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The Answers Are There: Building Peace From the Inside Out
Amazon Best Seller in War & Peace, Human Rights, and African Politics
A New Architecture for Peace
Our world desperately needs new ways to support community transformation. In The Answers Are There , Libby Hoffman shows us what is possible when outside aid animates, rather than obstructs, local leadership and recognizes and honors community wisdom, priorities, and resources.
This book shares stories of individual and communal transformation in Sierra Leone, where the culture of community was nearly destroyed by civil war. But the unique approach of Fambul Tok (family talk)—anchoring reconciliation in indigenous traditions of communal truth-telling, apology, and forgiveness—restored that culture and unleashed a powerful resource for national healing. Fambul Tok’s core conviction—that ordinary people have the creativity, capacity, and determination to transform their communities according to their own needs and desires—changed a country, and with it, international peace and development.
Hoffman shares her learning journey as a peacebuilder and as Fambul Tok’s co-founder, funder, and program partner. Her diligent, compassionate reflection on tending to community, to systemic failures, and to her own heart invites readers into “building peace from the inside out.” The Answers Are There masterfully blends lived experience, thought leadership, and actionable techniques, inspiring and equipping readers to grow whole, healthy systems in the world.
A New Architecture for Peace
Our world desperately needs new ways to support community transformation. In The Answers Are There , Libby Hoffman shows us what is possible when outside aid animates, rather than obstructs, local leadership and recognizes and honors community wisdom, priorities, and resources.
This book shares stories of individual and communal transformation in Sierra Leone, where the culture of community was nearly destroyed by civil war. But the unique approach of Fambul Tok (family talk)—anchoring reconciliation in indigenous traditions of communal truth-telling, apology, and forgiveness—restored that culture and unleashed a powerful resource for national healing. Fambul Tok’s core conviction—that ordinary people have the creativity, capacity, and determination to transform their communities according to their own needs and desires—changed a country, and with it, international peace and development.
Hoffman shares her learning journey as a peacebuilder and as Fambul Tok’s co-founder, funder, and program partner. Her diligent, compassionate reflection on tending to community, to systemic failures, and to her own heart invites readers into “building peace from the inside out.” The Answers Are There masterfully blends lived experience, thought leadership, and actionable techniques, inspiring and equipping readers to grow whole, healthy systems in the world.
328 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 25, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 25, 2022
This book was a challenging read in a good way. It makes you think about how you are living in peace with those around you. We often look to others to change our world, our problems, our issues. But what if, instead, we look within and see how we can be the first to change.
Reading the passion in Ms. Hoffman's desire to help a country heal and giving the tools to begin that process was inspiring. She doesn't promise a quick nor easy fix, but rather the steps to start. The follow up will be up to each of us that choose to be the change in the world for more peace.
I was moved by her personal account of the transformation within her own journey. And she inspired me to start making my own transformation.
Highly recommend this book if you want to be part of the change toward peace starting right where you live.
Disclaimer: I received a digital copy of this book from the author with no expectation in return. My thoughts and comments above are my own.
Reading the passion in Ms. Hoffman's desire to help a country heal and giving the tools to begin that process was inspiring. She doesn't promise a quick nor easy fix, but rather the steps to start. The follow up will be up to each of us that choose to be the change in the world for more peace.
I was moved by her personal account of the transformation within her own journey. And she inspired me to start making my own transformation.
Highly recommend this book if you want to be part of the change toward peace starting right where you live.
Disclaimer: I received a digital copy of this book from the author with no expectation in return. My thoughts and comments above are my own.
April 25, 2023
This book came to my attention when the Independent Book Publishers Association named it as a finalist for the 2023 Franklin Award. It describes the grassroots effort to rebuild rural communities in Sierra Leone after its bitter, decade-long civil war ended in 2002.
The war left the country wounded and deeply polarized. Neighbors had committed atrocities against neighbors. Communities broken by distrust were barely functioning, and there didn’t seem to be a path forward.
