Water Negotiator Aaron Wolf Spreads Liquid Hope

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As Wolf tells it, his transition from academic observer to participant in negotiations occurred gradually: “You’d have a conference that would turn into a workshop that would turn into a facilitation.” The first international dispute he formally mediated involved the Salween River, a body of water shared by China, Burma, and Thailand.

“All three countries have development plans, and no two sets of plans are compatible,” Wolf explains. “There is lots of political tension. China has huge plans for dams all through the southern part of the country, which are the headwaters of a lot of Asia’s rivers. There won’t be enough water for everybody’s needs, that’s for sure.”

He has also facilitated talks among the former Soviet nations of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia—no small feat, given that the latter two are mortal enemies. “[We] were able to craft a way where Azerbaijan and Georgia talked to each other and Armenia and Georgia talked to each other,” he says. “They were able to develop a process where they coordinated when they couldn’t collaborate.”

Wolf was searching for better catalysts for compromise when, in 2002, he realized what he was missing.

“I was having a conversation with someone at the World Bank who is involved in water conflicts and also has a deep spiritual life,” he says. “We were talking about a set of images I use in negotiations. I have a visual of the watershed with the political boundaries on it and one with the political boundaries taken off. [When you remove the boundaries] suddenly everything looks very different. He told me, ‘That looks like an analog for spiritual transformation.’

“For me, that was an ‘aha’ moment. People in an academic or scientific context often are reluctant to think about something as ephemeral as spirituality. [In the Western world] we separated out rationality from spirituality during the Enlightenment. In a lot of the world where I work, there is no distinction between the two. They’re one integrated whole.”

Wolf realized that the standard Western model of conflict resolution he was using was inadequate, if not irrelevant. “Whenever there are attempts to resolve real conflict, where there is deep pain or anger, there are transformative moments—profound shifts in thinking,” Wolf says. “You know it when it happens, and it isn’t about rationality at all. . . . I started asking, ‘How can you focus in on that moment of transformation?’

“Well, who thinks about transformation in a systematic way? The spiritual community does. There are people who have spent a lot of time thinking about conflict and anger and how to transform them into more peaceful ways of thinking. We’ve never tapped into that knowledge in the conflict-resolution world.”

Excited by the revelation, Wolf arranged a 2004 meeting in Vatican City between spiritual leaders and water-conflict negotiators. It was not a success; the disconnect between participants was all too evident. “I started to understand that there was room for dialogue, but it would take a lot more time,” he says. “Fortunately, being an academic, I had a sabbatical immediately afterward, so I got to spend the following year studying spiritual transformation in the Middle East and Southeast Asia and specifically think about how it might apply to conflict management.

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