by Heidi Burgess

April 18. 2023

Background

For the last five years or so, Beyond Intractability has been focused particularly on the highly destructive nature of political conflicts in the United States and elsewhere, particularly in developed democracies around the world. We, along with many other people, have been alarmed by the degree to which all issues have been framed as existential win-lose battles between “us” (the good guys) and “them (the bad guys). The dynamics are scarily similar to dynamics our peacebuilder colleagues have seen in places like Rwanda, Bosnia, Syria, and Sudan, where horrific genocides have taken place.  The assumption, up until recently, was such a conflagration couldn’t, wouldn’t, happen in the U.S. or other developed democracies.  Many of us are no longer so sure.

About two years ago, we got involved with the folks at the Institute (formerly Conference) for Global Negotiation where we met a former French diplomat, Jean-Jacques Sebrenat. Jean-Jacques shares our concern about threats to and the deterioration of democracy. He wrote a piece on his view of the problem for the BI/CRQ Hyper-Polarization Discussion, which started out with two questions: 1. How are the current trends in U.S. democracy impacting governance practices elsewhere, and 2. What are some “best practices” worthy of implementation in all democracies and in countries aspiring to democracy?

Years ago, when we (the Burgesses) were just starting Beyond Intractability, we convened three conferences to which we invited highly experienced scholars and practitioners, from a wide range of conflict-related roles, to discuss how we could better handle our most intractable conflicts. Not surprisingly, we got many different answers, as people were coming from many different places, different backgrounds, and different experiences. Rather than deciding that some of these ideas were right, and others were wrong, the group unanimously agreed that all were right – for a particular time and place. By putting all these ideas and experiences together in one virtual place (as we have tried to do on Beyond Intractability), we were able to “stitch together” a set of approaches – a meta-narrative or encyclopedia of sorts – for enabling people to live together peacefully, despite their sometimes deep differences.

We and Jean-Jacques decided that it would be interesting to host a similar discussion which looked at a version of his second question: what are some “best-practices” that can be implemented to strengthen democracies where they are being challenged, and to build them up where they do not yet exist.  Since this discussion ended up being hosted by the Institute for Global Negotiation, we decided to give the topic a “negotiation spin,” hence the title “Strengthening Negotiation's Role as a Cornerstone of Successful Democracies.” 

We began our discussion by offering four initial questions:

• Why are so many societies abandoning power-with approaches to governance and decision making in favor of power-over approaches?  And, most importantly, what can be done to reverse that trend?
• How can we get more people to abandon the prevailing "us-vs-them" mindset when even the suggestion of compromise is so widely seen as traitorous?
• How can we scale up our traditionally small-scale, table-oriented processes to deal with the size and complexity of conflicts that envelope entire societies?
• How can we better counter "bad faith actors" who are trying to advance their narrow interests by generating and inflaming tensions and hatred?

These questions were addressed by about 24 people who got together in three breakout rooms—each with about 6 people.  After about 45 minutes of separate discussions, a subset of participants continued the discussion in one room for another hour.  We told each of the breakout groups that they could focus on any of those four questions that they wanted to, and that we were following “Chatham House Rules,” meaning anyone can use the information given, but without attribution.  We did record the break out sessions, but only for the purpose of preparing this report.  We agreed that the recordings would not be made public, though the report would be.

The following summarizes many of the excellent ideas which were shared in each of the rooms, and then the main room at the end. As you will see, the groups approached the problem at different levels of aggregation (ranging from the small group to the societal) with some groups focused more on trying to understand contemporary challenges, and other groups comparing notes about things that are being done to help improve democracy around the world. In the months ahead, we hope to convene more such discussions to add to and flesh out some of these ideas. Ultimately our goals is to create a more up-to-date set of materials on how to best handle the many highly-intractable conflict challenges we all face today.

Room 1 Highlights:

This group, more than the other two, jumped directly into the question of what negotiators and conflict resolution practitioners can do about strengthening democracy by discussing what they, themselves, were doing.

One person was doing research on the institutionalization of the new autonomous region of Bangsamoro in the Philippines. This, another participant observed, is a useful conflict resolution mechanism. “By breaking things down into smaller jurisdictions and trying to not have the whole nation run by some central power, one can reduce conflict.  That's one of the underappreciated aspects of U.S. democracy as we have so many different jurisdictions. So many different communities can run themselves in very different ways. And a lot of our problem here in the U.S. is trying to force one way to live and to govern on everybody. And that doesn't go over very well.”

