South Korean Educator Eunkyung Ahn MA ‘19 began her CJP studies with an intensive short course about trauma and resilience – and she knew she wanted to pass the skills and values she learned to others.

“My key learning at CJP is the importance of embodied learning in peacebuilding, which is new to peacebuilding education here but also in Korea,” she said.

In February 2019, Ahn did just that – hosting a five-day course at ����Vlog on “Building Resilience for Body, Mind and Spirit” for 18 visiting South Korean K-12 educators.

“This arts-based, expressive experience was designed to revitalize creativity for working in nonviolent social transformation and to exercise creative muscles, a critical foundational practice for challenging violence,” said course creator Katie Mansfield, the lead trainer of the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program.

Offered in past years at CJP’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute, the course was tailored for this group by Ahn and Mansfield. Goals included an understanding of how systemic and cultural violence affects individual trauma; building resilience in body, mind, and spirit through arts-based, embodied learning; and empowerment for making social change, Ahn said.

Participants engaged in visual artistry, music making, movement exploration, poetry and short story development, and final presentations. A session with visiting co-facilitator and experienced public schools peace educator Ram Bhagat GC ’19 involved drumming and contemplative practices.

Mansfield appreciated the group’s engagement: “I was so impressed at how deeply and directly the educators connected the various expressive arts exercises to the challenges they face as educators, restorative justice practitioners and citizens of South Korea.”

The educators are members of the Center for Restorative Justice in Education, an affiliate of the Movement for Good Teachers, a grassroots Christian teachers association in South Korea. Formed in 2011 in response to a rise in school bullying, the teacher-members work to promote nonviolence and peace in the school environment.

Course participants Inki Hong, Eunji Park and Byeongjoo Lee are senior teachers at schools in urban neighborhoods near Seoul. All learned about circle processes and restorative justice in different ways in Korea, including teacher academies and international workshops, some involving Jae-Young Lee MA ’03, founder of the Korea Peacebuilding Institute.

Before learning about restorative justice, Hong says he played the role of a judge with his students. “Before, when children fight, I would have to decide who is wrong and who is right,” he said. “Now, I don’t decide. I help you figure out what happened and how to make things right. The circle makes equal power and equal power is not usually found in classrooms.”

Children in Korea “do not know how to express themselves,” said Park. “In the circle, they know how. It really develops metacognitive skills.”

Lee, who teaches middle and high school English, said he has appreciated “how the philosophy of RJ can be shaped into many circle styles.”

All three educators work with newcomer teachers in their home settings and plan to share their learnings in hopes of contributing to cultural and systemic change in the educational environment.

After graduation in May, Ahn took STAR II and visited spirituality-based peacebuilding communities before returning to her teaching position in South Korea. “I am so passionate about growing as an educator and helping to educate others about valuing our whole beings,” she said. “It is so important to live with our true selves in our individual and communal lives, and I hope to share that with my students and their parents and other educators in the future.”

SHORT-TERM GROUP TRAININGS MEET SPECIFIC NEEDS

Interested in a group training or workshop on restorative justice, conflict analysis or trauma and resilience? CJP has hosted a growing number of U.S. and international groups for short-term trainings, including judges from Nepal, educators from South Korea and the United States, and two cohorts of restorative justice practitioners from Brazil.

Building on years of experience facilitating trainings around the world, CJP faculty and staff from various programs help group leaders co-create innovative, beneficial educational experiences to meet each group’s specific goals.

“More and more, we see groups looking for creative, culturally-relevant and sensitive approaches to conflict analysis, restorative justice and trauma awareness and resilience,” said CJP Executive Director Jayne Docherty. “Our goal is to support change-makers in recognizing their own strengths and growing their toolkit for response in their professional and cultural context. Our strengths-based pedagogical practices tap into personal experiences, build relationships and engage different learning styles in a safe space.”

Visit emu.edu/cjp for more information or to inquire.

