In a reflective article on the tenth anniversary of the release from Robben Island of President Nelson Mandela, the distinguished South African novelist, André Brink, recalls a sense of existential disorientation when he noted a blank wall in the airport building in Port Elizabeth announcing ‘YOU ARE NOW HERE’. That was it: a blank wall, no map, no plan. It serves as a useful metaphor for a peace process. A certain amount of disorientation is inevitable, as is the roller coaster between hope and despair. For us the question is which one we ‘would choose to define ourselves by: the moments of light or the dark intervals in between. Perhaps neither should be thinkable without the other. If humanity makes sense, it is not because it is capable of the best, or the worst, but of both’.

Let that be our starting point. To start with a blank wall and the question ‘where is here?’ may be incredibly daunting; and ‘we may not be yet,’ as Brink asserts, ‘where we'd like to be, but at least we are no longer “there” any more. Most importantly, we seem to be on our way “somewhere”’. Drawing on the small cell which Mandela occupied for 18 of his 27 years in prison, Brink concludes: ‘Our peculiar cell may yet expand to the dimensions of a larger and more human world’. This paper is concerned with such a journey, with the larger issues of time and space rather than more practical concerns of the modalities entailed in conflict transformation.

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One of the characteristics of an intense conflict is the growth of a cottage industry in navel-gazing. The assumption is that ‘our’ conflict is unique; that we have nothing to learn from elsewhere; and that indeed the rest of the world is as consumed with our quarrel as we are ourselves. It is incestuous and dangerously static. The Irish poet Louis MacNeice employs a useful metaphor: ‘bottled time turns sour upon the sill’. In the Middle East, in Eastern Europe and in Central America I have encountered a similar mindset: a selective obsession with the past, a narrow insularity about the present, and no proper concern with the future. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera captured its essence in Slowness: ‘the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear’.