Falling Apart and Coming Together: A Theory and Practice of Love, Power, and Justice

Adam Kahane, bestselling author of Collaborating with the Enemy, shows how justice helps families, organizations, communities, and nations repair broken relationships and live together better.

A practical guide to using justice as the lever for balancing power and love in a world that is falling apart.

We are always falling apart and coming together. In families, workplaces, communities, and nations, people pull back into smaller camps, harden boundaries, or force unity that leaves too many voices unheard. Adam Kahane names the twin traps of combat and subordination and offers a practical way to steer between them: the justice lever.

Drawing on thirty-five years of work with divided groups around the world, along with intimate stories from family life and public life, Kahane defines justice as a functional tool. Justice is the container made of rules, norms, agreements, structures, and relationships that allows people to be both separate and together.

Readers will learn how to

• recognize when relationships are slipping into combat or subordination;
• harness power, the drive to realize ourselves;
• harness love, the drive to unite with others;
• construct justice containers that make collaboration and cohabitation possible; and
• repair cracked containers in families, teams, organizations, communities, and public life.

Brief and clear, with unforgettable stories from global peace work, climate negotiations, Indigenous health, family life, and organizational repair, this book gives readers a way to start repairing what is cracking right where they are.