Opinion polling for peace

I remember vividly the great anxiety of my Israeli classmates at the University of Chicago in May 1967, as war clouds darkened in the Middle East. They were all in the military service. Soon some of them vanished—returning home in time to join the Six-Day War (June 5-10, 1967), when Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. Six months later, in Chicago again, they refused to tell war stories, to avoid reliving the pain of seeing their comrades die.

It was in 1990 that I began to meet Israelis regularly again. That was when Social Weather Stations (SWS) joined the International Social Survey Programme (issp.org) as its 12th member. Tel Aviv University, through its B.I. and Lucille Cohen Institute for Public Opinion Research, had been in ISSP for a few years already. The ISSP surveys being annual, there are now 33 national surveys by which Filipinos and Israelis may be compared, on a great variety of matters.

Some years ago, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (pcpsr.org), based in Ramallah, West Bank, also joined ISSP. Unfortunately, it was unable to maintain its membership for too long, perhaps for financial reasons—every member is responsible for its own costs, and membership gets suspended when two successive surveys are not done. But I want to stress that I have met the Palestinians, too; they are good people, equally capable of high-quality research.

Whereas ISSP is a network of institutes that work on common topics, the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) is an association of individuals who share their work in conferences and publications. Many ISSP people go to WAPOR meetings, too (“Pollsters meet in Amsterdam,” 9/30/11, which mentions Chinese, Indians, Latvians, Pakistanis, Russians, and Taiwanese in particular). The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology has a good reputation; I just haven’t had the pleasure of meeting a Ukrainian pollster yet.

Polling for peace in particular. The very long and difficult process of establishing peace is a social one, involving many groups: the topmost VIPs of the belligerents, who make the big decisions, the many little people below whose consent is needed to prolong tranquility, and sometimes a few scientists on the side who help clarify the quarrels to the quarrelers.

The great success story has been Northern Ireland, where the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Belfast has held for 25 years (www.peacepolls.org). There, “public opinion polls were used as a tool to enhance the peace process by increasing party inclusiveness, developing issues and language, testing agreement proposals, helping to set deadlines …” The most heralded practitioner of peace polling is professor Colin John Irwin of the University of Liverpool, who has worked in many other areas aside from Northern Ireland.

In the Philippines, SWS did several national surveys in 2012-14 about the Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro, which had been signed by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the government in October 2012. In 2015, it did a Mindanao survey in February, and national surveys in March and June (“Filipino Public Opinion on the Bangsamoro Basic Law and the Mamasapano Incident,” SWS, August 2015, and “Philippines: Polling the Peace Process,” by Christian Hope Reyes, asiafoundation.org, 9/9/15). SWS is doing more surveys on the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao.The crisis in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Opinion polling about the conflict is surely going on in Palestine, in Israel, and probably in the countries of their friends and enemies too. Much of it is simply for news, while some of it is, hopefully, for serious peace advocacy. There are so many players whose views deserve to be polled; this is not like asking for voting preferences.

The only thing certain is that both Israel and Palestine have social scientists with the capability and the courage to do opinion polling for peace. Let us all pray that their work will be heeded.

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