INSPIRATION. REJUVENATION. Sharing a journey together. Delegations from Brazil and Korea made pilgrimages to ����Vlog this past academic year for multi-day programming hosted by the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice.

Although preparing for such delegations requires a major commitment of time and resources, CJP Executive Director Daryl Byler said that “the payoff is priceless” for all groups involved.

The first such delegation came in 2015 and included six curriculum developers from Nepal’s National Judicial Academy in Kathmandu. CJP anticipates hosting a group from Colombia this next year.

‘LIKE OXYGEN’

From across Brazil and with diverse professional backgrounds, 25 practitioners spent five days visiting Harrisonburg-area programs, contemplating practices and pedagogies, and witnessing shared values.

“It’s like oxygen,” said public prosecutor Danielle Arlé. “I can breathe again.”

“There is an Eastern saying that when the disciple is ready, the master comes,” Judge Leoberto Brancher said. “Restorative justice came to us in Brazil in the late 1990s and now almost 20 years later, we can come before the source … to review what we’ve been doing. It’s a time for tuning and beginning a new stage.”

“The source” is Howard Zehr, professor emeritus and the institute’s co-director, who led a session on restorative justice and serious crimes. Other sessions and site visits were hosted by ����Vlog-educated “disciples.”

Retired judge Isabel Lima, a professor at Catholic University in Salvador, developed the idea for the intensive seminar while a visiting professor at CJP in spring 2017.

In contrast to the United States, where a disparate group is driving the widening influence of restorative justice concepts, the Brazilian judiciary has played a key role in Brazil, Lima said.

Brancher, from Caxio do Sul, is one proponent who has made a nation-wide difference. He talks about restorative justice as an allegorical light during a dark time in his career, when he questioned the efficacy and meaning of his work with incarceration facilities for juveniles. Seen as both a punitive and protective system, “the way those two positions were disconnected made everything we did harmful because of misunderstood conceptions,” he said. “It was an existential question for me: What does life want from me as a judge? And also a professional question: How can I enforce the law? RJ came to me during that period as an answer.”

After nearly 20 years working to advance the concept, the five-day experience at ����Vlog heralded a new stage, he said, towards “the creation of a more solid basis and more integrated leadership to give support and enable this process to be sustainable.”

‘WALKING THE SAME WAY WE WANTED TO GO’

Last year in South Korea, middle school teachers Yongseung Roh and Kyungyun Hwang read Howard Zehr’s seminal text Changing Lenses with a study group. This year, they were part of a South Korean delegation that came to ����Vlog to learn directly about restorative justice from Zehr himself.

“We wanted to meet people who were walking toward the same way that we wanted to go,” the husband-wife duo wrote in an email. The 11-day east coast tour for 21 teachers, students, community leaders and legal professionals was organized by the Korea Peacebuilding Institute (KOPI). Because participants already had a firm basis of RJ concepts, the purpose was to learn about the “spiritual, cultural, and historical backgrounds” of the movement, said KOPI director Jae Young Lee MA ‘03. “If we believe RJ is a paradigm and not a program, it is important to know the Anabaptist/Mennonite tradition emphasizing peace and justice as a center of their faith.”

The visit was also an opportunity for “two-way” learning, said CJP executive director Daryl Byler – for both CJP staff and graduates like Lee and fellow delegation participant Yoonseo Park MA ‘16.

“They and others have taken the restorative justice training they received at CJP and expanded its application to a variety of Korean contexts – including the criminal justice, educational and health systems, as well as in housing and church conflicts,” Byler said.

The delegation also visited the Mennonite Central Committee headquarters and Material Resources Center in Akron, Pennsylvania; met with shooting victims and family members in the Nickel Mines Amish community; and visited two Washington D.C. schools that practice restorative discipline.

IN THE FUTURE…

Members of the Brazil delegation are exploring attendance at a future Summer Peacebuilding Institute, and staying in touch through online forums and webinars.

