The less aware we are of how our individual and collective psychology shapes us, the more malleable we are. If we believe in and agree with this central assumption that we will remain unaware, we are in effect those ‘war makers’. Most people believe that forces of war operate outside them. To deal with these forces more creatively, rather than only being swept along, we need to get to know our part.

The structure of this book is built around four main themes: justice, terror, trauma and altered states. Events from past and present hot spots illustrate psychological and political dynamics in these four areas. Examples include the violence during the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the USA’s position of unilateral dominance on the world stage, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Hitler’s Third Reich, the history of Native Americans in the USA, the history of African Americans in the USA, the Vietnam war, post-communist issues in central and eastern Europe, and others. Many important issues, conflicts and hot spots are not included. Nor do I offer a thorough social, political or economic analysis on any particular zone. I especially draw from my experience facilitating post-war forums in Croatia, after the violence in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, as well as other forums of conflict resolution that I have facilitated internationally.

In my descriptions of events and psychological dynamics of war, I cannot represent all views. Nor can I bear witness to the boundless suffering of individuals and groups who have experienced the horror of war. The examples therefore weave an incomplete story to highlight only some of the essential psychological dynamics of violent conflict and how we participate. I trust the reader to look elsewhere for more comprehensive analysis of the events in particular conflict zones and fuller accounts of the experience of war, as well as to further explore the vast theme of psychological dynamics in violent conflict and its resolution.

In addition to looking at how our tendency to be unconscious of these psychological dynamics can be exploited in war, I look at how awareness of these dynamics can make a difference. The final chapters suggest that awareness might be the emerging ingredient in humanity, so that we are not only swept along in the violent wheels of history, but also able to facilitate creative alternatives.

The title, The War Hotel, appeared in a dream I had when I was in Croatia in 1996. As a part of a post-war project over several years, my colleague Lane Arye and I had just facilitated a forum among a large group of people dealing with post-war issues in their communities. A diverse group of participants (Croat, Serb, Muslim and other national/ethnic backgrounds) was involved with the complex and painful problems of reconciliation in Croatia and Bosnia. We had gathered in a room overlooking the sea near Split. The placid green sea held an endless melancholy for people arriving from all parts of Croatia and also Bosnia, many returning to the sea for the first time since the war. After the intensive forum days, I stayed a couple of extra days in a small hotel. In my dream, I walked out of the hotel, finding myself in a parallel world, an eerie maze of windy streets, with warlords at market stalls. There was a large neon sign ‘W A R H O T E L’. I kept thinking I had to find my way back to my hotel. As I studied my dream, I realized I needed to step into the eerie parallel world of the dynamics of war, and find my way through this maze.

Writing became a pathway both into this world and back to my ‘hotel’. I realized that the more we consider violence as some other, eerie world, and do not become familiar with its dynamics and get to know how we participate, the more readily we are swallowed up.

The link between psychological dynamics and violent conflict is such a vast topic. We often consider our psychology, however, as a kind of excuse for war, a reason to be hopeless or to feel that there is nothing we can do about it. People often say: ‘Isn’t that just human nature to be aggressive and violent?’ The more I study the dynamics of violent conflict, the more I see that the raw material of war is largely made up of qualities that we highly cherish – our loyalty, love, devotion to community, urge to protect the vulnerable, and outrage at atrocity and pain, and our search for meaning that transcends the limits of our personal life and death.

People who bring us the news and those of us who watch the news deal in the foreground with political facts and spin, while in the background immersed in the psychological workings of war. Information and reflection on the psychology of war are needed in public dialogue, so that we do not stand by, unaware of our involvement, responsibility and the possibility that we can make a difference.

Social and political leaders often call for public awareness. But, what do we mean by public awareness? We might consider three sorts. Getting informed involves increasing our knowledge of history and current events within a network of communication full of partial information, misinformation and disinformation. It also means understanding international law and activities geared towards protection of human rights. Roy Gutman and David Rieff point to the importance of this sort of public awareness in the book that they edited Crimes of War: What the public should know.

They were concerned that journalists did not accurately report the violence in Bosnia and Rwanda, confusing ‘genocide’ and ‘civil war’. In appreciation of the profound impact journalists can make on international affairs, they felt that journalists needed to have a grasp of international humanitarian law, to accurately report on and interpret events whether up close in the field or reporting on violent conflict from afar, and to report on and interpret events within climates of disinformation and strong emotional turmoil. It was soon realized that their important book belonged to a public that also needs access to this information for a better grasp of what is going on in the hot spots in our world.

Public awareness also requires a degree of freedom of thought and the capacity to reflect, rather than just adapt or react. How we engage in community is tied to our relative privileges and worldviews, which we all too rarely question. The women’s movement long used the term ‘consciousness raising’.

Paulo Freire, a beloved figure in education and social movements, described a process of breaking through prevailing mythologies that reinforce oppression, to reach new levels of awareness and the capacity to take an active part in the world.

Howard Zinn says: ‘how we think is not just mildly interesting, nor just a subject for intellectual debate, but a matter of life and death.’

