Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott J. Allen, Ph.D.

Leadership in Conflict: Insights from Northern Ireland with Dr. Joanne Murphy

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 270

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Dr. Joanne Murphy is Chair of Inclusive Leadership at Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham. Her research explores leadership, change and organisational development in political volatility, including environments affected by ethno-political conflict. Her latest book is Management and War: How Organisations Navigate Conflict and Build Peace.


A Few Quotes From This Episode

  • “I grew up in Northern Ireland and was part of this ‘troubles generation.’ That has defined, to a very large extent, the work that I do, because conflict and violence became a big part of my reality.”
  • “What I’m really interested in—and I suppose the connective tissue through my work—is leadership. How do we get people to understand conflict and then lead them out of it?”
  • “When we talk about things like war or these intractable, wicked problems, they seem to be more prevalent rather than less. And that’s why understanding conflict—and how leaders can help resolve it—matters so much.”

A Quote From Hume's Nobel Speech

  • "All conflict is about difference, whether the difference is race, religion or nationality...Difference is of the essence of humanity. Difference is an accident of birth and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. The answer to difference is to respect it. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace – respect for diversity."

Resources Mentioned in This Episode 

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

About  Scott J. Allen

My Approach to Hosting

  • The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, rese


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Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.

Scott Allen  0:00 

Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis podcast. Thank you so much for checking in wherever you are in the world. Practical Wisdom for Leaders. Today, I have Dr. Joanne Murphy, and she is chair of Inclusive Leadership at Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham in the UK. Her research explores leadership, change, and organizational development in political volatility, including environments affected by ethnopolitical conflict. Her latest book is ‘Management and War: How Organisations Navigate Conflict and Build Peace.’ Joanne, such a pleasure to be with you a few months ago in Birmingham at the International Studying Leadership Conference. Just had a truly wonderful experience there, and I'm excited to have this conversation today. What do listeners need to know about you that maybe isn't in that short bio? What's something that can help them learn a little bit more about you?

 

Joanne Murphy  0:49 

Oh, that's a great question. Well, first, Scott, can I just say what an absolute pleasure it is? I'm one of your very many, many listeners, and it is just such a thrill to be part of the podcast. So, thank you for that, to begin with. In terms of me, as I'm sure listeners can probably tell, I'm someone who grew up in Ireland. Very specifically, grew up in Northern Ireland, and was part of this kind of troubles generation in Northern Ireland. So, I grew up during the conflict in Northern Ireland. And, for any of you who watch Netflix, you may have seen Derry Girls, so I was one of those people that went to school in the middle of all of that death and destruction and dreadful things with good things happening at the same time, and the contradictions of all of that. So, I suppose that has defined, to a very large extent, the work that I do, and the things that I'm interested in, and conflict and violence is a big part of that. But actually, what I'm really interested in, and I suppose the connective tissue through my work is this issue of leadership, and how we get people to understand what conflict is and how we lead people out of conflict. And so, one thing which I should say is that, very frequently, you talked about the International Studying Leadership Conference, and it was just brilliant to have you there and do your stellar keynote as well, but one of the things that's really interesting is that I kind of go to leadership and management conferences all the time, and people say to me, “What do you do?” I say, “Well, I kind of do conflict.” And they say, “What, you mean like bullying?” And I say “No. I mean like murder.” So, that's kind of the difference. So, I suppose there's a brilliant Margaret Atwood quote, this idea, what are you interested in? War. War is what I'm interested in. And then, I suppose it's me. So, that's probably what it would be useful for people to know about me. If that doesn't scare people too much, along with the Northern Ireland accent, so there you go.

 

Scott Allen  2:42 

Well, Joanne, I was telling you before we started to record that I spent the morning really learning about John Hume. And I know that you've written about John Hume, and it's embarrassing to say that I had not heard of him. I did not know of him, and I could hypothesize a number of different reasons, whether it was just kind of my age and state. I was born in 1972, and so I know that the height of some of his work was starting around that era. And I think it's just sad that… And I'm constantly amazed, as I've said to you before, through the process of this podcast, what I keep stumbling upon that I don't know about. But I'm so happy that I get to have conversations like this to learn. So, I want listeners, especially some of our listeners from the States who may not know about John Hume, because, talk about conflict, talk about war, talk about an individual, Nobel Peace Prize winner. It's tragic that, as a leadership scholar, I don't know his story. And I can't imagine I'm alone in the world, maybe I am. (Laughs)

