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Mediating History, Making Peace: dealing with the ‘messy’ stuff in the conciliation process

Dagmar Kusa, Adam Saltsman, and Phil Gamaghelyan

In: Sandor Schuman, ed. (upcoming, 2008) The Handbook for Working with Difficult Groups: How they are difficult, Why they are difficult, What you can do. Third in the series of handbooks published by Jossey-Bass/ Wiley and the International Association of Facilitators.

*****DRAFT ~ Please do not cite*****

Identity-based approach to conflict resolution

Israel and Palestine, Turkey and Armenia, former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, Cambodia, Rwanda… all places where people are divided by conflict with roots embedded in the histories of their country or region. Conflict resolution approaches in these settings are quite diverse—as they have been for many years—and they meet with varying levels of success. Most of them have, however, one thing in common: the “let the bygones be bygones” approach, with its stance that touching history hinders the development of positive relationships and stands in the way of peace.

Approaches presented in this chapter are based on experience with identity-based conflicts such as those mentioned above.  Our approaches are grounded in academic research related to history, memory, and identity.  Quite interdisciplinary, we call on the fields of sociology, psychology, political science, conflict resolution and family therapy. These approaches put history at the forefront. We believe that by addressing the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’—that is, painful memories  that frame conflict relationships in identity-based conflicts—we can help build deeper, more stable and longer lasting relationships, thus providing a firm basis for peace that is not just on paper, but finds its way into people’s minds and hearts.

“Historical conciliation”, the term that sums up the philosophy behind our method, is not a substitution for other conflict resolution strategies. Rather, it builds on these approaches and enriches them, especially during the initial engagement of the conciliation process, but also throughout.

In this chapter, we describe the philosophy of historical conciliation, developed over the years by the fellows and associates of the International Center for Conciliation (ICfC). This approach centers on the role of historical memory in the resolution of identity-based conflicts, particularly those marked by stories of widespread mass violence and trauma.  We illustrate our developed methodology with the case of Turkish-Armenian dialogues (bringing together cross-conflict groups) and on the case of community dialogues in remote villages in Cambodia (healing a community that is crippled by a deep historical trauma).

How the group is difficult

Conflicts addressed by historical conciliation are rooted in the conflicting identities of the people involved.  Whether the identity at stake is their ethnicity, gender, religion or culture, the process of historical conciliation requires a comprehensive approach that takes people’s needs, hopes, fears, and concerns into account. Peoples’ identities are related to their sense of dignity, feelings of security, and perceptions of their status.  “Identity-driven conflicts are rooted in the articulation of, and the threats or frustrations to, people’s collective need for dignity, recognition, safety, control, purpose, efficacy. Unfortunately they are rarely framed that way.” (Rothman, 1997: 7) Underlying needs held by individuals are not always transparently placed on the table; oftentimes we have to feel around for them.  In order to identify these needs, we often have to start the search in the past because one’s history (or what we selectively remember from it) forms a crucial part of one’s image of who s/he is.

Identity-based conflicts are often misrepresented as disputes over tangible resources1 , as existential issues are usually manifested in conventional ways, such as struggles over scarce resources.

The distinction between identity-based and resource-based conflicts is often not immediately visible and not clear cut: all identity conflicts have tangible components, but not all resource-based conflicts contain disputed identities. However, the longer any conflict continues, the more likely it will develop into an identity conflict as more people connect their dignity and memories with the dispute. Conflict analysis before the initial engagement is crucial in order to develop the right approach to conciliation. ‘Traditional’ conflict resolutions techniques, developed for dealing with resource-based conflicts, can sometimes exacerbate identity-based conflict as they tend to avoid dealing with the ‘messy’ issues of emotions, memories, values, belief systems, etc., that are at the core of identity-based conflicts.