Sierra Leonean native John Caulker understood that confession and forgiveness was the only path to healing. The tribes of Sierra Leone traditionally healed through truth-telling ceremonies in which both victims and perpetrators of violence described in public, to all their neighbors, what the crimes they had committed and endured during the war.
But how could the villages even begin this process when the wounds were still so raw and resentment and distrust so bitter?
Caulker sensed the citizens wanted to be released from the cycle of pain, from being trapped in the past and broken. Beginning in villages most deeply affected by the war, he simply asked if people would be willing to begin the traditional truth and reconciliation process in which the community gathered around a bonfire to air out some very difficult truths.
The answer was yes. The communities wanted to heal their wounds and move forward.
To begin this work, Caulker approached American Libby Hoffman, founder of Catalyst for Peace. The two shared a set of common beliefs. Both had observed first-hand that traditional Western aid didn’t work. Both understood that healing comes from within; it cannot be imposed from without. The communities already had the resources and the desire to fix themselves. All they needed was the space to begin, a space not dominated by resentment, hurt and distrust.
Caulker and Hoffman made it their mission to create that space, first in the form of the truth and forgiveness ceremonies, and later in the form of groups and committees that represented all people in the communities and drew up plans on how to move forward.
Caulker described the difference between traditional Western aid and this community-led approach to rebuilding. According to the Western view, Africa has needs and the West has resources, and the practice of aid often comes down to the West imposing its resources on communities without consulting them or drawing on their internal strengths.
Hoffman describes how imposing outside values derails and destroys Africa’s traditional community-based healing. After one notorious warlord had offered his testimony at a truth and reconciliation ceremony, a village began to forgive and heal.
On hearing this, another warlord wanted to lay down arms and reconcile with the factions he’d fought against during the long and bloody war. After long negotiations, he agreed to face his victims and ask forgiveness, something his victims were eager to see.
Just before he was to appear, the International Criminal Court indicted him on charges that would put him in prison for life. The warlord backed out of his agreement with the villages and remained hidden in the jungle under the protection of his soldiers.
Of this, Hoffman writes,
This erasure of local power by the West’s good intentions happens again and again, and it’s always imposed from the outside in, from the international level upon the community.
Many of the problems Hoffman describes in this book exist in the US as well: political polarization, hostility and distrust, local resentment of policies imposed by remote elites who understand neither the communities they’re impacting nor the ill effects of their well-intentioned programs.
The solutions Hoffman and Caulker foster in Sierra Leone–open discussion, compassion, and forgiveness–are the same ones we need here in the US. But pride and commitment to our grievances prevent us from getting there. The long war in Sierra Leone made life so painful, the people reached a point where they wanted to release the hurt.
The value of this book lies in Hoffman’s open-minded and open-hearted attitude toward humanity, and her description of how she and Caulker put their principals into practice. The healing they foster isn’t measurable by the standards of international organizations. It’s not a box to checked or even an outcome that can be defined as “done.”
It’s process, continually ongoing, and it requires personal investment and participation from all who wish to benefit from it. The space for healing and forgiveness doesn’t exist until you make it, and making it is an intentional and communal act. As Hoffman puts it,
The war left the country wounded and deeply polarized. Neighbors had committed atrocities against neighbors. Communities broken by distrust were barely functioning, and there didn’t seem to be a path forward.
Sierra Leonean native John Caulker understood that confession and forgiveness was the only path to healing. The tribes of Sierra Leone traditionally healed through truth-telling ceremonies in which both victims and perpetrators of violence described in public, to all their neighbors, what the crimes they had committed and endured during the war.
But how could the villages even begin this process when the wounds were still so raw and resentment and distrust so bitter?
Caulker sensed the citizens wanted to be released from the cycle of pain, from being trapped in the past and broken. Beginning in villages most deeply affected by the war, he simply asked if people would be willing to begin the traditional truth and reconciliation process in which the community gathered around a bonfire to air out some very difficult truths.
The answer was yes. The communities wanted to heal their wounds and move forward.
To begin this work, Caulker approached American Libby Hoffman, founder of Catalyst for Peace. The two shared a set of common beliefs. Both had observed first-hand that traditional Western aid didn’t work. Both understood that healing comes from within; it cannot be imposed from without. The communities already had the resources and the desire to fix themselves. All they needed was the space to begin, a space not dominated by resentment, hurt and distrust.
