Beyond Intractability
Hyper-Polarization Blog
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Things You Can Do To Help | Conflict Frontiers | Conflict Fundamentals
Beyond Intractability in Context | Colleague Activities
- Colleague and Context Posts for the Week of July 9 -- Reader-suggested articles along with Guy and Heidi's regular suggestions of colleague and context articles of interest for this week.
- Bridging the Theory/Action Gap: One Key to Improving the Effectiveness of Efforts to Strengthen Democracy -- If democracy scholars and democracy actors began to know more about the activities of the other, both would see a benefit in terms of stronger pro-democracy outcomes.
- Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess: The Key to Saving Democracy: Reducing Polarization? Promoting Justice? It Takes More Than That! -- There's no one answer to "saving democracy." We need to pursue many different things all at the same time.
- A Remarkable Effort to Do Trauma-Informed Peacebuilding Training in Ukraine Amidst Ongoing Trauma -- A description of a longer "practitioner reflection" about trauma-informed peacebuilding training in Ukraine, and how that reflects on peacebuilding challenges in less challenged places as well.
- Colleague and Context Posts for the Week of June 25, 2023 -- More colleague and context posts, along with three reader-suggested references.
- Rachel Kleinfeld and Shamil Idriss on Polarization, Philanthropic Plurality, Social Justice, and Democracy -- Those seeking to improve democracy should hold themselves accountable for advancing both peace and justice through collaborative action to meet common goals.
- Social Justice Advocacy, Bridge-Building and Philanthropy: How Do These Intersect? -- What role should philanthropy play in the effort to fix democracy? Can they help? How? Or should they bow out, acknowledging that they are making the problem worse?
- Colleague and Context Posts for week of June 18 -- This week's links to news articles and organizations that are, in various ways, working to help us understand and more constructively handle intractable conflict.
- More Ways to Turn Down the Heat -- The second part of our short, readable summary (with lots of links) to what we collectively know about strategies for controlling destructive escalation.
- Reversing or Better Yet, Avoiding, Destructive Escalation -- Once we understand the many ways in which escalation can trap us, we can avoid those traps. If we discover that we have already fallen into a trap, we can work to climb out--here are 5 ways to do that.
- Palma Strand: A Path Out of Polarization: The Strengthening Democracy Challenge and the Civity Storytelling Intervention -- Civity is all about forming relationships across difference. It's the "secret sauce" of successful communities and organizations. And better yet, everyone can do it!
- Colleague and Context for Week of June 4 -- More interesting reading from our colleagues within and outside the conflict resolution/peacebuilding field.
- Divided Community Project: Speaking Out to Strengthen the Guardrails of Democracy -- One of the most important ways in which we can all act to strengthen our democracy is to speak out when others are acting in ways that threaten it.
- Learning More about How the TRUST Network Does Massively Parallel Peacebuilding -- Democracy--and threats to it--are a complex adaptive system. We need complex, adaptive responses as well The TRUST Network is one.
- Learning More about How the TRUST Network Does Massively Parallel Peacebuilding -- Democracy--and threats to it--are a complex adaptive system. We need complex, adaptive responses as well The TRUST Network is one.
- Colleague and Context for Week of May 22 -- More news and activities from our peacebuilding colleagues and interesting readings from allied fields, particularly journalism.
- Escalation is the Most Dangerous Force on the Planet. But We Continue to Drive It -- Driven by many interacting feedback loops, escalation can get out of control quickly--leading to violence or even worse.
- Paul Monteiro, Former Director of the Community Relations Service, Talking About How CRS Works its Magic -- A few of the many important things Community Relations Service Paul Monteiro shared about the way CRS operates, what makes it successful, and most importantly, how it needs help from locals.
- Colleague and Context Posts for the Week of May 15, 2023 -- Our weekly selection of interesting organizations and projects in the conflict/peacebuilding field, and articles of interest from outside our field.
- An Award for NAFCM + Conflict Mapping and Other Tools for Understanding Complex Problems -- Conflict mapping is a tool to help understand what, besides "the other guys" are driving a conflict or social problem, and hence what might be done to fix it.
- John Lande: The Importance of Really Listening – For Ourselves, Others, and Democracy -- Some of our biggest errors are that we generally assume that we correctly understand the world and that being wrong is bad. Rather, we often are wrong--and that is good!
- Colleague and Context Posts for the Week of May 8, 2023 -- Colleague activities to strengthen democracy, and outside the field articles on democracy, polarization, and related issues.
- D.G. Mawn Talks About Community Mediation and NAFCM -- Conversation with D.G. Mawn about the National Association for Community Mediation and the work of the hundreds of member centers which have been helping resolve community conflicts for decades.
- Conversation with D.G. Mawn, President of the National Association for Community Mediation -- Video conversation with D.G. Mawn about the history and current activities of the National Association for Community Mediation and the work of the hundreds of member community mediation centers.
- Colleague and Context Posts for the Week of May 1, 2023 -- Colleague activities to strengthen democracy, and outside the field articles on democracy, polarization, and related issues.