Figure 1: Resource-Based vs. Identity-Based Conflicts

(Adapted from: Rothman, 1997: 17)

Conflicting identities are also a basis for relationships gone awry.  In a relationship riddled with conflict, people often feel threatened, humiliated, angry and resentful (Petersen, 2002). They perceive the situation as assault to their dignity and the blame for the situation and their negative feelings falls on the other side.  All of this leads to blind spots in understanding who these individuals are in relation to the other in non-exclusive way. Compassion and dialogue that promotes empathetic feelings are crucial in overcoming the impasse and managing and resolving the conflict. “Contemporary ethnicity is, … a highly conscious, political, and new mode of interest-articulation and conflict, which nevertheless also retains its quality of sacredness. Ethnic groups are simultaneously primordial and modern, because in social life tradition and modernity are not necessarily mutually exclusive, nor is their interplay a zero-sum game” (Rothschild, 1981: 30).

Recent studies in psychology and neurobiology have found that relationships - a connection with others and a sense of belonging - are more central to our emotional and mental health than experts previously assumed. Humiliation is a violation of this essential human need, and is likened by some researchers to a social pain, triggering the same receptors in the brain as physical pain (Hartling, 2005: 2).  As a result, a lingering sense of humiliation can lead to a decrease in self-regulation of behavior, to self-defeating and risky behavior, and all the way to open violence. This is not only true for individuals.  It is also, to a large extent, applicable to groups. Overcoming humiliation, humanizing the other and establishing a sense of dignity for the participants are among the main tasks of the initial stages of the conciliation process.

Donna Hicks identifies eight basic dignity needs that are common to all human beings. When individuals perceive that their dignity needs are violated, misunderstanding and conflict in relationships occurs:

                                                                                                                                      (adapted from Hicks, 2002)

A sense of humiliation, anger, resentment, fear, or rage towards the other side, together with mutual distrust and blame for the conflict and current situation, are all factors that accompany identity-based conflicts. They are the outcomes of previous conflicts, reinforced through patterns of strained relations that can lead, as a vicious spiral, to escalation and further conflicts. Participants arrive with a problem-saturated conflict story that is based on the popular beliefs and representations of the conflict in their ethnic/religious group and are often unable to distinguish between the other side and the conflict itself. As people ultimately experience identities on an individual level, the conflict does not only relate to the groups; it is personal and intimate for the participants, and runs to the core of their beings. Often emotions run high and erupt throughout the process.

Unfortunately, examples of large scale and violent identity-based conflicts around the world are in abundance. For an illustration of both the nature of the conflict and possibilities for overcoming it, we highlight the case of Turkish-Armenian dialogue groups, led by the co-author of this chapter Phil Gamaghelyan along with his colleague Ceren Ergenc, and the case of long-term community dialogues and action development related to issues of transitional justice in post-genocide Cambodia, designed and launched by the chapter co-author Adam Saltsman. The first case illustrates the cases in which historically hostile groups seek conciliation across the conflict boundary, the second case relates to communities wounded by memories of a traumatic event or era in their past.

Communities that not talk or trust: Cambodian rural villages
After decades of impunity, transitional justice has come to Cambodia. As a United Nations backed tribunal begins the prosecution of the top surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime, those deemed most responsible for one of the world’s most gruesome genocides in the 1970’s, Cambodians may have an opportunity for the restoration of their torn social fabric. Yet the tribunal’s proceedings, meaning, and outcomes are widely unknown to the Cambodian public, especially in remote areas beyond the reach of radio news. Moreover, the tribunal staff have little to no knowledge about the rural population’s concerns and interpretations regarding the court or what Cambodians actually need to glean a sense of justice.

In Cambodia, the ICfC designed a community social justice and history outreach program to serve as a connecting link between the tribunal and rural populations.  We assist in interpreting local and international concepts of justice for the court and for our Cambodian beneficiaries. Most importantly, we offer some healing mechanisms to the communities divided by the trauma of the genocide, a trauma people rarely discuss.