Caulker and Hoffman made it their mission to create that space, first in the form of the truth and forgiveness ceremonies, and later in the form of groups and committees that represented all people in the communities and drew up plans on how to move forward.
Caulker described the difference between traditional Western aid and this community-led approach to rebuilding. According to the Western view, Africa has needs and the West has resources, and the practice of aid often comes down to the West imposing its resources on communities without consulting them or drawing on their internal strengths.
It’s like Sierra Leone is being recolonized by aid. The large NGOs are spearheading the response, and they have well-oiled machines–but no local structures or credibility within the community. It’s colonization by compassion. We are not victims. We are leaders and potential leaders. We are agents of change and agents of healing, agents of transformation. This needs to be built on rather than ignored.
Hoffman describes how imposing outside values derails and destroys Africa’s traditional community-based healing. After one notorious warlord had offered his testimony at a truth and reconciliation ceremony, a village began to forgive and heal.
On hearing this, another warlord wanted to lay down arms and reconcile with the factions he’d fought against during the long and bloody war. After long negotiations, he agreed to face his victims and ask forgiveness, something his victims were eager to see.
Just before he was to appear, the International Criminal Court indicted him on charges that would put him in prison for life. The warlord backed out of his agreement with the villages and remained hidden in the jungle under the protection of his soldiers.
Of this, Hoffman writes,
[T]he Acholi wanted to use their traditional ways of dealing with conflict, the cultural and communal values they rested upon, such as forgiveness, to build a path toward peace and reconciliation… [T]he international community’s assumption that justice was found in prosecution undermined the Acholi’s to advocate for and engage in a broader reconciliation process.
[The Acholi’s] local healing and reconciliation practices [were] unacknowledged and untapped by the international system. The framework of formal justice, meanwhile, had a totalizing effect, erasing the Acholi culture’s communal and restorative approaches from the global conversation and simultaneously undermining their local power and efficacy.
This erasure of local power by the West’s good intentions happens again and again, and it’s always imposed from the outside in, from the international level upon the community.
Many of the problems Hoffman describes in this book exist in the US as well: political polarization, hostility and distrust, local resentment of policies imposed by remote elites who understand neither the communities they’re impacting nor the ill effects of their well-intentioned programs.
The solutions Hoffman and Caulker foster in Sierra Leone–open discussion, compassion, and forgiveness–are the same ones we need here in the US. But pride and commitment to our grievances prevent us from getting there. The long war in Sierra Leone made life so painful, the people reached a point where they wanted to release the hurt.
The value of this book lies in Hoffman’s open-minded and open-hearted attitude toward humanity, and her description of how she and Caulker put their principals into practice. The healing they foster isn’t measurable by the standards of international organizations. It’s not a box to checked or even an outcome that can be defined as “done.”
It’s process, continually ongoing, and it requires personal investment and participation from all who wish to benefit from it. The space for healing and forgiveness doesn’t exist until you make it, and making it is an intentional and communal act. As Hoffman puts it,
Community is the place where people are connected not by position or role but simply by their fundamental humanness, and it is our very humanness that contains the seeds for transformation and healing. In fact, the reclamation of our humanity after experiencing, or even causing, great harm is the transformation.
December 19, 2022
This is a remarkable, super-optimistic book that I wouldn’t even have looked it based on the title, but a colleague I have great respect for not only recommended it but sent me a pre-release copy (publishing date was October 25). It’s all about forming real community in strife-torn lands, in ways that respect and honor and take direction from the indigenous perspective while helping establish resilience in very different ways than the typical First World development agencies try to work. It’s a deeply personal account that’s also elegantly written and remarkable easy to read. I often found myself gliding through 20 or 30 pages at a sitting—not typical of the books I review—even while pausing to take lots of notes.