CJP and KOPI have signed a three-year Memorandum of Understanding. The partnership will strengthen the regional capacity for peacebuilding in Korea and cross-promote CJP-KOPI professional trainings in restorative justice and trauma and resilience, as well as academic programs.

In mid-October 2014, winter’s chill had arrived in South Korea. Inside a spacious conference room on the main floor of a newish multi-story building, 14 teachers were chatting animatedly about ways to be restorative in their lives and classrooms.

They were participants in an advanced workshop on restorative justice sponsored by the Korea Peacebuilding Institute (KOPI). The glass-walled room was in the heart of Bundang-gu, a section of the Seoul capital region known for its luxury high-rise condominiums and high-tech companies.

That evening, in an equally spacious room on the second floor of a neighboring building, about 50 people gathered to inaugurate the southern branch of KOPI with speeches, refreshments and socializing.

This KOPI branch is anchored in upscale Bundang-gu to make it accessible to Seoul-area teachers, counselors and administrators who recently became interested in non-violent ways to forge harmony in their schools.

“Two years ago, nobody had heard the term ‘restorative discipline,’” workshop leader Jungki Seo tells a Peacebuilder reporter. “Here especially in Gyeonggi province [which surrounds the city of Seoul and adjacent Bundang-gu], the schools have adopted restorative discipline as the main way of addressing conflict.”

This interest developed after capital-area school leaders decided that hitting students would no longer be permitted. Questions arose. Could teachers control recalcitrant or even violent students, without military-style punishments, exercises in humiliation, or expulsion?

At about the same time, stories were circulating in South Korea’s media about the high rate of suicide among the country’s teens, often attributed to bullying, but also to the extreme pressure to excel on academic tests.

Newly formed KOPI stepped forward with this answer: To intensively train interested school personnel (who would then train others) in the principles and practices articulated in the Korean translation of The Little Book of Restorative Discipline for Schools: Teaching Responsibility; Creating Caring Climates by Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz and Judy H. Mullet, plus several other titles in the Little Book series.^[1]

“Our minimum goal is to create safe spaces where people can gather to deal with sensitive issues,” says KOPI director Jae Young Lee, MA ’03. “Korean society has nurtured a violent culture in schools. Power is top down. Students are expected to focus on their grades to the exclusion of healthy relationships.”

Jungki Seo is the head of this new branch of KOPI, which is 15 miles from the main KOPI office in Deokso. Seo stepped away from university teaching to commit himself fully to co-founding KOPI in 2012 and being a key trainer for the school initiative. In addition to holding a PhD in anthropology, Seo completed three courses at ����Vlog’s 2008 Summer Peacebuilding Institute, including restorative justice with Howard Zehr and trauma healing with Nancy Good (Sider). In mid-2014 he returned to ����Vlog and became certified as a trainer of STAR (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience).

To complete the entire series of trainings, school personnel must commit themselves to 128 hours of KOPI coursework over about a year, divided into introductory, intermediate and advanced levels. The introductory level costs the equivalent of about $200 (U.S.) for 24 hours. Completion of the whole series adds up to $1,450. In 2014, 200 people started at the introductory level and 30 went all the way through the advanced level.

The schools have paid for some of these trainings, but many participants have dug into their own pockets for it. And yet there are more who want this training throughout Gyeonggi province than KOPI can handle.

Adapting to changing circumstances

The small group of low-paid visionaries steering the KOPI boat have learned over time to tack with the prevailing winds, always heading in the direction they desire in terms of building peace on the Korean peninsula (indeed in the whole Northeast Asia region), but understanding that their journey may look like zig-zagging, even backtracking at times.

KOPI has grown from four staff members to 18 since it was founded in 2012. Most of these staffers work from two rooms, plus a small adjoining kitchen, in Deokso – a moderately priced, edging-into-farmland suburban city just east of Seoul.