Reaching out to the enemy: Turkish-Armenian dialogue group
History is central to the conflict between Turks and Armenians. The central disagreement in the present day Turkish - Armenian conflict is whether the mass killings of Armenians during World War I in the Ottoman Empire constitute genocide. For nearly a century Armenians have overwhelmingly been on one side of this dispute and Turks overwhelmingly on the other. Armenians argued that one and a half million Armenians were subjected to genocide by the Ottoman Turkish state during WWI. Turks argued that the Armenian allegations are baseless or exaggerated. This dispute is not only of an academic nature since what happened in 1915 has shaped the identities of the Turks and particularly the Armenians and have the profound consequences for the relations between the two nations. Turkey and Armenia, two neighboring countries, have no diplomatic relations, the border is closed and they routinely lobby other countries to support them against one another. When Turks and the Armenians meet abroad, they either avoid each other, resort to a direct confrontation or, if they befriend each other, they try not to discuss any controversial issue.
  In September 2005, a number of Turkish and Armenian students and young professionals living and studying in Boston (United States) decided to break this cycle and engage into a long-term dialogue to try to understand each other and to find out if there is any room for reconciliation between the Turks and the Armenians. . The work with this and similar groups will be cited as the main example, but the methodology applied in these process is applicable also to other conflicts that involve ethnic groups that live in different countries (such as Serbs and Croats) or in the same country (Armenians and Azerbaijani in Azerbaijan; Arabs and Jews in Israel; Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland). What all these groups have in common is the condition conductive to their segregation and isolation from one another during the upbringing and education. Such dialogue groups are difficult as the participants are often from societies deeply divided by years and often decades of violence or history of repeated violence. The members of these social groups tend to evaluate their in-group positively in contrast to the out-group, which is seen negatively. This creates fertile conditions for the development of deep-rooted stereotyping and extreme—often perceived as ‘primordial’—hostility.

Why the group is difficult: An exploration of the underlying causes of the difficulty.

The reasons why groups involved in deep identity-based conflicts are difficult to work with are multiple and complex. Some reasons are typical for all dialogue groups and are obvious: the people involved in ethnic or religious conflict grow up with a strong sense of hostility towards the other and tend to have profound negative stereotypes about them as well. They are often isolated from and harbor  strong mistrust towards the other, and are not used to interacting with members of the other group at all or not beyond a superficial level of interactions.

These sorts of identity-based conflicts also represent personal struggles for involved participants. As  mentioned above, group identity is deeply embedded in and experienced through the individual person, and therefore is something deeply intimate. It is also a powerful mobilize, as memories that form our identities come with strong feelings, psychological problems, and emotional and mental anguish attached to them. This interconnection between personal sentiments and group identity engenders stakeholders who are deeply and intimately invested in their conflict. In these instances, rational analysis of the situation and the identification of possible solutions are not immediately feasible goals.

Working with groups plagued with internal historical trauma: Village dialogues in rural Cambodia

When it comes to communal conflict, Cambodian villages sometimes resemble a thinly frozen body of water: the surface is strong enough to hold together from day to day, but the application of even a small amount of pressure reveals hundreds of cracks that open into a deep, dark, and hostile environment.  Beneath the veneer of daily subsistence, residents of rural villages divide on multiple levels.  Systematic and institutionalized gender discrimination along with a growing gap in traditions, values, and experiences between old and young form male/female and generational polarities.  Membership to different political groups that were once engaged in armed conflict with each other and remain violently opposed to one another pit an opposition minority against an autocratic majority and leave the moderate center intimidated. Former Khmer Rouge cadre who at one point terrorized the Cambodian population during the 1970s and 1980s now live in villages with victims of the brutal regime though they deny ever committing any crimes.  In order to maintain the uneasy village peace, village leadership pushed residents to decide that it could only do harm to talk about the past. Thus, on a deep emotional and historical level, enmity from the years of the genocidal, ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge rule dissects communities, filling residents with suspicion and a decades-old silence that perpetuates a thick blanket of mistrust.