Hoffman has been working with local peace leaders in Sierra Leone, and especially John Caulker, founder of an organization called Fambul Tok (Family Talk) that has done amazing work in helping that country move through the deep bitterness and resentment following a civil war with tens of thousands of atrocities. Starting in a single village, Hoffman, Caulker, and their colleagues have spiraled out to develop a framework that was eventually accepted by the national government—one resilient enough to help turn the country around during the Ebola epidemic, which hit Sierra Leone particularly hard.
Unlike typical western aid projects, Fambul Tok was at least as much about the process as the result—and because of that, the results have been spectacular.
Some of the key principles and insights:
* Peace must be in a local context, based holistically in local ecosystems and traditions: not just physical ecosystems, but cultural and spiritual ones
* No matter how barbarous a crime or series of crimes, reconciliation can happen if space is made for sincere repentance and apology and rebuilding, for listening to the perpetrators AND the survivors, and communally figuring out how to move forward—and sometimes, the most brutal actors can be among the strongest supporters, taking leadership to undo the damage they caused
* Successful aid/development is not a one-way street from funders and programs to passive recipients; every person has things to contribute, things to learn—and perhaps more importantly, things to unlearn
* The typical current pattern of development agencies is broken, because it doesn’t recognize that truth, attempting instead to impose a project from the outside, plan out all the details, pilot it and rapidly scale it up, rather than let one emerge organically from the needs—and strengths and capabilities—of the local community, and according to that community’s traditions and initiatives, on a timeframe that makes sense in the local culture
* Proactively building locally-rooted resilience is immediately empowering to indigenous people who have long felt unheard, unseen, and uncared about—and that resilience is a powerful way to get beyond the next crisis; rebuilding Sierra Leone after the civil war meant it was much more ready to face Ebola
* Unheard voices may belong to women or others who have not been welcomed into the circles of power—and their leadership can bring deeper changes than anyone would have anticipated before those conversations started
* Even the most dedicated leaders need to recharge and be nourished, and amazing learning and growth can come out of the spaces and rituals that enable those recharging moments
Hoffman uses a lot of powerful metaphors. Example: As early as page 10, she introduces the concept of repairing the cup (the community) before pouring water (aid) into it, and by page 218, that morphs into a series of nested bowls, spiraling up and out from the local villages through chiefdoms, districts, nations, the world, and whatever might be beyond—which she calls “the idea of wholeness.”
I could easily write another couple of thousand words, pulling out specific quotes and wisdom. But I want to honor the organic nature of Hoffman and Caulker’s work, and not to be just like those western planning and development agencies that impose their own structure on a recalcitrant village instead of coming in expecting to learn as much as they teach—and I don’t want to subject their message and methods to that subtle violence. So I will end simply by saying that anyone who really cares about peace and about ending poverty will find this book well worth the time you put into it.
Hoffman has been working with local peace leaders in Sierra Leone, and especially John Caulker, founder of an organization called Fambul Tok (Family Talk) that has done amazing work in helping that country move through the deep bitterness and resentment following a civil war with tens of thousands of atrocities. Starting in a single village, Hoffman, Caulker, and their colleagues have spiraled out to develop a framework that was eventually accepted by the national government—one resilient enough to help turn the country around during the Ebola epidemic, which hit Sierra Leone particularly hard.
Unlike typical western aid projects, Fambul Tok was at least as much about the process as the result—and because of that, the results have been spectacular.
