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Introduction:
Carolyn Stephenson, a University of Hawai'i peace researcher who had a Fullbright Grant to work in Cyprus, described the importance of personal relationships there.
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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 ???).
Knowing the Other Side
Carolyn Stephenson
Professor of Population Studies, College of Social Sciences, University of Hawai'i
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If you don't rebuild . . . the next generation only knows each other if they
happened to have gone to the same college in the US or in Britain, but without
building those relationships there are friends of mine whose kids have never met
somebody from the other side. These kinds of relationships are necessary to deal
with basic stuff, like one friend of mine said her daughter asked, "Do they
have cats on the other side?" "Do they eat the same things we
do?" So that kind of lack of trust and so on can only be built up by involving
people in basic cross-cultural kinds of things.
The theory of international organization and politics and the theory of
functionalism says get people together to do specific problem-solving oriented
things and that will overcome some of the bounds of stereotypes across national
boundaries. Singing clubs, conflict resolution associations, management
associations, women's film groups and so on are ways to build up communities
that have bonds that can overcome some of the national bonds. I think that in
any conflict that is a long-term intractable conflict, you really have to work
it both ways; you have to have the elite commitment and then you have to have a
wide variety of functional communities, specific problem-oriented groups working
across all levels of the society, if it's not going to have more disastrous
violence when it comes back together.
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