These three levels of division interact with and sustain each other creating a seemingly un-ending cycle of conflict and dishonesty.  In attempting to engage residents from six Cambodian villages in community empowerment dialogues, the International Center for Conciliation ran into enormous relational and political obstacles (see Figure 2).  In the beginning, we planned to make three preparatory visits to each village to pitch the idea of a dialogue, meet interested participants, and build some trust and comfort between participants and facilitators.  We would then make between two to three more visits to conduct one to two hour dialogues per trip.  Follow-up visits followed the dialogue and we were able to do some basic evaluations of our pilot method.

At various times during the first few dialogues, we found that men talked far more than women or refused to engage when many women were talking; the opposition party members (who are a vast minority in any village) were silent when sitting in a circle with a village chief from the dominant political party; and youth expressed disinterest and disbelief at Khmer Rouge survivors’ stories of the past as elders used stories of suffering to scold the bad behavior of village youth and fill them with guilt.  Most egregiously, former Khmer Rouge cadre denied their participation in the regime’s atrocities at the same time that victims cried out for justice and an end to impunity.  On top of this, participants did not perceive any sense of ownership over the process and they often felt rushed to return to their farming or other work-related activities. This lack of ownership may have stemmed from how abstract the topic seemed to the villagers or from the fact that the dialogue was something imported from the outside.

 Facilitators quickly recognized that the initial approach was not productive; the only thing participants claimed to gain from the dialogues was the recognition that a group from outside the village made an effort to provide them with emotional support.  While our dialogue project was already unique in Cambodia for spending as much time as we did eliciting conversation from relatively small groups of people, we needed to change the way we went about making initial contact with participants, designing the dialogue structure, and facilitating the process.

Working with cross-conflict groups: Turkish – Armenian dialogue group

The groups from societies divided by centuries of hostility are difficult for a number of reasons: some difficulties, as mentioned above, are similar to those for other dialogue groups and are obvious: this includes strong sense of hostility towards the other; profound negative stereotypes; strong mistrust towards the other. In addition to those, such groups present a number of additional, less obvious difficulties.
First, the conversation in such groups usually focuses on the matters central to the conflict, yet the two sides usually have very different underlying assumptions about the context and the background of the conflict. They each have their own problem-saturated story that tells the conflict story from a heavily biased and selective perspective. Many of these varying assumptions are taken for granted by each side as ‘common knowledge’ that should be shared by the other side and the facilitators. As a result, normally these assumptions are rarely discussed and frequently lead to miscommunication.

As an example, in the Turkish-Armenian groups, the discussions and disagreements are centered on the massacres of the Armenians in 1915, which Armenians refer to as genocide, while Turks usually dispute the applicability of the term. The context of the events is rarely discussed, yet can explain the attachment of both sides to their respective positions. 1915 is seen by the Armenians in the context of centuries of occupation and discrimination by Turks, culminating in the Genocide in 1915 and the subsequent Turkish policy of denial. The fact that it happened during WWI is considered only as a convenient pretext when a plan to exterminate Armenians could be carried out without getting much attention from the international community. The context, as seen from the Turkish perspective, is entirely different. For them, the Ottoman Empire, even if not perfect, had for centuries the best record amongst the other empires when it comes to minority rights and religious practices. The Turks consider that these minorities, particularly Armenians, betrayed them during WWI and became the ‘fifth column’ during the hardest periods of the Ottoman history when the Empire was losing a war and in the midst of collapse. The massacres are seen in a context of a civil war imposed on the Empire by the Armenians, rather than a deliberate massacre.

There is another, methodological difficulty of working with groups such as these. As noted above, most of the conflict resolution practitioners and facilitators avoid historical discussions. The common opinion is that history is an emotional, divisive, and potentially explosive topic and contributes to the worsening of the conflict rather than its resolution. Instead, dialogue processes traditionally focus on finding the uniting elements, common threads, positive moments in the conflict stories and strongly emphasize looking to the present problems and zeroing in on finding solutions to them and planning the future. As a result, the conflicting perceptions of the past that are often the unspoken driving force of the conflict remain unaddressed and constitute a ‘baggage’ that hinders the progress of the dialogue. Related to that, there is a virtual absence of a culture of discussing and handling historical discussions during dialogue processes. When such questions are brought into the open, they are often mishandled and lead to a bigger conflict, often damaging the dialogue. In the Turkish-Armenian case, the conversation usually develops into a cycle of mutual accusations: Armenians accusing Turks of a genocide and subsequent cover up, the Turks accusing Armenians of betraying them and of exaggerating and manufacturing a ‘false’ history to hurt Turkey.

