Making Peace
Neu uses language and the art of mediation to create a safer world
By Eva Emerson
As a linguist, USC College alumna Joyce Neu (M.A. ’80, Ph.D. ’85) understands the power of language. In her career as a peacemaker and international mediator, she uses that power to try to find ways to resolve conflicts and end violence.
Neu, now the executive director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice (IPJ) at the University of San Diego, began to organize and lead global peacemaking efforts while at The Carter Center in Atlanta. In her job as senior associate director of the conflict resolution program there, Neu had close contact with former President Jimmy Carter, the 2002 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Under the auspices of the center, Neu helped to negotiate a four-month ceasefire between Bosnian Muslims and Serbs in 1994. Her negotiations with leaders in the Sudan and Uganda built the foundation for the Nairobi Agreement of 1999, which restored bilateral relations between the nations. She was part of an innovative conflict prevention program in Estonia and has worked in the former Soviet states of Georgia, Latvia and Moldova to assess how conflicts could be resolved.
In 2000, the National Peace Foundation presented a Peacemaker/Peacebuilder Award to Neu, citing her “pioneering, multifaceted work in Africa.” Neu has facilitated high-level mediations between parties in conflict in Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia and Mali. In Rwanda, she has trained African women in conflict resolution. She has served on numerous institutional boards, been named a senior Fulbright professor, and traveled the world lecturing, training and mediating.
Neu learned much about the art of mediation from Carter, who she calls “a naturally gifted negotiator.”
Yet she also traces many of her skills in conflict resolution back to her academic training in linguistics at the College.
Beginning when she was a doctoral student, Neu focused her research on the ways that language is used during negotiations. Although her dissertation looked specifically at the language of buyers and sellers in sales negotiations, she has since broadened her scope to include the dynamics of political and intercultural negotiations.
“I’ve looked very carefully at the ways people develop and maintain relationships” in negotiations, she says. “It’s those relationships that are so essential in maintaining a peace once it’s negotiated.”
When Neu first arrived at USC, she had studied how people learn a second language. In fact, throughout her time at USC she taught English as a second language (ESL) classes at the College’s American Language Institute (ALI).
“My experiences at ALI have been tremendously helpful,” Neu says. “I give a lot of credit for that to Dave Eskey,” the director of ALI in the late ’70s and early ’80s.
Eskey, a linguist and professor of education until his recent death (see Eskey obit, page 23), introduced innovative teaching methods at ALI, training instructors to work with small groups. “We were heads and tails ahead of everyone else,” says Neu, who has called upon these same small-group techniques many times during mediations with presidents, opposition leaders, diplomats and citizens.
Looking back, she says she values the rigors of the linguistics training she received at USC. “It helps to have been trained in statistics, in analyzing data for patterns and thinking critically. I find it helpful to look across the different conflicts I’ve worked on for patterns—while all conflicts are different, there are some shared characteristics.
“My career has taken a circuitous path,” says Neu, who left USC for a position in ESL at Pennsylvania State before going to The Carter Center. But she believes she has found her calling in her present position at IPJ, which she expects to build into a major peacemaking center in the western U.S.
“If anyone had told me 15 years ago that I’d be doing what I’m doing now, I never would have believed it,” she says.
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