Another participant was thinking about Israel, and its highly-escalated fight over what is being called “judicial reform.” “Netanyahu is going to give a speech tonight where I understand he is going to say they're going to slow down the judicial reform. And if that's true, then it is an amazing testimonial to the power of the people who have been on the streets, protesting for weeks against what seemed to be a tremendous government overreach.” And, indeed, Netanyahu did slow down judicial reform, clearly illustrating the power of widespread nonviolent direct action.

Other people talked about the importance of convening.  One person is trying to get people from around the world to come together to “and see if we can find global common principles of how to find peace within yourself, peace within your family, peace within your community, peace within your nation and the last layer is peace between nations.” But before the face-to-face get together, they are setting up working groups with online meetings to explore those layers of conflict.  The goal is to get more people engaged. “Right now, I sense that most people, like 99% of the people in the world, are almost standing beside a train and just watching it run. And it is a few governments who are running it. But the people are not on board on the train, they are just watching it, as if they are extras in a movie. They are just watching the movie play out. If they started running the train, things would go differently. . . .I don't think there is a huge wish from the people on the streets to have all these conflicts going on.” So he is trying to engage what he calls "peace helpers" around the world to help us all address our conflicts in constructive ways.

They have a logo depicting peace helpers that is shaped like a tree. “The reason we made it into a tree was because we have this idea that peace should spread organically. So we have these little groups and hopefully many more little groups around the world will hopefully start, not a revolution, but a peace movement from the bottom up, because from the top down right now, it doesn't look good.”

Another participant talked about leadership development. He formed a nonprofit, originally, to help “build a more peaceful world. We've changed that more recently to healthy societies because we think that seems like a more tangible goal.” They are “working with communities to engage people and try to build leadership capacity of community members at the grassroots level, and then [get citizens to] engage in dialog with public officials so that people understand how government works, and how to work through differing views. So we're creating an online (at your own pace) leadership academy, with the goal being to help people, first of all, understand how decisions are made, how resources are allocated, but then talk about leadership skills, conflict resolution skills, etc., so that as people get into these settings, where they may be involved with some policy discussions, they can approach it in a civil way.” They are starting in just one state, but are hoping to expand to others. “I know a lot of our frustrations concern what happens at the national level. But I do believe that while work needs to be done at that level, I do think that if we can create more resilient communities at the community level, it will potentially bubble up.”

One of the challenges to getting people fruitfully engaged, however, is the complexity – and scariness – of the problems facing us. One participant said that she “grew up as a very anxious child. And my way of dealing with uncertainty and risk was just to pour all of my soul and time and energy into my schoolwork and to try and keep control of my environment by anticipating and planning. But I wore myself out. I literally burned out doing that when I was in my early 30s, which forced me to revisit how I do everything. And I learned the hard way that production is a road to misery. Certainty doesn't exist. And good enough is mostly enough. And just through the course of life, I've learned that I never have perfect options. I just have choices. So, how do I go about making choices? How do I position myself so I have as many options as possible?  I used to be very hard on other people, but I was hard on other people because I was very hard on myself. And once I stopped being so hard on myself, that allowed me to be kinder to other people. We need to do that at scale. I think leads to a lot better outcomes.”

“We need to have a willingness to try and understand and practice curiosity” she continued. "When we hear something we strongly disagree with, instead of jumping in immediately and saying, 'well, that's clearly wrong,' it helps to stop and think, 'well, I think you're barking mad, but there's a reason you think what you think. Can you tell me more about it?' ”

Another participant talked about the challenge of “knowledge cycling.” “There are always new people entering conflicts and older people getting older or just burning out and leaving. A lot of hard-learned lessons get lost in the process. And there's lots and lots of effort we go through the really trying to reinvent the wheel. So if we could increase the efficiency with which people learn these lessons, that would be a major step forward. We tend to focus a little too much on coming up with the latest and greatest idea, not so much about really utilizing ideas that we've had for a very long time.

Along these lines, one academic participant described how he tried to research what worked and what didn’t work, primarily in international relations and international peacemaking and peacebuilding, and then transfer that knowledge to graduate students who could take it and act upon it. 