What you can do:  As a group facilitator, how you can help the group to work more effectively through the messy parts of conciliation process.

Action-oriented sustained dialogue: getting to the ‘next steps’ through acknowledgment and empathy

Overcoming humiliation, feelings of anger, hatred, resentment, and/or rage related to the memories of violent conflict and feelings of victimization reflect key goals of historical conciliation, particularly in the phase of initial engagement in the conciliation process. The parties need to find a way to relate to each other on a universal human level: to re-humanize the other. Empathy, an honest heartfelt experiencing (not necessarily agreement) of the other’s story from their point of view, is the path towards building relationships based on trust and understanding from which the process can move on forward using already widely established conflict resolution techniques (Halpern and Weinstein, 2004).

Empathy building with parties stuck in historically rooted and identity-based conflicts begins long before face-to-face discussion between opposing sides can take place.  By the time conflicting parties can speak with each other, much re-humanizing work has already been done.  First, participants in a historical conciliation process need to decide for themselves that they are willing and committed to what may be a long and painful series of meetings with an “other” that embodies a whole series of culturally resonating negative collective memories; that is, an “other” that may unwittingly bear the burden of generations of pain, anger, suffering, and humiliation.  This willingness to engage with the “other” at all signifies the opening of a possibility to build a new relationship based on empathy rather than hate.  Second, participants must be able to see some possible benefit—there must be some forward looking goal—to a conflict resolution process that seeks to delve deeper than the resource-driven tension that may lie on the surface and that may be the most immediately relevant issue with which parties wish to deal.  This is to say that conflicting individuals or groups must see for themselves the benefit of a deeper, identity-based, intervention even when it appears that the problem can easily be fixed with an interest-based mediation procedure.  Once parties see for themselves the possible benefits of deep mutual engagement, the path to conciliation may not be smooth, but participants are truly present and committed 2.

For this purpose, historical conciliation borrows heavily from narrative mediation methodology and adapts it to work with stories within collective memories. While narrative mediation originates from family therapy, it has been applied in other areas as well. Its foundation in social constructivism and its focus on validating people’s experiences and feelings render the approach very useful in working with identity-based conflicts. “Mediators who use a narrative orientation are interested in the constitutive properties of conflict stories. In other words, whether a story is factual or not matters little to the potential impact it has on someone’s life. Our emphasis is on how the story operates to create reality rather than on whether it reports accurately on that reality. Stories therefore are not viewed as either true or false accounts of an objective “out there” reality.” (Winslade and Monk, 2001: 3). Stories are viewed as constructing the world rather than viewing the world as independently known.

In ethnic, religious, and other identity-based conflicts, multiple stories form groups’ collective memories, the building blocks of their identity. “Narratives are implicated in the onset, escalation, and maintenance of ethnic conflict. However…it is important to recognize their potential in de-escalation as well, because narratives can and do evolve over time” (Ross, 2007: 44). A narrative approach helps to deconstruct the problem-saturated stories that participants come with, see where the strong emotions that enter the conflict come from, ‘externalize the conflict’ – separate it from the people that came together to resolve it and thus create the possibility to move on to work on solutions together.

Ross focuses on narratives that foster peace processes on a national level.  Those narratives “arise when there are connections made between culturally available references and events on the ground… Changing the narrative frame can also facilitate de-escalation when it helps people caught in conflict to envision alternatives to ongoing confrontation. In order for this to happen, each side must appreciate the perspective of the other, and learn that there is someone to talk to on the other side and something to talk about.”  The same is true in dialogue settings when we work with groups of students, villagers, and various other stakeholders in conflict on local level.

