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Introduction:
Planning and flexibility together are key for holding successful peacebuilding workshops, says peace researcher and trainer Carolyn Stephenson. Here she describes what happened in one workshop she held in Cyprus.
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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 ???).
The Importance of Planning
Carolyn Stephenson
Professor of Population Studies, College of Social Sciences, University of Hawai'i
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The other thing that we know is to plan ahead. Most of the
work in these things is not done in these actual sessions but in the 3-4 months
ahead of time: locating people, finding the right people, finding out the relationships between people
was an enormous part of my work. Doing the workshop itself was easy.Plan ahead
but know how to punt because in this, it was being disrupted in the last minute
almost always, and you knew it was going to happen, so you had to have several
kinds of plans.
For example, one of the things that I did [in Cyprus] was a Model UN. I run the Model UN
in the state of Hawai'i so I thought I'd try it there. So I had a number of
schools that were willing to participate in that and we did preliminary sessions
and we had a day set up to run this in the Fulbright building to do this within
the green line and the day before one of the teachers called up and said she'd
gotten in enormous trouble because it hadn't gone through the bureaucracy on one
side.
I had a separate plan because I knew that that would be likely to happen at
the last minute but I didn't know the threats that would come with it. So if we
couldn't do it at the Fulbright building, with all the kids together, I had
places lined up on both sides where we could do it by computer. What I didn't
know was that the school would prevent the kids from even doing that because
they would see that as a threat, so eventually it collapsed and I had to do that
with one side. You need to have multiple layers of backup to make something work,
some of it is doing it parallel on both sides, some of it is knowing when to
stop on one side, when to do both, when to put something off for three months, and so
on.
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| If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. -- Martin Luther King Jr. |
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Featured Links
Organizations Making Noteworthy Contributions to Efforts to Promote More Constructive Conflict
Peace Action
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