KOPI is focused heavily these days on spreading restorative practices through area schools and, via young people and their mentors, into the wider community.

In addition to leading KOPI, Lee coordinates the Northeast Asia Regional Peacebuilding Institute (NARPI), founded in 2008. NARPI rotates three intensive weeks of summertime training among locations in countries that don’t always get along on the official level – so far NARPI has been held in South Korea (twice), Japan and China. Mongolia is the site of the 2015 summer session, hosted by a local organizing committee.^[2]

The roots of both KOPI and NARPI (both explicitly secular organizations) can be traced to an organization of Mennonite-style Christians – the Korea Anabaptist Center founded by Lee, Kyong Jung Kim and Tim Froese, in 2001.^[3]

Wanting to promote a cultural shift toward peace in the region but short of funds, the Korea Anabaptist Center decided to raise money by launching a for-profit, English-language training institute in 2004.

Staffed largely by fresh graduates from Mennonite colleges in North America, Connexus did well until the end of 2011 by catering to financially secure professionals in Seoul.

Buoyed by the proceeds of Connexus, Lee was able to experiment, trying a variety of ways to introduce peacebuilding concepts into the military-oriented, hierarchical culture of South Korea. For about six years, he tried offering his services and giving talks at no or low cost to churches, schools and judicial officials.

“Sometimes six or seven people would show up, sometimes 20 people would show up,” he says. “I didn’t have high expectations, so I wasn’t disappointed if only six or seven came.”

For two or three years Lee taught teachers mediation skills to use within their schools. But the teachers had no official backing – no official time off to pursue mediation and little top-level support for applying it. So they drifted away.

In 2006, Lee got a breakthrough. The government agency responsible for Seoul’s courts and family issues asked Lee, in cooperation with the Women Making Peace group, to run a pilot project of using a restorative approach for handling juvenile offenders. “Everybody got excited,” Lee says. “Over two or three years, we developed 20 or so trained volunteer mediators.”

In 2010, most of the mediators Lee trained were hired as official court-system mediators, soon joined by others not trained by Lee. “The number of mediators grew so fast, they hired anybody whatsoever,” he says. “The courts were looking for quick fixes, rather than investing in addressing the root causes of offenses.”

Another problem: the head judge changed on an annual basis (South Korea’s way of combating judicial corruption). But the unfortunate result, says Lee, is that he would spend a year educating a head judge about restorative justice, only to see that judge leave and be replaced by a less understanding judge, requiring Lee to spend the next year repeating the process.

“There was no long-term stability, no deep change in the judicial system,” Lee says. “So we decided to try another path – to focus on working at change at the community level through local schools, local teachers, local young people, and local families.”

At about the time Lee’s court-system work was coming to an end, members of Seoul’s business community stopped enrolling in English-language classes at Connexus, a shift attributed to the worldwide recession. Income could no longer cover expenses, especially in the high-rent district where Connexus held its classes.

Crisis and recovery

Crisis time. Hours of prayer, conversation, and soul-searching led the Korea Anabaptist Center to a momentous decision to separate itself from Connexus in 2011. Mennonites in the United States lent the Korean Anabaptists $10,000 interest-free to wrap up their Connexus operations downtown (money since repaid).^[4] The Anabaptist Center shifted to Chuncheon City, two hours northeast of Seoul, the home of the first Anabaptist Church in Korea, Jesus Village Church.

Jae Young Lee, Karen Spicher ’02, and the other Anabaptists who chose to remain in the area of Seoul reassembled themselves under the secular mantle of a new organization, Korea Peacebuilding Institute.^[5] They put the main office of KOPI – joined by NARPI – in much cheaper rental space in Deokso, about 15 miles east of downtown Seoul.^[6] Government entities, like schools and courts, feel more comfortable doing business with secular organizations like KOPI than with overtly religious organizations, explains Lee.