This process does not necessarily have to lead to a creation of a new shared narrative that everybody can agree on. Although this sometimes (in very rare circumstances) happens, or happens to a certain extent – when the groups engaged in dialogue co-author shared narrative moments or at least broaden and diversify each other’s points of view, one ultimate ‘truth’ is not the outcome this process seeks to lead to. Rather, the focus is on acknowledgment of the other’s experience, validating its’ authenticity and honoring the dignity needs of the counterpart in the conciliation process.

There are numerous practical ways of navigating through this process. Here we will look at an example of using a “historical timelines’ approach used in Turkish-Armenian (and later many other) dialogue groups, and community village dialogues on social justice and history in rural Cambodia.

Reshaping the long-term dialogue approach in rural communities of Cambodia

Our case study in Cambodia speaks primarily to the early stages of historical conciliation: getting participants to see for themselves the value of engaging in a dialogue process that elicits deeply buried memories and emotions.  This is an especially difficult task when silence about history is the widespread norm and officially sanctioned solution to conflict and pain.

In an effort to design a forward looking and open dialogue process for a community unaccustomed to discussing the past or dealing with deeper level conflicts, International Center for Conciliation facilitators sought an approach that would create space for villagers to realize for themselves the extent of their need and interest in engaging in a process of historical conciliation.  We realized this approach would not be possible if a) we were seen as enigmatic outsiders—causing suspicion among villagers—and b) if the villagers did not feel a sense of investment in and ownership over the process.  Gradually, we developed a five-stage strategy grounded in elements of sustained dialogue and participatory action development.  This approach infuses the entire operation with exercises in trust-building and empowerment.  

Today the dialogue project looks different: facilitators stay in villages for up to a week at a time for two weeks. They can be seen harvesting rice alongside villagers and helping them to prepare meals. The dialogues are now lively with participants deeply engaged in the process.  Facilitators help to build trust between them and the villagers and within the village as well.

1. Assessment and establishment of local partnerships
While facilitators recognized the benefit of long-term stays in the villages where we planned to conduct dialogues, it was not possible to stay for months or even weeks at a time. In an effort to expedite the work of trust-building and also to ensure some continuity for whatever gains may be made from the dialogues, we found villages in which community based organizations (CBOs) worked and maintained good relations with residents.  Often these organizations were focused on community development; helping villagers to set up sanitation systems, rice banks, and sustainable animal husbandry programs. 

We approached these organizations, asked about social tension within the village, and offered to partner with them in addressing these tensions. They agreed to help introduce us to the village leadership—a crucial step to gaining the privilege of sleeping in the village and the privilege of free access around the village.  They also introduced us to all the villagers, informing them of the partnership between the CBO and the International Center for Conciliation. The facilitators agreed to provide conflict resolution training for the CBO staff with the intention of eventually co-facilitating the dialogues and ultimately handing over the dialogue project to them. When village residents saw that the facilitators had the “blessing” of the CBO that they knew so well and trusted, they welcomed us into their village.

2. Participation in the village life
After partnering with the local CBO, the facilitators arranged to stay with village families.  We ate with the families and gave assistance to villagers as they farmed rice paddies, constructed houses, cared for their animals, and cooked meals.  Inexperienced with some of this work, the villagers became our teachers.  Becoming a regular sight around the village normalized our presence there.  Our interactions with village residents became casual: we joked, discussed politics, and talked about our families. 

By participating in so many aspects of daily village life, the facilitators found themselves in a position to observe interactions between village residents and to locate the strengths and weaknesses in their relationships.  Despite the many divisions, we saw in place systems of reciprocity binding households to one another in the struggle for subsistence.  Often people did not know of others’ experiences with the Khmer Rouge, but they knew that they had helped each other survive since the end of the armed conflict.

