On The Balcony Dr. Hugh O'Doherty: Who Are We Without the Enemy?
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As we arrive at the final conversation of Season Two, we turn to one of the deepest questions that has quietly threaded through the entire series: what happens when the conflicts we face are not simply disagreements, but conflicts about identity?
In this episode, Michael Koehler sits down with Dr. Hugh O'Doherty, longtime teacher of Adaptive Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and a practitioner of peacebuilding shaped by his experience growing up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Hugh's life unfolded inside a history of deep division, between Protestant unionists who identified with Britain and Catholic nationalists who identified with Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement brought an end to most large-scale violence in 1998, but the deeper work of peacebuilding, identity, grief, history, and trust, continues.
Drawing on decades of work in conflict resolution, Hugh reflects on what exercising leadership looks like when people are asked to engage across seemingly unbridgeable divides. At the heart of the conversation lies a profound paradox: the very identities we cling to in order to know who we are can become the barriers that keep us trapped.
Toward the end of the episode, Hugh shares a reading from Prior Unity, a reflection suggesting something radical. Beneath our divisions, unity is not something we must create. It may already be true.
What You'll Explore in This Episode
Growing Up Inside Conflict: Hugh shares what it meant to grow up in Northern Ireland during decades of violence, where identity was shaped early and reinforced daily, in schools, communities, and public rituals. These early experiences formed the backdrop for his lifelong search to understand the roots of violence.
Learning to Sit in the Fire: Working in early peace and reconciliation efforts, Hugh describes the experience of bringing people from opposing sides of the conflict into dialogue, and discovering how little preparation there was for what happens when the "other" is truly encountered. One of the most important capacities he developed was not intellectual. It was the ability to remain in the heat of conflict without fleeing from it.
The Paradox of Identity: A turning point came when Hugh realized something unsettling: we often need the other as an enemy in order to know who we are. Letting go of that structure is not simply a change in opinion. It is a loss of identity. Adaptive leadership offers a way of understanding this. People do not resist change. They resist loss.
Peace Agreements and Adaptive Work: Hugh reflects on the limits of traditional peace agreements. While they can stop violence, they often leave the deeper adaptive work untouched. Real reconciliation requires something much harder: helping people see how they themselves are participating in the very systems that keep conflict alive.
The Inner Work of Peacebuilding: Over time, Hugh came to see that the work of peacebuilding is inseparable from inner work. The divisions we see in the world mirror divisions we carry within ourselves. The journey toward peace is therefore both political and deeply personal.
Prior Unity: In the closing moments of the conversation, Hugh shares a reading that has shaped his own path: the idea that beneath our identities and divisions, the world is already a unity. Not a unity we must build, but one we may awaken to.
Quotes from This Episode
"I learned to sit in the fire." — Dr. Hugh O'Doherty
"The more I kept him as the other, the more I realized I was keeping myself imprisoned." — Dr. Hugh O'Doherty
"We need the other as enemy in order to know who we are." — Dr. Hugh O'Doherty
"People don't resist change. They resist loss." — Dr. Hugh O'Doherty
"The world is a prior unity. It is not that there is a unity yet to be established which you must seek for and work on. Unity is so." — Adi Da Samraj, quotes by Dr. Hugh O'Doherty
Links & Resources
Lectures by Hugh O’Doherty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0I1yMElyFA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLlnwEUKxMQ
Reading Shared in This Episode Adi Da Samraj. Prior Unity: The Basis for a New Human Civilization. Middletown, CA: The Adi Da Foundation Press, 2015.
In this short philosophical work, Adi Da argues that humanity's deepest conflicts arise from the assumption of separateness. The book proposes a different starting point: the recognition that the world is already a prior unity, and that transformation begins with awakening to that reality.
About Dr. Hugh O'Doherty
Dr. Hugh O'Doherty is an adjunct lecturer who has taught leadership and conflict resolution at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, and the University of Maryland. Raised in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, his work has focused on peacebuilding and dialogue across deep identity divides.
He directed the Ireland–US Public Leadership Program for emerging practitioners from across the political parties in Ireland and led the Inter-Group Relations Project bringing together political and community figures to establish protocols for political dialogue. Hugh has consulted with organizations including the Irish Civil Service, the American Leadership Forum, the Episcopalian Clergy Leadership Program, and the Mohawk Community Leadership Program in Canada. His work has also taken him to Bosnia, Croatia, and Cyprus, and he has addressed the United Nations Global Forum on Reinventing Government.
He holds an M.Ed. and Ed.D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Continue the Conversation
New episodes of On the Balcony drop every two weeks. Receive additional reflections and resources at konu.org/balcony.
Season Three will turn toward practitioners, people out in the world practicing adaptive leadership: their struggles, experiments, and lessons. If you know someone whose practice we should explore, Michael would love to hear from you.