Connexus was reconfigured as an after-school language program in the suburbs for families who wanted their children to learn English from native speakers in a non-competitive atmosphere (making it unlike the highly competitive, rote-learning, test-driven approach of many other private after-school programs). In its first two years, the reconfigured Connexus school [] grew from 10 students to 105, from two teachers to six.

The Deosko group of Anabaptists didn’t ditch their religion. They worship on Sunday mornings in an egalitarian fashion, with a warmly relaxed gathering around a table organized by a rotation of lay people, followed by a shared lunch.

On the morning of October 19, for example, 17 adults and five children at the worship session explored this theme through Scripture readings, hymn singings, prayers and conversation: “Your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, your endurance inspired by your home in Jesus.”

Someone made reference to the number of conscientious objectors (600 was the figure) serving jail terms in South Korea due to their refusal to serve in the military, including a member of this Anabaptist church group. “We’re not free from violent structures,” murmured one attendee.

Communal-flavored way of life

As of late 2014, Lee, Spicher and their daughters Lomie and Aurie, were living in a relatively new cluster of low-rise buildings near Deokso. Their three-bedroom apartment is also home to Sarah Wilson, an English teacher who had arrived in South Korea several years ago as a MCC volunteer with SALT (Serving and Learning Together). They frequently host visitors.

Spill-over guests are dispatched across the hall to a bedroom in the apartment where Lee’s elderly parents live. In apartments above and below them, as well as in a neighboring building, live many others connected to KOPI, NARPI or Connexus. Typically, five staffers share one apartment.

Connexus teachers are mostly fresh grads from Goshen, ����Vlog, Canadian Mennonite University and other such Anabaptist institutions in North America, who sign up for at least a year of teaching in return for lodging, a food allowance and monthly salary of $1,000.

On most mornings, almost everyone in these residences heads to work in the same commercial building, characterized by small ground-level stores lining a busy street. Occupying much of the fifth floor, the classrooms and offices of Connexus are about 30 feet away from KOPI’s and NARPI’s shared work spaces. At noon everyone in these rooms emerges to enjoy lunch together in a conference room, with staff rotating food preparation in the galley-sized kitchen.

The communal-flavored way of living; the latest iteration of income-generating Connexus; the decision to move most of the peacebuilding team from an expensive Seoul neighborhood to comparatively working-class Deokso … These all evolved in 2011, the same year that NARPI held its first three-week summer session in Seoul, with 47 participants, plus 28 staff, from 11 countries.^[7]

“The past year has not been easy,” Spicher said in a Mennonite Mission Network newsletter published soon after the 2011-12 transitions. She added, however, that it had been “a faith-affirming experience to witness God’s provision of everything we need and more.”

Spicher told Peacebuilder that her husband has “no fear of the unknown.” In fact, “moving and changing are energizing to him.”

Lee doesn’t come across as a pushy person. He just has lots of ideas, a way of articulating them well, and boundless energy. Everyone says Connexus and peacebuilding institute decisions are made collectively and generally by consensus. Spicher described Lee’s leadership style as “visioning together.”

The latest vision is to move the entire Deokso operation – KOPI, NARPI and Connexus – into space formerly occupied by a restaurant on a nearby busy thoroughfare. “Jae thinks having a coffee shop would provide us with more financial stability,” Spicher said.

Yet, “he’s not a micro-manager,” she emphasized. “He needs detail people around him. His role is to shift to where he is most needed. If others are doing fine with their work, he’s fine in giving them the space to do it their way.”

Spicher, with her native command of English, does the communications for NARPI, which uses English as the language that permits most attendees from the Northeast Asia region to understand each other. A volunteer staff keeps the books balanced. Well-trained facilitators run most of the workshops, some brought in from other parts of the world, sometimes including people connected to ����Vlog’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, such as Howard Zehr, Carl Stauffer and Al Fuertes.

‘Everything starts from one person’

Of the 17 adults who attended the October 19 worship service in the NARPI/KOPI conference room in Deokso, seven had been through at least one of NARPI’s intensive summer sessions.