3. Deep listening and selection of future participants
In addition to participating, facilitators tasked themselves with both casual and ‘deep’ listening.  Rather than bringing up social tensions in the village, historical divisions, or memories of suffering, we paid attention to which village residents raised these issues and how they came up in everyday conversation.  We took copious field notes over the course of the weeks we lived in the village and after an initial assessment, we began to seek out and engage in casual conversation those individual residents who talked most often about the Khmer Rouge years, current injustice, conflict, and the need for peace.  We determined these people “high priority.”

After two weeks of listening, facilitators gathered the group of “high priority” residents together and presented some of the results of our assessment. “We recognize that you all have raised certain issues quite often in casual conversation,” we told them, “and we are wondering if we can help you deal with these issues in some way.”

Village residents who had never deeply revealed their stories with those outside their nuclear families began to see that despite historical divisions, they shared the experiences of pain, loss, and injustice with others.  This opened a door for victims and perpetrators to hear each other’s stories. It also gave chance to the young people to hear the stories for the first time on a community sharing level; youth were not only hearing about the past as a tool of parental scolding, but as an important part of their own story.  This helped open up space for inter-generational bonding and healing. During the dialogues, facilitators would work hard to highlight the many empathy-rich moments that lay just beneath the surface.

4. Consensus decision-making: villagers deciding the steps they wish to take
Our approach is rooted in the belief that the participants, in order to be fully invested in the process, have to feel the ownership of the process and its outcomes. In social sciences, this approach is called participatory action development (PAD).

The decision to engage in dialogue became entirely up to the village residents we had gathered through our assessment.  In each village, most of the approximately twenty-five residents we brought together said they would like to do something to deal with their pain from the past and current social tensions, but they were not sure what kind of activity would serve this purpose.  Facilitators assisted them with a list of potential activities, which included dialogues, visits to Phnom Penh—Cambodia’s capital city—to see the genocide memorial museum (a former prison and torture center for political prisoners during the Khmer Rouge years) and the court set up to try the former leaders of the Khmer Rouge, and the establishment of village memorials.  The “high priority” villagers all decided on a dialogue and visit to Phnom Penh.

In setting up the dialogue, it was the participants who decided the time, the venue, and the dialogue agenda.  We had an equal number of men and women participating as well as a large number of youth.  While the youth, respecting their traditional roles in the village, remained quiet when it came to making decisions, the increased level of trust and sense of purpose brought greater equality between male and female participation due to the presence of several outspoken women who felt some ownership in the process.  In some instances, villagers decided not to invite the village chief.  When the chief did come, participants would divide into small groups partway through the dialogue so that the chief would only be able to influence a fraction of the overall number of participants.

5. Tangible outcomes: group activities and follow-up projects
Also useful to the dialogue process itself was the establishment of concrete, tangible outcomes; outcomes determined by the participants themselves. Participants decided that they wanted to engage in the dialogue process in order to a) hear each others’ stories and then b) conduct outreach in the village to encourage others to break the silence about the past.  Participants also agreed that they would use the dialogue process as a way to emotionally prepare for their trip to Phnom Penh and to decide on questions to ask the officials at the court house.  An additional follow-up dialogue after the visit to the genocide memorial museum had the goal of making sense of the visit and deciding what could be done as a next step in the village.  Establishing these simple goals served to move the dialogue process from a place of abstraction to a place of usefulness. Participants fully engaged in the discussions and could recognize a number of benefits from them. 

“Historical timelines” approach in cross-conflict dialogue groups
The ‘historical timelines’ approach was developed by Ceren Ergenc and Philip Gamaghelyan. Ergenc is from Turkey, Gamaghelyan is from Armenia. They have facilitated together Turkish-Armenian dialogue groups, trained facilitators, journalists and educators working in a wide range of conflict situations. They have researched extensively the role of history and collective memory in conflict and its resolution and found practical applications of their findings in mixed groups of Turkish and Armenian (as well as other cross-conflict groups) students and young professionals.
 
