Recent BI and Substack Posts

Democracy only works if people understand how to work through disagreements constructively. "Disagreement Fitness" is a way to strengthen such skills.

Our normal weekly links to interesting reading about democracy in the U.S. and around the world.

Dialogue can change attitudes, but those changes tend to be fleeting unless a great deal of thought and care goes into both the process and the aftermath. Designing for scale up is key.

Reader-suggested articles along with Guy and Heidi's regular suggestions of colleague and context articles of interest for this week.

If democracy scholars and democracy actors began to know more about the activities of the other, both would see a benefit in terms of stronger pro-democracy outcomes.

There's no one answer to "saving democracy." We need to pursue many different things all at the same time.

A description of a longer "practitioner reflection" about trauma-informed peacebuilding training in Ukraine, and how that reflects on peacebuilding challenges in less challenged places as well.

More colleague and context posts, along with three reader-suggested references.

Those seeking to improve democracy should hold themselves accountable for advancing both peace and justice through collaborative action to meet common goals.

What role should philanthropy play in the effort to fix democracy? Can they help? How? Or should they bow out, acknowledging that they are making the problem worse?

This week's links to news articles and organizations that are, in various ways, working to help us understand and more constructively handle intractable conflict.

The second part of our short, readable summary (with lots of links) to what we collectively know about strategies for controlling destructive escalation.

Once we understand the many ways in which escalation can trap us, we can avoid those traps. If we discover that we have already fallen into a trap, we can work to climb out--here are 5 ways to do that.

Civity is all about forming relationships across difference. It's the "secret sauce" of successful communities and organizations. And better yet, everyone can do it!

More interesting reading from our colleagues within and outside the conflict resolution/peacebuilding field.

One of the most important ways  in which we can all act to strengthen our democracy is to speak out when others are acting in ways that threaten it.

Democracy--and threats to it--are a complex adaptive system. We need complex, adaptive responses as well The TRUST Network is one.

Weekly set of important and interesting readings and videos.

More news and activities from our peacebuilding colleagues and interesting readings from allied fields, particularly journalism.

Driven by many interacting feedback loops, escalation can get out of control quickly--leading to violence or even worse.

A few of the many important things Community Relations Service Paul Monteiro shared about the way CRS operates, what makes it successful, and most importantly, how it needs help from locals.

Our weekly selection of interesting organizations and projects in the conflict/peacebuilding field, and articles of interest from outside our field.

Conflict mapping is a tool to help understand what, besides "the other guys" are driving a conflict or social problem, and hence what might be done to fix it.

Some of our biggest errors are that we generally assume that we correctly understand the world and that being wrong is bad. Rather, we often are wrong--and that is good!

Colleague activities to strengthen democracy, and outside the field articles on democracy, polarization, and related issues.