Some of the key principles and insights:
* Peace must be in a local context, based holistically in local ecosystems and traditions: not just physical ecosystems, but cultural and spiritual ones
* No matter how barbarous a crime or series of crimes, reconciliation can happen if space is made for sincere repentance and apology and rebuilding, for listening to the perpetrators AND the survivors, and communally figuring out how to move forward—and sometimes, the most brutal actors can be among the strongest supporters, taking leadership to undo the damage they caused
* Successful aid/development is not a one-way street from funders and programs to passive recipients; every person has things to contribute, things to learn—and perhaps more importantly, things to unlearn
* The typical current pattern of development agencies is broken, because it doesn’t recognize that truth, attempting instead to impose a project from the outside, plan out all the details, pilot it and rapidly scale it up, rather than let one emerge organically from the needs—and strengths and capabilities—of the local community, and according to that community’s traditions and initiatives, on a timeframe that makes sense in the local culture
* Proactively building locally-rooted resilience is immediately empowering to indigenous people who have long felt unheard, unseen, and uncared about—and that resilience is a powerful way to get beyond the next crisis; rebuilding Sierra Leone after the civil war meant it was much more ready to face Ebola
* Unheard voices may belong to women or others who have not been welcomed into the circles of power—and their leadership can bring deeper changes than anyone would have anticipated before those conversations started
* Even the most dedicated leaders need to recharge and be nourished, and amazing learning and growth can come out of the spaces and rituals that enable those recharging moments
Hoffman uses a lot of powerful metaphors. Example: As early as page 10, she introduces the concept of repairing the cup (the community) before pouring water (aid) into it, and by page 218, that morphs into a series of nested bowls, spiraling up and out from the local villages through chiefdoms, districts, nations, the world, and whatever might be beyond—which she calls “the idea of wholeness.”
I could easily write another couple of thousand words, pulling out specific quotes and wisdom. But I want to honor the organic nature of Hoffman and Caulker’s work, and not to be just like those western planning and development agencies that impose their own structure on a recalcitrant village instead of coming in expecting to learn as much as they teach—and I don’t want to subject their message and methods to that subtle violence. So I will end simply by saying that anyone who really cares about peace and about ending poverty will find this book well worth the time you put into it.
December 30, 2022
A great book with some amazing stories. It is optimistic in a way I am not, and refreshing in a sense of providing success stories coupled with learning from mistakes. While I would not declare this a necessary read for those in the peace studies field, I would turn those to this book as a resource for encouragement and ideas. Metaphors such as the river/lake and changing of vocabulary stood out as incredible tools for empowerment and organization. In sum, it is a great book with positive takeaways, and is an easy read with detailed lessons.
I do have a few complaints, though I believe the author does their best to address them. I primarily take issue with the money. As a young peace builder struggling to enter the field, it seems as if money remains key for successful projects. The author has amazing ideas, and I do not want to take away from their commitment and genius, but key partnerships and large financial resources make this work possible, meaning it is hard to really get others involved when that is what it takes. The author does address this, but rather than really provide solutions to this (which I acknowledge is not the aim of the book), sort of adds this as a caveat.
But this leads me into my second concern, one that I had at the beginning, only to have it suddenly appeased. The solutions are there, yes, but not explicitly so. Much of the book, maybe an overwhelming amount, is stories. I recognize the emphasis on story telling, but I entered this looking for key resources and answers. Yet the purpose is to demonstrate the answers are not universal - to miss this is to miss the foundation and thesis of the work. The answers are distinct, community led, and locally sourced.
It forces one to ask - are all the answers local? Can all solutions be built from the inside out? I would argue no. But to continue the standard of “top down” projects is again to neglect the fundamental pieces of the work told in this book - the answers are there if you work together. Do not continue to ignore them.
I do have a few complaints, though I believe the author does their best to address them. I primarily take issue with the money. As a young peace builder struggling to enter the field, it seems as if money remains key for successful projects. The author has amazing ideas, and I do not want to take away from their commitment and genius, but key partnerships and large financial resources make this work possible, meaning it is hard to really get others involved when that is what it takes. The author does address this, but rather than really provide solutions to this (which I acknowledge is not the aim of the book), sort of adds this as a caveat.
But this leads me into my second concern, one that I had at the beginning, only to have it suddenly appeased. The solutions are there, yes, but not explicitly so. Much of the book, maybe an overwhelming amount, is stories. I recognize the emphasis on story telling, but I entered this looking for key resources and answers. Yet the purpose is to demonstrate the answers are not universal - to miss this is to miss the foundation and thesis of the work. The answers are distinct, community led, and locally sourced.
It forces one to ask - are all the answers local? Can all solutions be built from the inside out? I would argue no. But to continue the standard of “top down” projects is again to neglect the fundamental pieces of the work told in this book - the answers are there if you work together. Do not continue to ignore them.
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