 

Joanne Murphy  3:44 

No, of course not. And it's a big, complex world. And unfortunately, when we talk about things like conflict and these intractable wicked problems, as we would talk about, these complex difficult intractable issues, these issues are becoming more prevalent, unfortunately, rather than less prevalent. And John Hume, and what I've called the untangling of the Northern Ireland troubles, I think is a brilliant example because I think we need to understand more about the ways in which leaders and leadership helps us move beyond these big issues of intractability that dog us throughout history and really dog us at the present. For people who don't know, John Hume was a major political leader in Northern Ireland during the conflict. He was principally the leader of a political party called the Social Democratic and Labor Party. And he was from a place in Northern Ireland, for those of you who maybe know the region a bit better, called Derry, sometimes called Londonderry. Of course, everything in Northern Ireland is divided, so nobody even agrees on the name of the city. So, Hume was from Derry, and he was a leader of civil rights initially. And he very much took his political inspiration from someone who you will obviously know a lot better, Martin Luther King Jr. And so Hume saw himself, and is very much seen within the political area of Martin Luther King Jr., of Gandhi, nonviolent leadership, and that was his absolute mantra from the word go. That he didn't support political violence in any way, shape, or form, whether that was paramilitary violence, or, of course, whether it was state violence. And when you look at Northern Ireland, at that point, before the advent of the troubles, and then as we moved into this awful 30-year period of huge brutality and violence. You have paramilitary violence on the one hand, and then you have state violence on the other. And so, Hume, very much, sat outside those violent traditions. He had a very famous saying, his focus was on economic development, was on people's ability to be able to live their lives in the best way they could. He did a huge amount of work in America, and we'll maybe get to that in a minute. And he had a whole series of sayings, but his most famous saying was, “You can't eat a flag.” Whatever else you can do, you can't eat a flag. And so, he came out of this civil rights tradition in Northern Ireland that was inspired by the civil rights tradition in the US. And he led throughout the conflict. But what I think is really interesting about Hume is that Hume's analysis, and of course, it wasn't just him, we're not into this kind of heroic leadership idea, but one of the things that he did was he articulated this analysis much more clearly than anyone else. And the analysis was, and, of course, this is what's incredibly important in terms of ethno-political violence everywhere, not just in Northern Ireland, that these things amount to a totality of relationships. So, in terms of the Northern Ireland situation, at that point, the framing -- and framing is a very big thing within leadership, it's a very big thing within political communication -- the framing that I was taught when I was a political science student, I was taught by very eminent professors, people who wrote the books, I was taught that Northern Ireland was a divided society. That the conflict in Northern Ireland, for those who maybe don't know, was, on the one hand, that members of the Catholic and nationalist community wanted to be part of a united Ireland. On the other hand, members of the Unionist and Protestant community, and I'm making big distinctions here but those are the general terms that are used. Unionist and Protestant community members wanted to stay part of Britain. And so, you had Northern Ireland between Ireland and Britain in this kind of liminal space, and this was an irreconcilable difference. And, on the surface, that's how it sounds. If one group wants to be part of one country, another group wants to be part of another, it sounds like something that can't really be fixed. And Hume fundamentally disagreed with that analysis, the analysis that was accepted, the analysis that was taught, the analysis that the governments believed as well. And Hume said, “No, that's actually not what we're dealing with here. We're dealing with three sets of relationships.” Fundamentally, first of all, there is the relationship between Britain and Ireland. So, this didn't start in 1969 with troubles, this goes back hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. It's a long-term conflict. So, first of all, if you want to move this violent conflict on, this is a conflict where three and a half thousand people were murdered and died within a very small area of land within a population of a million over a period of time. But if you want to move this conflict on, then the first thing you have to sort, the first relationship you have to resolve is the relationship between Britain and Ireland. Then you have to think about another set of relationships, and that's the relationships on the island of Ireland between Northern Ireland, which is part of Britain, and the south of Ireland, which is an independent republic. And so, that's the second set of relationships you have to sort. And then, when you have resolved those relationships, you need to resolve the relationships within Northern Ireland itself, between people who are at conflict within Northern Ireland. And suddenly, when you reframe it away from a kind of a binary zero-sum game to see sets of relationships, suddenly it becomes resolvable. Now, Hume was propagating these ideas from the middle of the 1960s, really, before the troubles, and certainly in the way that I've articulated it there, in the 1970s when the troubles were really at their height. And those relationships, for anybody who's listening that knows anything about the peace agreement in Northern Ireland that was reached in 1998, it's frequently called the Good Friday Agreement. Anyone who knows about that will know that that agreement is in three parts, what are known as three strands. And those three strands are those three relationships. So, I think it has now become accepted that Hume's analysis was the analysis that unlocked the really intractable zero-sum difficulty that was the Northern Ireland troubles. And that, of course, is very important, because, unfortunately, the Northern Ireland troubles are not the only intractable zero-sum conflict we have on our hands. So, the idea of what Hume was able to do in terms of his leadership and that long-term engagement that he was involved in, there's huge lessons, I think, in that for some of the dreadful difficulties that we're dealing with globally at the moment. 

