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Introduction:
Jayne Docherty of Eastern Mennonite University says that any
intervention into a complex conflict must be treated as a small piece of a
larger system. Intervention into multi-dimensional conflicts requires
inter-field collaboration.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Small Pieces of a Larger System
Jayne Docherty
Eastern Mennonite University
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The most pressing
conflicts that we deal with are so multi-dimensional, that any intervention that
we do as small problem solving we must see it as only part of a much bigger set
of interventions that needed to take place. We must learn to be more aware of
what other things need to happen. So for example if you do an environmental
conflict dialogue around land management issues in the far west you must think
about the overall agricultural economy. You can't do land allocation resources
without talking about water; all of these things have to be brought into the
open. It's not that you have to do everything in a single intervention; but you
must not sell a single intervention as the magic bullet that's going to fix
everything.
We must also think about how we work with other people, not
necessarily conflict resolution people, community development people, that kind
of cross. What are we calling it now? Internationally, we call it, there's a
whole new slogan, inter-field. We're now talking at the international level
about sort of inter-field collaboration between development work and conflict
resolution, and conflict transformation work. We have to take that same approach
domestically, here in the US. And we're way behind.
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