April 14, 2026
Now that I’m back home, here’s what I’ll be saying to friends and colleagues:
I just got back from Belfast. I was there as part of my work with Root Change, an organization that supports networks in creating democratic resilience. One of our most important relationships is with The Carter Center, where we serve as a learning partner. Part of our role is helping those networks think strategically about how to pursue change. So, when I had the opportunity to spend time in Belfast, studying one of the most closely watched peace processes in modern history, I went with a specific question in mind: what can Northern Ireland teach us about doing this work better?
I want to start, though, not with strategy — but with a detail that stopped me cold when I heard it in Belfast.
During the worst years of the Troubles, some parents would kiss each other goodbye whenever they left home not knowing if they would be alive by day’s end. Not because they were soldiers. Not because they were political figures. Just because they lived in Belfast. That was enough. That kind of fear, lived quietly, every day, over decades — that is what normalized violence looks like from the inside.
I am not here to give you a history of the Troubles. I am here to share what I learned about what it took to end them — and why those lessons matter for the democracy work happening in the US right now.
One of the things Root Change has brought to the Democracy Resilience Networks is a framework we call Build-Win-Sustain. I’ll explain it briefly, because what I found in Belfast is that the Northern Ireland lived experience illustrates the power of this framework.
The framework’s core idea is this: when you are trying to create lasting democratic change, you need to pursue three non-sequential outcomes. Visualize three strands of a schoolgirl’s braid. Now you know what the 3 outcomes—build, win, and sustain—might look like in action.
Build means strengthening relationships, capacity, and organizational infrastructure to make action-taking possible. Building trust, forming coalitions, developing a shared understanding of the problem are all connected to this outcome.
Win means converting that capacity into concrete, visible gains. It’s not just expressing a preference for change but actually making it.
Sustain means protecting those gains from backsliding — maintaining the trust, alliances, and coalitions that make continued progress possible. This is the work that most often goes underfunded and underestimated.
Build, Win, Sustain. Not steps. Not phases. But braided outcomes, each one making the others possible.
These three outcomes are achieved through four action levers — four distinct ways of intervening. Let me tell you what these are and how my time in Belfast enhanced my understanding of how they operate.
Think of the levers as tools you use. The skill is knowing which ones to reach for in any given moment.
The first lever is Re-Norm — shifting what people believe is normal and acceptable. One of the most striking things I heard in Belfast was how violence had become completely woven into the fabric of everyday life. People were not outraged by the ever present bombings and shootings. They were exhausted by it — but they had stopped being surprised. That is what happens when violence persists long enough: it stops being an emergency and instead is seen as a chronic condition. It becomes the weather. And once a society accepts violence as a given, as simply the way things are, that acceptance becomes its own obstacle to peace. You cannot negotiate your way out of a conflict when people have stopped believing the conflict can end.
Before any formal negotiation could succeed, peacebuilders had to do something more fundamental: they had to create a new vision of the future. Not just a ceasefire, but a different picture of what daily life could look like. New expectations about what was permissible and what was not. A shared insistence that children should be able to go to school without their parents fearing they would not come home. That is re-norming work.
The second lever is Reform — changing how institutions actually work. One of the clearest lessons from Northern Ireland is that you have to address root causes, not just symptoms. The violence was not primarily about religion, even though that is how it looked from the outside. It was about the interplay between partition and identity — a problem with structural, political and cultural dimensions. In our democracy work, the equivalent question is always: are we treating the symptom, or the source of the problem?
The third lever is Depolarize — building genuine trust and connection across lines of division. In Northern Ireland, the divide between communities was not just political. It was psychological. Each side had, over generations, stopped seeing the other as fully human. They had become categories — the other religion, the other tradition, the other side of the wall. And when people are reduced to categories, fear fills the space where relationships might exist.
What was required, before any formal negotiation could take hold, was something much more intimate: people encountering one another as individuals. Not as representatives of a cause. Not as symbols of a grievance. As people. That is harder than it sounds and cannot be manufactured by a peace process. It has to be built, one relationship at a time. The mechanism is personal contact, not formal procedure.
George Mitchell, a diplomat and principal negotiator of the Good Friday Agreement, understood this. He did not arrive with a framework to impose or a timeline to enforce. He listened. He listened so carefully and for so long that someone later described him as having “listened Northern Ireland into peace.” That line stayed with me. Because what it describes is not a diplomatic technique. It is an act of radical attention: treating the person across the table as someone worth truly hearing. That is what depolarization looks like when it works.
The fourth lever is Mobilize — building collective power and coordinated action. There is a distinction that matters enormously here, and I heard it said plainly in Belfast: the difference between those who call for peace and those who make it. Northern Ireland had no shortage of people who wanted peace. What moved the process forward were the people doing the grinding, unglamorous work of organizing — the women’s groups, the community organizations, the religious leaders who stayed in relationship with people on both sides. Civil society was not a supporting actor in that story. It was the social glue that held everything together. That is exactly the role the Democracy Resilience Networks are trying to play right now.
So, what did Belfast teach me that I am bringing back to our DRN work? Three things.
First: the outcomes are indeed braided. There was no moment when Northern Ireland finished building and moved on to winning. The same actors, in the same years, were building relational infrastructure, winning structural agreements, and sustaining fragile gains — all at once. I see the temptation in our own work to treat Build as a precondition you complete before you start winning. Belfast is a clear reminder that if you wait until you feel ready, you will have waited too long.
Second: each lever can serve any outcome. Storytelling — a Re-Norm activity — was used to build a shared vision, to fuel the narrative shift that led to action-taking, and to sustain the memory of why the peace mattered once the Agreement was signed. Grassroots organizing — a Mobilize tool — built the base, gave the Agreement its popular legitimacy, and continued in the form of a network of relationships that could lower the temperature in a crisis. The art is in knowing how to match levers to outcomes at any given moment. This is the strategic acumen we are developing together with the DRNs.
Third: Sustain is the outcome that most determines whether change lasts. There is a line I heard in Belfast that I have not been able to stop thinking about: complacency costs lives. Not as a metaphor. Literally. When people assume the peace will maintain itself — that the hard work was done and the problem was solved — violence returns. Agreements do not produce healing on their own. The network of trusted relationships that allows people to pick up the phone and lower the temperature in a crisis does not build itself and will not maintain itself. Sustain is not the reward you get for building and winning. It is the condition for everything else holding.
Northern Ireland is not a finished story, and it is not a perfect one. The divisions that drove the Troubles have not disappeared. The work continues. But something real was built there — something that did not exist before, and that has held, imperfectly, for twenty-eight years.
I return from Belfast more convinced than ever that the framework Root Change has brought to the Democracy Resilience Networks is the right one. Not because it is elegant on paper, but because I’ve now seen it play out in the lived experience of a society that found its way back from the edge. And that pathway back? Building a shared vision of a better future. Entering into dialog with people perceived as “other.” Admitting mistakes publicly. Keeping civil society alive in the spaces between formal agreements. And always keeping in mind that signing a document is not the same as making peace.