 

Scott Allen  10:22 

Mmm. And I want to go there a little bit of a couple of what maybe some of those lessons are. But, in my own analysis, he was also… Because you're exactly right, I think it's very easy for us -- and thank you for mentioning that a little bit earlier -- that we can make this only about the heroic leader. And, of course, a number of other players engaged. And my understanding is that he was pretty good at building relationships. That he was building relationships with Ted Kennedy, he's building relationships with individuals across these different factions, and leveraging some of those relationships throughout. Would that be one of the lessons that we can begin to kind of think about when it comes to his work and the work of others? 

 

Joanne Murphy  11:03 

Absolutely. So, the first thing I think that we think about when we think about John and what we can take from it is this idea of reframing the problem that we've talked about in terms of the relationships. But the second, which is incredibly important, is this idea of what we might call stakeholder cultivation. What he was able to do is to say… I did an interview with his wife, but sadly, before she died, and she talked about a very important point. At the early stage of the troubles when things really were falling apart in terms of ways forward, came off the phone to a very significant political kind of person on the other side of the community, the Unionist community, and he turned to her and he said, “This is no good. This isn't working. If we're going to fix this problem, we have to make it bigger.” Now we talk about problems, and we talk about making problems, breaking them down, making them smaller, he saw it in a completely different way, and that's when he went to America. And so, you're absolutely right. What he did was he cultivated relationships with Ted Kennedy. In particular, he cultivated a very strong, enduring relationship with Tip O'Neill who was the Speaker of the House at the time, with Governor Carey in New York as well. So, the group, this group that he developed, the relationships were known as the four horsemen, I think after an American football team. But, Scott, you might know a lot more about that than me. This is where my knowledge begins to fall down a little bit. So, the four horsemen kind of became… Might have something to do with Notre Dame, possibly, but I don't know, I'm sure someone will know. But so the Four Horsemen became a kind of anchor for him in the US. And so, he began to propagate that. And he began to look at American foreign policy and focus that foreign policy in terms of non-violent ways forward in Northern Ireland because, at the very center of Hume's philosophy, and we really mustn't forget, this was this core of non-violence.

 

Scott Allen  12:56 

Yes. And I don't know the four horsemen, my sense is it does have something to do with Notre Dame but…

 

Joanne Murphy  13:03 

[Inaudible 13:05]

 

(Laughter)

 

Scott Allen  13:07 

Another area I need to learn about. 

 

Joanne Murphy  13:09 

Someone will be outraged at my lack of knowledge.

 

Scott Allen  13:13 

And mine. So, what's interesting is, even there, when you look at Tip O'Neill, a relationship with Ted Kennedy and Tip O'Neill, he's working multiple Republicans and Democrats, building relationships. And I think that's critical. That's important. He also kind of stood in this space where he was speaking with all sides, correct? 