Manshik Shin, for example, has participated in NARPI for three of the four years it has been held. After attending the first NARPI gathering in Seoul in 2011, Shin traveled to Hiroshima, Japan, for NARPI 2012, and to Nanjing, China, for NARPI 2014.

For Shin, this was a major investment, both in money and time. He’s a 44-year-old high school history teacher, with a wife and three children, 9, 11 and 14. The family must travel over an hour to attend Sunday morning worship sessions in Deokso.

Shin says he got interested in NARPI when he took a restorative justice course in 2011 co-taught by Jae Young Lee and Jungki Seo. “Sometimes there is conflict between students, sometimes between students and teachers, sometimes between teachers and parents. I learned how to deal with this conflict.

“I learned that the punishments the school was giving students – like making them clean the playground or classroom – were not changing their behavior. And we kept offenders and victims separated and didn’t spend much energy to help the victims. After I understood restorative justice, I felt I could understand what’s wrong among our Korean society.”

Shin paused and pointed at a book lying on a conference table. It was the Korean version of Changing Lenses by Howard Zehr. “After I read it, I could understand what to do – it got my imagination. It gave me insights.”

Each NARPI session includes field trips and talks that allow participants to gingerly explore (and seek to begin healing) historical traumas that one participating nationality may have inflicted on another. Shin was moved by the stories told by Chinese survivors of the WWII-era massacres by Japanese troops in Nanjing. And by hearing from the survivors of the atom bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima. And from Korean “comfort women,” used sexually by Japanese soldiers.

It is rare, explains Shin, for people from different countries to meet and intentionally and caringly talk about the harms inflicted on others in the name of one’s own patriotism. The ultimate lessons, though, were ones of hope. Even the victims asked that they serve as inspiration for “never again,” for peace. They held no rancor.

Shin now believes that “everything starts from one person,” and he’s that person in his 700-student school. He has introduced restorative circles in that school and he’s training facilitators for those circles.

He is interested in egalitarian churches now. “In Korean churches, the pastor is the focus. He gives long sermons and everyone sits and listens to him.”

Shin motioned to his present surroundings, where he had joined 16 others in worship an hour previously. There was a simple multi-purpose room with a homemade wooden baby’s crib by the conference table and, on the wall, a Martyrs Mirror sketch of Mennonite Dirk Willems rescuing the man who had been hunting him, labeled with the words “Love your enemies and bless them that curse you.” And Shin commented, “Frankly speaking, I like these people, these Mennonites. They are culturally different in a way that I like.”

Footnotes

1. Jae Young Lee co-translated into Korean the Little Book of Restorative Discipline. Other Korean Anabaptists translated these Little Book titles: … of Restorative Justice by Howard Zehr, … of Trauma Healing by Carolyn Yoder, … of Conflict Transformation by John Paul Lederach. … of Strategic Peacebuilding by Lisa Schirch, … of Circle Processes by Kay Pranis. In addition, Lee edited the translation of Changing Lenses – A New Focus for Crime and Justice by Howard Zehr.
2. NARPI’s 11-person steering committee currently consists of five people from Japan, two from China, two from South Korea, one from Mongolia, and one from Taiwan. Each year the NARPI Summer Peacebuilding Training is hosted by volunteers native to the location where the session is held. But NARPI’s main organizing team – behind the website, main telephone line, communications, and accounting – is housed within the office shared with KOPI.
3. See the following article on Jae Young Lee’s journey to peacebuilding via Mennonite universities in North America. “Anabaptist“ is often used as an umbrella term for Mennonites and kindred pacifist-Christian sects.
4. Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Mission Network in the U.S., and Mennonite Church Canada Witness have at different points between 2001 and 2015 all stepped forward with support for projects envisioned by Korea’s Anabaptists.
5. Jae Young Lee gained a full-time partner in 2010 when he married Karen Spicher, a fellow ����Vlog alumnus who arrived in South Korea as a Connexus teacher in 2007.
6. Three years later, in October 2014, KOPI opened a branch office back in an upscale business district, in response to the growing demand for teacher training in restorative discipline, as discussed earlier in this article.
7. In the summer of 2014, NARPI was held in Nanjing, China, organized by Liu Cheng, a Nanjing University history professor, assisted by students. Seventy-three people from nine countries were in attendance, either as participants, facilitators or staff.