That led to a discussion of how we define "success." One person noted that we tend to think of success in conflict resolution to mean that “the conflict was resolved. There was an agreement, and everybody was happy. But sometimes those "successes" don't last.

One participant observed that  "one way in which our field may have failed, is in terms of sustainability. When we bring people into the mediation room, we can usually get them to reach some common ground and perhaps come up with some integrative solutions. But then, how do we keep them implementing those solutions and committed to them when they go back to their respective constituencies? That seems to be very problematic. How do we build a culture that supports them? How do we build a container that will support a really different way of thinking and acting? How do we design and implement systems so they are part of the culture…so that you deal with your differences, you communicate about problems, and it’s just the way you do business.  And hopefully you do it when it's small and addressable. And if you can’t, then there’s support from outside mediation.  But the ideal is that it will really be self-guiding and self-directing."

Following on this thought, one participant made the distinction between conflict-negative cultures that assume that “a bad thing and we have to get rid of it,” and conflict positive cultures which see conflict as a good thing—as a way for cultures to learn, change, and improve.  When people from this culture have a conflict,  “our job isn't necessarily to solve them, our job is to engage each other and encounter each other and figure out how we're going to work through this together.” True success, it was observed, goes farther than a particular decision.  "It involves changing the way a society operates, or changing corporate culture and the way that we, individually, approach things. And these go to the longer term question of sustainability and how we really deal with difficult conflicts.

One of the last ideas suggested was the National Issues Forum process. “They take a topic and they run them out in various communities around the country. I wonder if we could create more of a public dialogue around some of these issues using that kind of a mechanism. You could also do something like that with community conflict resolution centers around the country. I'm sure they are in other countries as well. Because you have to create a movement somewhat at that level, right? If you think about all the community mediation centers that are around, what if we tried to start a dialogue through all of those around the country at the same time?

Room 2 Highlights:

This breakout group said that before they could really talk about how to address the problem of threats to democracy, they needed to talk about what they saw as the nature and causes of these threats. 

Prominent among the drivers of polarization the group discussed was the level of threat so many people are feeling today  –  from natural disasters and climate change, violence, failing economics, mass migrations, the pandemic, etc. “People are feeling unmoored,” one participant observed, and that sense of unmooring drives people into narrow identity groups that give folks a sense of security, of belonging.

“In times of great stress, if you look historically, us-versus-them narratives tend to develop.  And right now, we just have such a strong combination of stressors.”

Also important, someone else observed, is the speed of change. “People feel like they've lost control of their lives. And so it's so easy to blame somebody else for that. People just don't know how to harness that change."

Others, however, didn’t think any of this was new: “we’ve been highly polarized forever: there’s always been some element of an us-versus-them. Sometimes the “us” has been different groups and sometimes the “them” has been different groups, but there's always been that dynamic and it often has been quite strong.”

But others felt that the problem was getting worse: “There has always been Republicans and Democrats, buy they used to have healthy debates. It was not polarized to the point where today so many of my Democratic friends are saying, ‘I don't even talk to Republicans anymore.” It's that kind of polarization, it’s society wide. So beforehand, they might be angry over an issue, but not in general, so they won't talk to them. That is, in my view, the difference we see now.”

Everyone agreed that social media is contributing to the problem.

“Technology is an accelerant. Yes, there have always been us-versus-them problems in the United States and globally.  But it has only involved a fairly small number of people. And then everybody else wasn't really engaged. They were just going about their lives. They weren't really politically active. And now with social media, everybody is politically active. Everybody is in their own silo getting their own narrative, having totally different worldviews.” These divergent notions of ‘what is’ and ‘what should be’ are both created and constantly reinforced by social media, and it gets harder and harder to leave. If someone diverges from “the truth” as their side sees it, they risk being shamed or shunned or worse.

We agreed that the algorithms social media platforms use are big contributors to the problem  –  showing people more and more stories that reinforce their chosen point of view.  Wouldn’t it be great, one participant observed, if these algorithms could be changed to show a diversity of views? (A Harvard program is apparently working on that.)  The impediment to that, though, is our “economic model. These are privately owned companies.  They make their money through advertising and the way to do that is to keep their viewers hooked as long as possible. It’s all about engagement.” 