 

Joanne Murphy  13:35 

Yes. Absolutely. And that is what I think is really fascinating about him. And I think that's one of the core lessons. When I've written about him, I've talked about him as being a kind of liminal leader. And there's a lot of stuff out there on leadership and liminality, and it's really, really kind of interesting work. What I think is so interesting about him is that he seems to have been able to almost embody liminality in a lot of what he did. So, he was clearly not only our leader of nationalism, but he was the leader of Irish nationalism in terms of political support. But he wasn't a nationalist. He wasn't actually… Non-nationalist. Frequently talked about your nationalism as just being an accident of birth. That's all it is. Which is perfectly true, of course. So, he was somebody who was hugely internationally focused. Spoke a little bit about his work in America, massive amounts of work in the European Union, massive amounts of work in Dublin. One area that he was less focused on, really, ironically, was London and Westminster, even though that was the parliament that he was elected to. That was the one he was least concerned about, but fascinating international focus. But also, even though he had this international focus, his real focus, his real interest was in his hometown, in Derry. So, he was also place-based as a leader, even though he was known for this enormous kind of international focus. But, of course, the most significant thing was his adherence to non-violence, but his very unusual stance. And this really was very unusual, and it's worth thinking about this in detail, that while he was absolutely opposed to political violence, he was the only person publicly, of course, we now know there were people under the cover of secrecy, but he was the only person who was brave enough. He had the courage to talk to men of violence publicly. So, he was involved in very significant talks with the provisional IRA leadership for long periods of time. The most well-known, of course, is towards the IRA ceasefires at the end, but that wasn't the only time that he engaged with the IRA. It was something he had done. And he frequently talked about the fact that he would engage with anybody if it saved lives. He had no boundaries. Now, talking to terrorists is one of those things that people say, “Wow, you can't do that. You can't talk to terrorists.” But his view was the opposite. His view was that you talk to anybody you could.

 

Scott Allen  16:00 

Well, and you're walking that tightrope because I imagine if he's talking with terrorists, then he's part of the problem, potentially. And so, how did he navigate? Was it the relationships on all sides that he was able to navigate because you're walking a tightrope? 

 

Joanne Murphy  16:17 

Totally. Absolutely. And so, he came under just enormous amounts of pressure; political pressure, reputational pressure because, at this point, he's putting his entire reputation. He was accused of giving the provisional IRA, who, at this time, were still killing. They were still involved in a campaign of killing, giving them political cover in terms of what they were doing. He was vilified by a number of media outlets, some papers in the Irish Republic in particular in ways that were… When you look at it now, the viciousness of that campaign against him is quite extraordinary. He was under very significant personal threat. So, there were attempts on his life at that point as well. So, he really put himself out there in a way that isolated himself to an enormous degree, which required a degree of self-discipline. And, of course, it took a huge toll on him personally in terms of what he was doing. And there is a wonderful documentary which I think is available on YouTube. It was done by a brilliant Irish journalist on John Hume. John Hume was voted Ireland's greatest ever kind of Irishman, Irish person, as you'd say. The journalist who put together the piece of work, she put together this wonderful documentary on him, and she talks about the period before the ceasefires where he is still talking to the IRA, he's under immense pressure. There is a dreadful incident in Belfast. I suppose it wasn't the only Shankle bomb, but it was, I suppose, the one people think about when they think about this bomb. And he is absolutely vilified at this point because he hasn't broken off his talks. And then, unfortunately, one of the characteristics of the Northern Ireland troubles was not just individual bombs but retaliatory attacks by other paramilitary groups. And in a retaliatory attack, a number of people are murdered in a pub shooting, people went in and just shot up a pub in his constituency. And he is attending the funeral of one of these people who is murdered, which is a very big thing in Ireland. Everybody goes to funerals who you may or may not know. But, at the funeral, there's a very famous TV shot of a young woman coming up to him and speaking to him at the funeral, and him completely breaks down in tears. Completely breaks down. It was very unexpected because he had been such a strong stalwart for such a long time, and it's only after that we find out that she is the daughter of the man who's been killed. And she goes off to him, and she says… Well, one of the things about Irish Catholic wakes, which some of your listeners may be aware of, is people pray around the coffin. People come in and they'll pray around the coffin. And she said, “Mr. Hume, last night, we prayed for you around my father's coffin that your talks would be successful and that no other family would have to go through what we have gone through,” which is enormously powerful. And that, I suppose, is what triggered this outpouring of emotion. And so, I think you get a sense in that of just the intensity of the process that he was involved in entirely by himself and the strength that takes, and the courage, the huge moral courage that requires.

 

Scott Allen  19:32 

Mmm. Well, I'm going to put a lot of links in the show notes for listeners to access that documentary, access some other resources. Is there anything other than what you just mentioned, the documentary from YouTube that I can point? I'll put a link to your paper because I think it's a wonderful, wonderful paper that really goes a little bit deeper into some of how he held this space in this very, very kind of wicked problem, VUCA context, adaptive challenge. We could call it a number of different things. And, of course, is there anything else that comes to mind for you that you would want to point listeners to? 

