a disagreement into a story about someone else’s character, when it would be easier to reduce someone to a type than to stay curious about how they got there. The discipline is the same: resist the urge to flatten someone into an identity.
And that, I think, is the bridge between conflict zones and our daily lives: the discipline of keeping our perceived adversaries psychologically complex enough that collaboration remains imaginable.
Michael is betting on this. He’s now building a global leadership network to equip leaders to work collaboratively across divides. It’s the same approach Search for Common Ground has refined over twenty years, now available to leaders everywhere. The public launch of the new global leadership network is this spring.
We already know how
Near the end of our conversation, Michael returned to where we started—with cooperation hiding in plain sight.
“Most of what’s good comes from collaboration,” he told me. “We already know how to do this. We just need to unleash it.”
That line landed for me as both a comfort and a challenge.
It’s a comfort because it suggests we aren’t starting from zero. Even now, especially now, people are cooperating all the time. And I’ve come to think this might be the kind of optimism worth trusting: the earned kind. The kind that notices what’s still working and refuses to let cynicism have the last word.
It’s a challenge because unleashing what we already know requires giving up something many of our institutions quietly reward: the certainty that we have adversaries and they are fixed.
Maybe the divide isn’t as deep as it feels. The wager is that the enemy category is doing unnecessary work, making disagreement feel permanent.
Michael put it simply: “Naming something ‘perceived’ doesn’t erase pain; it creates the possibility of movement.”
Michael Shipler is Vice President of Leadership Development and Partnerships at Search for Common Ground. Connect with Michael on LinkedIn. This conversation is part of the Real Insights series exploring democratic resilience and the leaders building it.