What she didn’t say, but implied, was that telling people what they want to hear keeps them hooked.  Challenging their beliefs won’t do that. So, “it would be very hard to incentivize Meta [the parent company of Facebook] to change their algorithms. But there could be federal regulation that would require that they show different viewpoints to their viewers.”  Europe is doing this more than the United States already, another participant observed.

We also discussed that social media can be used for good.  One person told a story about how the Internet was being used in Taiwan to hold large scale deliberative discussions.  Zoom, we noted, was allowing us to have this discussion today, a discussion which was massively more expensive when we held similar discussions as we started Beyond Intractability back in the early 2000s. So, tech is a source of hope, as well as threat.  We just need to learn to utilize it for pro-social ends,  and discourage and disrupt its use for anti-social goals.

This can be helped by programs teaching “social media literacy.” A peacebuilding project in Bosnia taught high school students how to check sources, how to check the truth of things you are being shown. “They were very successful, and they had student champions who then posted all sorts of stuff [about social media literacy] and taught others.”

There has also been some effort to create federal legislation or ground rules for cable network accountability.  The Fox News/Dominion Voting Machine case may contribute to that effort.

Another challenge discussed is, as one person put it, “we don’t read anymore. The older generation does, but the younger generation doesn’t really read. Everything is in soundbites. So when you're talking about conflict, you don't have a chance to go into the subtle differences and discover how much you have in common, that there is this commonality among us, unless you can convene people, bring them together and have them tell stories.”

Though it wasn’t said at the time, but is obvious as I write this up…such convenings can happen online as well as face-to-face. So that’s another way to use tech for pro-social ends.

Another observation made just at the end, which we couldn’t address (but should!) is how we can address the “underlying fissures and fractures that were already there? Is the emphasis on fixing the media doing anything to eradicate or fix the underlying causes of division that are just being manipulated or exploited by power brokers who stand to benefit from these divisions?.”

Room 3 Highlights:

Key ideas presented in this session were the following:

Totalitarian regimes use belief systems and religion to stifle democratic institutions and practices. One participant spoke about the links between religion and politics in countries like Afghanistan or Iran. In their view, it is difficult to envisage a negotiation which could lead to any improvement in basic rights. For lack of a more efficient approach, fostering awareness and resistance is the only way to keep one’s ideals alive under autocratic rule. Democracy can only occur in countries with a minimum of political diversity, individual freedoms and economic viability.

Sometimes viewed as a distant pursuit, democracy can be attractive, and can actually bring tangible benefits. The example of the European Union comes to mind. Candidate countries must meet a number of standards (separation of powers, political diversity, trustworthy institutions, efficient processes, economic viability) before being admitted as members. They are attracted by the benefits of membership, such as structural funds, the ability to take part in common policies, and being seated in the EU’s institutions (Council, Commission, Parliament, Court of Justice).

Another way of preserving and promoting democracy is by adopting a global view. The current pattern of international relations does not seem capable of addressing some of the major challenges of our times, e.g. the preservation of our ecosystem, the containment of pandemics, large-scale monetary instability, or war as a default mechanism for conflict resolution.

More than ever, information is of prime importance in a globalized world. Education, reliable data, truthful news reporting all play a big role in enhancing awareness, which in turn is an indispensable component of democracy.”

Ending Plenary

The closing plenary included a few people from each of the original breakout rooms. The discussion went on for another hour and a lot more ideas were shared. Among them were:  

• "After listening to the discussion and the summary of the other two discussions, it still seems there is a tension between just trying to end the conflict, and trying to have a good ending…one which is progressive.  I would argue that in the United States we have conflicts that were very badly waged, which cumulatively produced our present problems. And there were also unwaged conflicts — latent conflicts — that contributed to our problems too.  Because if they would have been waged more openly, things would be better.  It was the smothering of conflict that has contributed to the disaster that our country is currently facing.  I would argue that we need to pay much more attention to how you get good results, that lead to more equality, allowing people to have a better life.  That should be part of the agenda.

• There’s a question of when things should be negotiated and when they should not be.  Looking at the current conflict in Israel over judicial reform.  Should that be negotiated, or should it be addressed with a power-based approach such as nonviolent direct action (as occurred) or even violence, if non-violence didn’t work.  We’re facing similar questions in the United States.  Are the threats to democracy here so severe that they have to be met with force, rather than negotiation?  Do we have to take a solely adversarial view and beat “the bad guys”? And is there a way to take an adversarial view, but do it constructively? (And what do we mean by “constructive” or “good outcome”?)
   
