Conflict Resolution Training: Purpose and Content
Context
One sub-group looked at issues related to the context of conflict transformation training and individuals contributed ideas and positions for the words and graphic indicators on the schematic above. The circle began as an encompassing image but sensibly, participants located their descriptors of relevant issues outside the circle, on its circumference, or at its centre. For the linear thinkers like myself, some of the basic ingredients of context are historical social, economic and spiritual trajectories rooted in historical experience and empirically measurable. Part of this conventional approach to describing the context of training interventions, also includes the detail of empirical information and accepted or acceptable definitions of issues, attitudes and ideas.
Parts of this schematic are made up of the agents of conflict and peace; the people who maintain a conflict for whatever reasons; those affected by conflict; and external and other actors. Between these various agents are connectors made up of strands of the web of interrelationships within any social grouping, whether it is at war or at peace.
In terms of the several members of the group taking part in the discussion who were looking to place themselves in the diagram, some described themselves as individual interveners and others came from the experience and potentialities of organisations involved in training activities.
Whether seeing themselves as individual actors or organisational people, all agreed that trust and capacity were crucial to successful intervention - being able to build and maintain trust and being able to guarantee delivery of what those involved in conflict could reasonably be expected to request in terms of assistance.
Central in the schematic is the phrase "tolerating ambiguity", a comment on context, individual and organisational capacity, information, attitudes, cultural differences - the list goes on.
David Lord