To promote peace, I borrowed a principle from martial arts

By nature, I am an impatient person. I yearn for rapid outcomes, both to my personal problems and to the conflicts that are tearing apart the planet.

In places like the Middle East, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burundi, where there was—and is—unspeakable violence, Search for Common Ground (the organization I founded and headed for 32 years) was committed to preventing violence.

Still, my colleagues and I realized that even though we were the world’s largest nonprofit group engaged in peacebuilding, we did not have the power to directly intervene.

Instead, we adopted a strategy based on the Japanese martial art of aikido. Aikido emphasizes accepting an attacker’s incoming energy and not trying to counter it with direct force.

We found that if we took an oppositional, adversarial position to people in conflict, we would be acting like a boxer who tries to reverse the energy flow of an opponent by knocking that person backward by 180 degrees. We were convinced that such an approach was not an effective way to achieve our goals.

Instead, with aikido tactics, we “blended” with problems, accepted them as givens, and tried to divert them by 10 or 15 degrees.

I internalized these principles, and they provide the basic framework for my new book, From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship, published by Columbia University Press in September 2024.

A government major in Arts & Sciences, John Marks ’65 co-authored The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence and The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control. He founded and currently serves as managing director of Confluence International and is a visiting scholar at Leiden University. 

Read the full article on the Cornellians website.