• One participant had an important caution about the level of generality of the whole discussion.  “When we paint with a broad brush as if any conflict was just as comparable to any other conflict, we come up with tools that we assume fit our case, but they often don’t.  What we've been talking about just doesn't apply to everything. For instance, some people here are looking at international conflicts. And the Americans in the group were thinking about our problems here. And people from other countries who are thinking about their problems there. But we weren't talking the same language because the context is so different.” Another person observed that even the word "conflict" means many different things.  He always advises his students to put a few adjectives before the word to explain what they mean.
   
• This discussion made one participant wonder if we’d be better off with a lot of small earthquakes or one big earthquake.  Several of us agreed—we want lots of small earthquakes. So better to confront conflicts as they come, rather than let them build up until they explode.
   
• One participant talked about a former Islamic militant he had recently talked to in the Bangsamoro Autonomous region of the Philippines who had moved from an Islamic Freedom movement to the peace movement because “he realized that the Christians are not the enemy, the Muslims are not the enemy, the oppression is the enemy." And this is actually a framework that think can be applied in a very broad sense and on different scales. And at the same time, it also brings up the connection between oppression and exploitation on the economic sense.”
   
• “It is important to that we don’t think of conflict as a discreet item that opens and closes.  They are ongoing!  The issues of inequality are persistent.”
   
• Another participant told a story of talking to a friend who observed that “you people who do conflict resolution are missing an important point: that is that most people don't come to a conflict looking for the kinds of resolutions that you provide. They're looking for answers to the substantive problem.   . . . We [in the conflict resolution field] have skill sets that could help them do that, but my friends [in advocacy roles] are telling me to “put the conflict resolution software off center stage, take on the issue that people are raising first, join in their struggle if that's the word you want to use, and help them get to a better place". . . . We discovered several years ago that when people have a conflict, they don’t go to the community mediation forks.  They go to their pastors.  They go to their coaches.  They even go to their cops before they come to us.  But we have a critical role to play and that is getting off of center stage, and helping other people to get there.
   
• In response, another participant said that “I do think that we, coming out of the conflict resolution/peacebuilding field have something to offer there. "We've developed a lot of skills over the years and thinking about conflict analysis and how various factors work together to create conflict dynamics. ”We need to help parties understand those conflict dynamics, and see the big picture, as well as the close-in, local picture. Democracies are really stressed to be able to meet the complexities of our world. I think those current challenges are going to require collaborative solutions.
   
• She continued, "Unfortunately, they can't just be solved by nation states. They affect the global commons. So it's getting very complicated, as well as the fact that we need to think locally and to think about very specific problems. So I totally agree, we do need we need to think about what are the actual issues that people bring forward. But the part of me that likes to think systemically tries to think about where our potential points of entry and leverage are, whether one's thinking about working with governments or with civil society or what. I really like Heidi and Guy Burgess’s notion of “massively parallel peacebuilding.”  We have accumulated a lot of really wonderful peacebuilding frameworks over the years and those things are valuable. But we also need to rethink some of those frameworks and paradigms to make them best fit our current more-complicated-than-ever situation."
   
• Another observer also thought that mediators an play an important role by creating opportunities for people to listen to one another and to reframe an issue.  "Often issues are framed as either-or issues, and they aren’t that. Or they don’t have to be. If you can reframe the question from who is right and who is wrong to 'how can we solve our mutual problem,' all sorts of things change.  Mediators and facilitators know what questions need to be asked to set up a constructive process – and process is the key. So our job is to keep helping people because a lot of people think they can do this conflict resolution stuff without professional guidance because they’ve had a course in it, or that’s their nature of leadership. But to really know how to get under the surface issues to the underlying structure parts…it takes looking deeper. So mediators and facilitators can ask those questions, create those arenas where people can really talk to each other and frame those issues so that there are opportunities."
   
• She continued, "I really believe in creating opportunities for people to talk about what it should look like, the normative side.  What do we want to see it look like?  That's where people's energy go.  I've done consensus-building meetings over wilderness issues where people were shooting each other − killing cows, shooting tires, but when you said, “what would you like to see this land to look like?” They all wanted the same thing. They all wanted it preserved. And it was so interesting, but nobody got to the point of being able to ask them what they would really like to see. And all of a sudden, they realized they were all environmentalists, even with a little e, not a Big  E. And then they were able to get their issues resolved."
   