 

Joanne Murphy  20:06 

There's a new biography of him, which was published recently. There's a lot of material around him online. I would be inclined to say to people, read his Nobel Prize acceptance speech because that gives you a really good indication of who he was and what he believed in. And these are enduring messages for those of us who are interested in conflict and moving on from conflict. That, in the end, it's about people and not territory. In the end, whenever we think about human life, human life is the most significant thing. That any action is worth it if you can save a life. But the other thing, I suppose, which we should always say about John is that there was an immense understanding of the sacrifice that was required. He knew that, to a very large extent, he was sacrificing his own reputation. That he was putting his own reputation at risk, certainly putting the future of his political party at risk, putting all sorts of things that he had worked for his entire life at risk. But, for him, that was worth it. For him, that was enough, and that, I think, is quite a rare type of leadership. Keith Grin talks about this in terms of Eisenberger's ‘Heroes of Retreat.’ I think him was a hero of retreat in terms of his own community. He told his own community things that they didn't want to hear. They didn't give them the easy answers. He told them a difficult, real story. And he was able to do that in a way that people understood and accepted. And I think, because of that, his contribution is something that will live on in history. I know, certainly, the Irish Times the day he died talked about him as the man who built the peace, the architect of the peace in Northern Ireland. And I think that's very important. 

 

Scott Allen  21:46 

You had this opportunity to speak with his wife, are there any other kind of gems that came out of that conversation that just helped you think about this differently? Because that had to have been just… I can't even describe the amount of stress, the challenge, and so she has a front-row seat to this whole experience for decades, years. And what did you gain from her?

 

Joanne Murphy  22:10 

She unfortunately has passed away since, but she was as remarkable a woman as he was a man. She was just an exceptionally wonderful, very thoughtful, reflective, very wise person, and it was just an absolute privilege to be able to sit down with her and to talk about it. She spoke to me. The one thing that I remember about that conversation was just she was very keen to speak. I should say that. And, of course, obviously, as academics, we go through very rigorous ethical processes in terms of our things, but I did feel that I was taking her back to what were painful things. And I knew that, and I knew she wanted to talk about them, but I was aware that while there is a great prize, the pain to get to that prize of peace is enormous. One of the things that I remember probably most about that conversation was her talking about the events on a dreadful day for the city of Derry, which was the day of Bloody Sunday, which is in January 1972. And I'll let your listeners go and have a look at what happened in Bloody Sunday. But a number of very young men, in very many cases, there weren't even men really, they were boys, were murdered by the British Army, the British Parachute Regiment during a civil rights parade. And it was one of the very unusual events in the troubles. It was very early on. And there were TV cameras there, so a lot of it was caught in films, very famous images from that dreadful day. One of the interesting things about that awful day was that Hume was the only major political leader not at that event. He was not at the march. And he wasn't at the march because he believed that there was going to be trouble at the march and he was trying to have the march called off. And that is extraordinary because when we look at the inquiry into Bloody Sunday, the relatively recent British government inquiry, it's pretty clear that there were all sorts of environmental indications that there was going to be violence, but nobody else seemed to really pick up on it in the way that he did and that says a lot about his ability as a leader. We talk about environmental scanning, we talk about trying to pick up keys. And that, I think, is an example of that happening in a way that we rarely see. And it's a very dramatic example of someone who was able to put together the pieces just in a way that others weren't. And she talked about him standing at the window of their house watching thousands of people going to the march, when he had done everything he could to try to get people not to attend. Turning to her and saying, “That's it. That's me. I've no future in politics. My political career is over, these people will never listen to me again.” But unfortunately, that meant that he was the person that took the call from the hospital, and he was the person that had to go and tell the families that their loved ones were dead, and the toll of that... And that was 1972. That was an awfully long time ago. And to go through that, and then to go through an entire political career. And it was wonderful to speak to Pat and it was a real privilege to speak to her, and a huge insight, I think. So, I'm very fortunate having been able to do that. 

