The war on peace: Kristen Wall lost her job, but not her mission
Kristen Wall, who spent time growing up in Haywood County, spoke at the United Methodist Church’s Peace Conference, held at Lake Junaluska over the April 4 weekend. Cory Vaillancourt photo
It was 9:32 p.m. on Friday, March 28, and as Kristen Wall was getting ready for bed, she learned via email that she, along with colleagues, had just joined more than 200,000 federal workers who’d been fired. But Wall didn’t work for the National Park system, or the Social Security Administration, or NASA, or even FEMA. Wall’s work involves a somewhat higher purpose.
“My personal commitment to peace is not just a job or even a career,” she told a crowd at the United Methodist Church’s Peace Conference at Lake Junaluska April 4. “It is a life calling that I will continue regardless of the status of my employment, regardless of the existence of my organization, and yes, even regardless of the type of political system I live in.”
The Peace Conference got its start in 2006 when a 95-year-old peace advocate, Lake Junaluska resident and former Columbia College President Rev. Wright Spears, assembled members of the community from diverse backgrounds to foster dialogue around a simple, albeit elusive concept — peace.
“We’re engaging people of all faith traditions and many denominations, different faith traditions outside of Christianity, as well as people with no faith tradition,” said Rev. Beth Crissman, the Peace Conference’s director, district superintendent and director of peace building ministries for the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church. “But we are also very clear that we are speaking to the Christian church, because right now, we have a lot of work to do within the church to really reclaim the core of who we are and what we’re called to be about as builders of peace.”
The conference featured roughly two dozen speakers, including Crissman, giving presentations over two days on intersectional justice, bridging divides and cultivating inner peace at a time when divisiveness seems to be the prevailing sentiment. This year’s conference theme was “breaking down the dividing walls.”
“We actually launched our morning session by addressing that the dividing walls are not the differences that we have among us, but the hostility we have toward one another in those differences,” Crissman said. “This has become a highly politicized and divisive season, because we have as a nation started to use the differences among us — whether that’s difference in race, difference in gender identity, difference in socioeconomic standing — to pit against one another and to say that one person’s rights or ability to exist in a state of ‘shalom’ or wholeness or completeness is more important than someone else’s.”
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Wall, daughter of retired Haywood County physician Steve and wife Betsy, is an alum of both Tuscola High School and the North Carolina School of Science and Math, holds a bachelor’s degree in politics from Princeton University and a master’s degree in conflict transformation from Eastern Mennonite University. Previously, she led democracy and peacebuilding programs in Kosovo for the National Democratic Institute and researched nonviolent foreign policy at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. In 2017, she co-authored “Governance for Peace” and has taught nonviolent communication workshops to inmates, religious groups and peacebuilding students. Until receiving that Friday night email, she had worked on the learning, evaluation and research team at the U.S. Institute of Peace, where she co-authored a guide on monitoring dialogue in conflict zones.
“Throughout much of my adult career I have sought to share the practices of democracy and conflict transformation with other nations and partners who seek freedom and peace,” she said. “I have committed myself to walk, though at times very imperfectly, in the path of nonviolence and recognition of the innate dignity of all people. This includes the dignity of those misguided people who have ended my job and seek to destroy my organization.”
The U.S. Institute of Peace provides research, analysis, and training in areas such as diplomacy, mediation and peacebuilding to help prevent and resolve conflicts worldwide. Operating as a nonpartisan body, USIP is funded entirely through congressional appropriations to maintain its independence. Its headquarters are — or rather, were — in Washington, D.C., near the National Mall.
“This Institute, we think, will be a valuable source of scholarly research and information on ways in which we can promote peace with freedom,” Reagan said during Feb. 26, 1986, remarks on its establishment. “As Abraham Lincoln reminded us in his second inaugural address, ‘We must do all which may achieve a just and lasting peace with all nations.’ We should always remember that peace follows in freedom’s path and that conflicts erupt when the democratic will of the people is denied. History shows that democratic nations are naturally peaceful and nonaggressive. Democracies take up arms only in self-defense. I have always put in a sentence that people don’t start wars, governments do.”
In March 2025, USIP encountered significant challenges when the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk, sought to take control of the Institute. On March 14, Trump fired board members. Employees tried to prevent DOGE staffers from entering the building — which USIP considered private property — but according to Wired, “the DOGE team returned a few days later with a physical key they had gotten from a former security contractor.”
That led to a legal battle, with nearly all employees based in the U.S. being terminated. The situation worsened when a federal judge ruled in favor of DOGE’s intervention and allowed the USIP headquarters building to be transferred from the USIP to the General Services Administration.
One of USIP’s biggest wins, Wall said, was its long record of working to prevent extremism.
“One of the projects that we were doing that is now canceled is resettling former family members of former ISIS members who are at risk for re-radicalization,” she said. “Some of the work that USIP was doing was negotiating with tribes in Iraq so that they could figure out an approach to reintegrate sons and daughters of ISIS fighters from mothers that maybe had been raped or taken away from communities.”
Despite USIP’s important international successes over decades, Wall’s Peace Conference speech focused on the domestic issues that are simultaneously driving Americans apart and eroding the conditions Reagan thought necessary for democracy to flourish. Over 45 minutes, she broke it all down in terms that even a schoolchild could understand.
“I used to be a kindergarten teacher,” she said. “We must share this country. We must be patient and take turns. It’s okay to be angry, but it’s not okay to call names or grab or hit. We must use our words. It is that simple.”
In a more complex analysis, Wall said that as a rule-based system of order, democracy is based on the accountability of the three branches of government and that peaceful societies arise when democratic principles are utilized to solve conflicts without violence through political processes. In short, it’s hard to have peaceful societies without democracy, and it’s hard to have a democratic society without peace.
“I have come to the realization that democracy is a living thing,” she said. “It does not live in the past. It only lives in the present.”
