Beyond Intractability: A Free Knowledge Base on More Constructive Approaches to Destructive Conflict
Introduction:
Even if people are completely hostile to the idea of conflict resolution initially, sometimes if you work with them for long enough, they'll come around to seeing it as valuable. Mohammed Abu-Nimer explains how this happened when he was working with Palestinians in Gaza.
This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Seeing the Value of Conflict Resolution
Mohammed Abu-Nimer
Professor of Peace and Conflict Resolution at the School of International Service, American University
A: The nature of my work, or our work, is in this field you basically have
many of these so called transformative moments where actually you get some
sustainability out of them.. I guess I could talk about various places, it is
not such much a moment, it is the process that takes place. One of the stories
that stuck with me is in 1994 is when I was working in Gaza with a staff of
American facilitors with me and we were conducting our first conflict resolution
training in Arabic. There was no material in Arabic at all, and so we were
basically the first to introduce the subject in the Middle East in general. In
Gaza, during that time, it was the post-Oslo period and I have had a group of
Palestinians who were receptive, but there was also a group of people who were
very critical and challenged almost every concept and base. They had some
accusation that we were with the CIA, or that we were outsiders trying to make
them collaborate with Israel without getting any concessions. Four years later
these four counselors became the first to create a conflict resolution in Gaza
and called it the Palestinian Community Dispute Resolution Program, they have a
staff of twenty-five people and they have curriculums in Arabic. They have
twenty-five schools owned by the UN that run peer-mediation every year. They
have trained hundreds of teachers. It took about four or five years of work, but
it was particularly inspiring to me.
I'm not really interested in persuading people, I don't want to and I try to make this point obvious. What I'd like to do is to help people persuade themselves. -- Noam Chomsky
Featured Links Organizations Making Noteworthy Contributions to Efforts to Promote More Constructive Conflict HasNa, Inc.
Other Resources from Beyond Intractability Red State/ Blue State: US Political Polarization Though US politics has long been divided along ideological lines, the last two presidential elections have created increased polarization between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. How did this happen? Is it good for the country? Can anything be done to reunited us?
Nobel Peace Prize Winners
Jody Williams Architect of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), and 1997 Nobel Peace Laureate
The Beyond Intractability Knowledge Base Project Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess, Co-Directors and Editors c/o Conflict Information Consortium(Formerly Conflict Research Consortium), University of Colorado Campus Box 580, Boulder, CO 80309 Phone: (303) 492-1635; Fax: (303) 492-2154; Contact