 

Scott Allen  25:06 

Well, Joanne, as we begin to wind down our time, a couple of things for me. So, first of all, just your expertise and your wisdom in this space, it's wonderful. And I have loved this conversation, I've learned so much. And, for listeners, there's going to be a number of links in the show notes. I love your suggestion of reading his Nobel speech. I think that will be wonderful. I'm excited to read that and to explore that a little bit. You have a case study for those of you who are in the classroom, and we have a case study for those of you who are just interested in this work of leadership. Now, we didn't even get to your book, so that means we need to have another conversation. 

 

(Laughter)

 

Joanne Murphy  25:44

Don't worry. 

 

Scott Allen  25:45

If you're open, I would love to have you back because I think there's a lot more. And we could probably explore some more contemporary issues in some places in the world, and really just start to try and make sense of, through this lens, some of kind of what's happening in different places in the world. So, will you come back? I would love to… 

 

Joanne Murphy  26:02 

Oh, yeah, of course. If you’ll have me, of course, I will. Of course. It would be an absolute pleasure.

 

Scott Allen  26:07 

Well, I always end these conversations by asking what you've been listening to, or reading, or streaming. What's something that's caught your attention in recent times? So, it could have something to do with what we just discussed, it may have nothing to do. It just might be a series that you're streaming right now that you've really enjoyed, or a book that you've read that's nonfiction or fiction. So, what comes to mind? What might interest listeners when it comes to what's caught your attention?

 

Joanne Murphy  26:32 

So, I suppose one of the things that's caught my attention recently, and I suppose, for anyone in Northern Ireland, it's just been quite an eye opener, is the dramatization of Patrick Radden Keefe's book, ‘Say Nothing’ to streaming at Disney, which is about an early murder in the Northern Ireland conflict, the murder of a woman called Jay McConville. And the protagonists within that. And just, I think, really interesting in terms of just the destruction of violence. What it does not only to the people that suffer, but also to the perpetrators of it in terms of just them having to deal with the reality of what they've done. But also just sometimes the narcissism behind that, in terms of, sometimes quite dark leadership. And I think that is something people are interested more about this, that's really worth having a look at. And I think Patrick Radden Keefe, I have to say, for an American has done quite a… What a guy. He's done such a brilliant job. The other thing. I have to say this because I'm in your podcast. I was so fortunate yesterday, I actually attended a conversation with Joan Baez in Northern Ireland. She was in Northern Ireland, and we have a very famous poet, again, on the Nobel Prize-winning person, Nobel Prize-winning poet, Seamus Heaney. So, Joan Baez was in conversation with another poet called Paul Mauldin in the Seamus Heaney home place -- brilliant venue, amazing place for anyone who's coming to Northern Ireland -- and she was just outstanding. She talked actually about her friendship with Martin Luther King. She talked about Jimi Hendrix. She was just absolutely amazing. But she said something which I think is so true, and because I think many of us at the minute are just struggling with the reality of the world. There seems to be so much negative, so many dark things around every time you turn on the news, or every time you see anything, it's such a worrying period. And she said, “The only thing to do is to live 90% of the time in denial because the world is so difficult at the minute because you'd go crazy otherwise.” But she said, “The other 10%, you got to make good trouble.” John Lewis. And I just thought that was wonderful. I thought that was absolutely brilliant. And I'm going to say one more thing, I know we're tight for time. And I said this at the International Studying Leadership Conference when we were there. I think that if people are looking for a little bit of hope, and they're looking for something that is going to give them a little bit about leadership and the types of leadership, young leadership, old leadership, and all of this sort of stuff, particularly around women, they should go and they should look at Margaret Atwood's book, ‘The Testaments.’ Now, that book was launched just before COVID, so I think it's going to be a bit lost. The Testaments is the sort of sequel to ‘The Handmaid's Tale.’ And the Testament tells you about how this awful Gilead, this awful dystopian world of Gilead arises, but most importantly, how it is destroyed. And I think if you're looking for some hope, you're looking for some energy, you want to know about the enormous energy and bravery of young women, but, even more important, the tenacity and the resilience and the cunning of older women, then that's the book to read. So that's what I'm thinking about at the minute. 

 

Scott Allen  29:45 

Well, I will put those in the show notes for sure. And Joanne, we will do it again. I am so thankful for your work. For helping me better understand this very, very important individual at this very, very important time in world history. And your wisdom, it's admirable. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. 

 

Joanne Murphy  30:02 

You’re so kind, Scott. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. 

 

 

[End Of Recording]