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Introduction:
Mari Fitzduff, formerly Director of Irish NGO Incore, and now a Professor of Intercommunal Co-existence at Brandeis University, describes which she calls as a "knowledge intervention," when people are encouraged to look at other cases to learn about their own situation and possible ways to address it.
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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 ???).
Knowledge Intervention
Mari Fitzduff
Professor and Director of the MA Conflict and Coexistence Programme at Brandeis University
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One thing I was
very proud of was that in our own case, the British government would commission
us and say, look, victims is a problem that's coming up now. Can you do a piece
for us on victims around the world and the way in which governments are dealing
with them so that we can learn from the best practices in South Africa or
Guatemala or wherever.
So we very much use the international to inform the local on the basis that
people who are in conflict often think there is nowhere else like them. They
feel their problems are not replicated elsewhere, but there is enormous
learning. Every conflict is different, but every conflict has also usually got
something to offer to different parts of the world.
...
So what we try and do is the best learning in the field, and
bring it to bear on different conflicts.
...
It's what we call a knowledge intervention.
...
The final thing, I think is actually that learning from the
international was hugely important for us. Our folk could often take many things
from people who had been elsewhere. So we learned an enormous amount from, for
instance, South Africa. To a certain extent the United States, in terms of some
of their legal policies to do with diversity and race was also extremely
important. So, we have found that we have become very important in terms of all
of our processes to elsewhere. Because it is less threatening when you realize
that these are problems that are shared elsewhere, and there are ways that other
people are developing that actually can make it a lot easier for you in terms of
where you're going.
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