He peered through binoculars intently. His life, after all, might be at stake. Through the optics he could see the enemy smoking a cigarette, just over the border.

Jae Young Lee, 16 years later, remembers the absurdity of that moment. North Korea’s “beloved leader,” Kim Il Sung, had just died, and both militaries – north and south – along the “demilitarized zone” were on red alert.

“We had been given orders to shoot anything that moved in the river [dividing the armies]. We were all very quiet as we dealt with our own thoughts and fears of life and death. I thought, ‘I don’t even know his name. I don’t hate him, but if war broke out, I would shoot him and he would shoot me.’”

Lee’s transformation from watchful sniper to dedicated, savvy peacebuilder was over a decade in the making. After he completed his 26-month stint as a draftee in the South Korean army, his father suggested Lee might want to get some education in North America. Forty-five years earlier, in the aftermath of the Korean War, his father had worked as a farm manager in a vocational training school for orphaned boys. The school was run by Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), which led his father to suggest that Lee apply to a Mennonite college.

In 1996, Lee found himself in classes at Canadian Mennonite Bible College (now Canadian Mennonite University) in Winnipeg. One of his professors teased Lee that he was the first student to wear camouflaged fatigues to his class. “They were the most comfortable pants I owned,” Lee now says with a chuckle.

In Canada, Lee kept hearing people talking about, and praying for, world peace. “One day I saw 20 old ladies packing health kits for North Korea. I asked them why they were doing this and they said, ‘There is famine in North Korea and we know that someone out there will get help from these kits.’ I cried because I realized that I myself had no concern, but these Mennonites cared.”

In 2000, Lee headed south to attend the Summer Peacebuilding Institute at ����Vlog. His first class was “Introduction to Conflict Transformation” taught by John Paul Lederach. His second class was “Restorative Justice” with Howard Zehr. His third class was “Philosophy and Praxis of Reconciliation” with Hizkias Assefa. Lee had ended up in classes taught by three of the legendary professors of the program. The experience settled the matter of what he wanted to study. With financial support from MCC and his parents, Lee completed a master’s degree in conflict transformation at ����Vlog in 2003.

In Seoul in 2001, Lee joined a fellow graduate of Canadian Mennonite Bible College, Kyong Jung Kim, and a Canadian Mennonite service worker, Tim Froese, to found the Korean Anabaptist Center. Lee became its peace program director. Lee began to envision ways to foster a paradigm shift in Northeast Asia, from an atmosphere of animosity and militarism to one where both national security and human security are guaranteed. And thus the idea of a regional peacebuilding institute was born.

Northeast Asia contains more than a quarter of the world’s people and will likely emerge as the center of global economic and military power in the coming decades. In Lee’s view it is critical for the region to transform its “long-standing animosity and mistrust” created by “wars and military confrontations.”

By the fall of 2010, Lee had visited China, Japan and Taiwan to build interest in the formation of the Northeast Asia Regional Peacebuilding Institute (NARPI) and had secured funding sufficient to launch NARPI in the summer of 2011 from MCC, Asian Community Trust, the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, Niwano Peace Foundation, and the Mennonite Mission Network.

This is adapted from an article by Earl and Pat Hostetter Martin ’64, MA ’98, which originally appeared in the summer 2010 issue of Crossroads, ����Vlog’s alumni magazine. Pat was on the staff (eventually the director) of ����Vlog’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute from 1998 through 2008.