Public awareness is also a psychological and spiritual matter – a process of discovering as individuals and collectively what makes us respond and what makes us silent. We are each unique in how we perceive and contribute to this world. We are also each limited and stretch the boundaries of our identities as we meet challenges and grapple with the unknown. Gandhi believed that individuals have a right to perceive and live in their unique manner, and at the same time can dissolve the notion of ‘self ’ and ‘other’ by attaining identification with humanity and all of creation.

Gandhi’s political leadership came from the notion that spirituality and politics were identical. He saw our internal and external worlds as part of a single pattern. Politics was a spiritual activity and all true spirituality culminated in politics.

Chuang Tzu, an ancient Chinese philosopher, recognized that the same patterns emerge inside us and within the world, and inner development and leadership could therefore not be separated.

Arny Mindell’s notion of ‘deep democracy’ suggests that society needs dialogue and interaction that includes not only our political positions, but also our deepest rifts and the emotions of history, as well as access to the underlying creativity that precedes our polarizations of conflict. Awareness of how we identify and what we consider ‘other’, in both our inner and our outer worlds, allows us to facilitate conflict, rather than only be sunk in it.

So, to recognize our part in violent conflict and to find alternatives, public awareness involves getting informed, developing freedom of thought, and a psychological and spiritual process of becoming aware of the inner and outer dimensions of conflict.

Although some political leaders and warlords have exploited the psychological and spiritual dynamics of conflict for the purpose of power and profit, at the expense of unspeakable tragedy, the responsibility and the possibility to ‘profit’ from our awareness of these dynamics lie with all of us. Below is a summary of the chapters to welcome you and give you an overview of The War Hotel.

SUMMARY OF THE FIVE PARTS
Part 1: Justice and the wheels of history
History repeats and conflicts cycle almost always in the name of justice. In the midst of extraordinary acts of brutality, people readily claim that they are doing this in the name of justice. We identify with being right and just out of both privilege and suffering. Part 1 illustrates how our urge for justice is used to create new rounds of conflict. It looks at how we become polarized around our concern for loyalty and justice and our need for accountability. Accountability is explored as an essential key to interrupt cycles of conflict, throughout all levels of society, from International Tribunals, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and the Lustration process in the former communist countries, to our grappling with history and the complex issues of personal and collective responsibility in community. Staying out of the loop of accountability supports violent conflict. Exploring personal and social accountability is necessary to know how we replay cycles of violence and to discover that we can step off this wheel.

Part 2: Terror and the spirit that survives
State tactics of terror and acts of ‘terrorism’ are designed with an astute understanding of our individual and collective psychology. State tactics of terror and acts of terrorism are violent tactics in both directions in a system that is already cracked and holding itself together by power and intimidation. The chapters in Part 2 focus particularly on state tactics of terror: creating or exploiting instability in order to crack down, demonizing, dehumanizing, desensitizing, and the normalizing of violence, torture, targeting leaders, targeting the soul of community and disinformation. We explore how psychology is used to dominate and suppress the spirit at any cost and the spirit that survives.

Part 3: Trauma – the nightmare of history
The effects of trauma are used to ignite conflict. We are vulnerable when we are not aware of how traumatic experience gets locked inside us, such that it reoccurs and continues to haunt us. We will look at the dynamics of trauma in individuals and whole communities and in our global interactions. Traumatic experience not only affects those who suffer atrocity. Feeling distant and silent in the face of atrocity is also a symptom of trauma and an active ingredient in violence. Trauma is a community matter and we need to include our personal and collective stories of trauma into the narrative of history to be able to move forward. We explore how traumatic events replay and reoccur in individuals and communities, including cycles of revenge and the revision of history. If the story isn’t told, as when mass graves are not found, our traumatic experience and the stories of our families remain open.

Part 4: The warrior’s call – altered states of war
Within the tragic events of war, people feel taken into a mythic battle. Individuals and entire communities are faced with death and loss, thrown from everyday life. After a war, survivors may feel unable and unwilling to ‘return’.

In the heightened experiences of war, people sometimes feel connected to a sense of spirit or meaning that is awesome and even intoxicating. Contacting dimensions beyond our ordinary lives is an essential part of our nature, as we are propelled and inspired in our search for meaning, whether in the realms of religion, spirituality, the arts or scientific research. Our longing to find purpose and to connect to something infinite, our devotion and our desire to feel part of a greater community, while perhaps among the most beautiful and sacred parts of humanity, are also used to arouse us to violence. With awareness, these experiences are also creative pathways for society.

Part 5: Awareness at the hot spot
Another part of our personal and collective nature is our urge to grow in awareness. Even our urge to wake up, however, when undeveloped, can be exploited in calls to violence. A predominant way of interacting throughout much of history has been based in power, one side dominating the other. In situations of conflict, we often think that one part of ourselves must dominate the other part. Yet, underlying the polarizations of conflict, we might discover a creative potential, allowing us to go beyond our one-sided identities. We look at what people mean by awareness, touching on how our evolving world views influence what we perceive and attitudes towards conflict. We look at things like mapmaking, some basics of systems theory, chaos, complexity theory, non-linear change, and how awareness can emerge at hot spots, making it possible that we don’t have to just sleep-walk through history. A hopeful perspective is that we might be on a long-term journey to learn how to not only stand by, observe or participate in destructive conflict, but rather to facilitate our human nature in more creative ways.