Mari Fitzduff: earning a degree the hard way

She?s a clinical psychologist and a peacemaker.

By Patrick A. McGuire
Monitor staff

Imagine a young mother?s perspective on her world if she were changing her

baby?s diapers one morning in a staunchly Catholic area of Londonderry, Northern Ireland, and through one window saw members of the Provos?the Provisional Wing of the outlawed Irish Republican Army?maneuvering through the street, while out the other window she could see soldiers of the British army doing the same.

It might drive that mother to fear. Or hatred. Or despair. As it happens, it drove Mari Fitzduff, PhD, into a career as a psychologist.

'It was a very fraught place, with 30 people murdered in a very small area,' she recalled. 'Helicopters landing beside houses. Learning to step over trip wires. They were such to drive me to take my doctorate to look at the whole issue of change and how you move within a situation. To look specifically at the conflict-management process in Northern Ireland.'

Now, many years later, Fitzduff directs the Initiative on Conflict Resolution and Ethnicity?INCORE?a joint project of the United Nations University and the University of Ulster, and housed on its Magee College campus in Londonderry. Fitzduff shared her recollection of 'changing nappies,' with a group of scholars who convened at INCORE last month, to discuss the whys and hows of ethnopolitical warfare.

The group was brought together as part of another joint initiative, this time between APA and the Canadian Psychological Association, as the first step toward creating a new discipline in psychology to research, prevents and intervene in ethnic wars around the globe.

Fitzduff urged her international colleagues to help find practical solutions. 'Many academics,' she said, 'are used to thinking in terms of fundamental research but not in terms of options. It is difficult getting people?to bridge the gap between knowledge and practice.'

That doesn?t apply only to psychologists, she said, referring to the inability of local leaders and residents to avoid violence in a dispute over the routing of a Protestant parade through a Catholic neighborhood. 'As academics we often attempt to use rational approaches,' she said. 'In Northern Ireland, seeing a parade, reason goes out the window. Again and again rationality has been rejected here in terms of the need to belong.'

The detrimental effects of group identity were a recurring theme during this conference. And a key question raised by conflict in Northern Ireland, said Fitzduff?where a 12-year-old child can name 32 different ways to distinguish a Catholic from a Protestant ?is 'why human beings seem to have a need here to see very simply. And even where there?s not a difference between people, we will find it.'

She said politicians seem unable to understand 'the irrational nature of conflict,' and 'find it hard to lead us on to more complex ideas.' Instead, she said, the debate falls along simplistic lines. 'And it is so hard to prevail against the rhetoric of simplicity, the win-lose paradigm.'