• Another participant agreed, saying “ so many times people are angry, and they want to express the anger. They want to demonstrate that they are really angry about what their condition is. But if that anger can get transformed, to answer the question “what change do you want, specifically,” it's more likely to get a hearing. And people can discover, well, yeah, that's not unreasonable. It may be even mutually beneficial. So finding ways to fight constructively is really important."
   
• A question was raised about the normative approach−is it focused on interests or is it focused on values?  "If you ask people what they want, that’s focusing on interests, isn’t it?  Right now it seems that people will not talk to each other and will not consider each other’s point of view if they don’t first line up on the left or right on environment or equality vs. equity, etc. So people just don’t engage with people with different values, which to me, is one of the big sources of polarization.  Whereas, if you let them talk about what they would like to see happen—which I see as interests--then they would find that they would get together behind certain things that they would never discuss otherwise because they’re not on the same page value wise."
   
• A related issue is that some leaders are taking the grievances of people who have been neglected, and reframing those grievances as the fault of a scapegoat or other bad people for their own personal gain.  The way of countering that is to really understand what the grievances are and what the basis is for those grievances.  Then they can be constructively addressed.
   
• A question was asked about whether we have a catalog of what works and what doesn’t. We have so many tools and so much experience, has it been evaluated?  Yes, one participant answered!  The Alliance for Peacebuilding has the Eirene Peacebuilding Database that does just that.  It focuses on international peacekeeping, not domestic conflict resolution, but since domestic conflicts are beginning to look a lot like ones in which international peacebuilders have long been involved, the lessons are likely to be useful domestically as well.
   
• One other thought on evaluation is that if you look at things at the super- macro scale, asking if a peacebuilder is able “to bring peace in our time to some particularly war torn part of the world, it's very hard to find clear successes. But if you start looking at the micro level of, for instance, were you we able to find ways of bringing people together to talk about their mutual problems? Were you able to solve some aspects of the problem, or stop regional fighting, or address local needs?  Those, too, are successes."
   
• But, another person added, you should also look at failures. "If you think at the level of general principles, we know a lot.  But each conflict is unique, which means you don't have a sample size big enough to do a standard statistical approach. So I'm thinking though that, for instance, we should also look at failures. I’m thinking that those are more generalizable than the successes.  Because we keep doing the same thing and sometimes it pans out and sometimes it doesn’t. So maybe we should also learn from things that didn’t work, not anywhere or not mostly. So that we don’t try it again."
   
• One thing that worked well that is worth emulating is the European Union. Each candidate for membership is called upon to meet a great number of requirements: political criteria, rule of law, etc. By meeting these criteria, these countries have undergone a huge change. For instance they have adopted separation of powers with a more independent judiciary.  If you have a larger than thou and a larger than me, it provides an objective of integration. But it is an integration which does not take away your own identity and your national structures, but serves a greater purpose, which allows you to see whether you feel like becoming part of that vast project or not.

Summing up, and where to now?

We were originally planning to share a much shorter report, focusing on themes.  But there were so many themes and so much richness to these conversations, that we didn’t want to condense it all down to a few pat answers: social media needs to be controlled, people should focus on what they want, not just on their anger, we need to be curious about the other.  Those were themes, yes, but there were countless more, as we hope we have demonstrated with this report.

As for next steps, we are going to mine the ideas presented here, and we may reach out to some of you for more details about some of your stories. We also hope to have more such discussions in the future.

But we firmly believe that “massively parallel peacebuilding” is already happening, it just isn’t particularly visible.  We hope that by making it visible, more people will replace despair with hope, and will be willing to add their own personal efforts to the cause. 

We are convinced that if we all work together, we can overcome our many challenges and build a world that is safe and welcoming to everyone. But we can’t do that if we don’t try.  So we hope everyone who has read this far will join in our effort to build out this knowledge base, spread the word about the information that is already available, and share your thoughts about what else is needed, what other ideas should be included, and how else we can make this system stronger.

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*Beyond Intractability doesn’t have members, but we do have many people we have worked with over the years, and we invited those who have been most active with us recently and who are interested in this topic to join this discussion.