The methodology derives from the assumption that historical memory is at the core of ethnic identity of the group and the driving reason behind the hostile feelings and the conflict itself. It agrees with the premise that history is often a divisive topic and it is often not possible to find the ‘truth.’ However, the popular perception of history -- the collective memory of it -- has to be addressed and its role in the conflicts can and should be understood if the parties to the conflict ever want to achieve real reconciliation. The understanding of the process of collective memory, its forms and agents of transmission by the participants can help transform the relations between the conflicting parties.

The reason for engaging historical memory, from the conflict resolution perspective, is not to establish all the facts in regards to who was right or who was wrong, or “who did what to whom when”. Instead, the aim is to see the difference between the history as it happened, and the memory of the history, how differently it has been transmitted by the two societies in conflict, how it generates hatred and stereotypes, how it creates conflicts and how this awareness can be used to resolve conflicts. The historical timelines methodology allows us to analyze the underlying reasons for the ‘historical hatred’ and also outline solutions to the conflict.

The two groups representing the two sides of the conflict are asked to write two simple timeline tables (each group from their own perspective), recording the important events they remember from history that impacted the relationship with the other party in conflict. The groups work on the basis of consensus – only events that are familiar to and deemed important by all members of the group make it onto the group timeline sheet. The two timelines are then placed next to each other, and each group explains their timeline to the other group, then they are discussed in detail and analyzed. This process can take a number of days to complete – usually at least two or three days are needed for discussions to run their course.

When participants see the two timelines next to each other on one piece of paper, they are asked to view the two stories through eyes of an independent observer. They see that the two stories often look as if they were not even related to the same conflict (one participant exclaimed that these countries could be on the opposite sides of the planet as they have almost nothing in common). Analyzing the narratives invariably demonstrates that groups in conflict arbitrarily select and emphasize very different events in their history, with different values and meanings attached to them, and consequently construct very different identity stories.

Such realizations:

Figure 3: Historical timelines sequence

The process brings the dialogue group to a place where looking into the future is a lot more feasible and productive. After the learning that results from the historical timelines experience, the group shares a much higher degree of mutual trust and understanding. From this point, facilitators lead the group through the process of identifying current fears, needs, hopes, and concerns, identifying solutions for overcoming obstacles and planning common or individual follow-up activities designed by the participants.

Our experience also shows that a large percentage of participants that have shared this experience tend to be engaged long-term in follow-up activities. Since the timelines approach involves undergoing a profound learning experience about people’s perception of what their identity means and where it comes from, participants’ investment in the process after the end of the dialogue remains high as they wish to share the gained insight with others.

Conclusion

Approaches utilized within historical conciliation may vary widely. Some are set up in a traditional dialogue setting, some designed as interactive retreats combining outdoors and dialogue elements, others have elements of community participatory action development. What they share is the philosophy that navigates the process towards the desired outcome – transformed relationships that build on deep trust, empathy, and understanding. Historical memory is recognized as the humanizing force that leads to that end result. Even though the first days are invariably difficult, messy, emotional and even explosive, it provides participants the platform to speak in their own voice, to understand not only the other side, but their own story and its place in the conflict, and to connect on a universal human level, experiencing the stories from the teller’s point of view. Such process results in a peace that is deeper, longer lasting, and relationships that lead to cooperation between the participants well beyond the duration of the conciliation engagement.

Glossary of Key Terms

Acknowledgment: a public expression of the reality and/or legitimacy of another's status, claims or grievances.

Action-oriented dialogue (also sustained dialogue): Long-term dialogue process that sets as one of its goals the development of concrete follow-up projects and initiatives by the participants

Alternative story: Building a story of cooperation that stands in stark contrast to the conflict-bound, dominant story.

Deconstruction: The process of unpacking the taken-for-granted assumptions and ideas underlying social practices that masquerade as truth or reality. It is achieved by bringing to light the gaps and inconsistencies in a dominant story so that acceptance of the story's message or logic no longer appears inevitable. Deconstruction is less adversarial and more playful than critique or confrontation.

Deep listening: Analytical listening for specific contents in conversations, taking into account the context and identifying trigger and operational mechanisms of the terms listened for in the stories of the participants.

Dignity needs: Essential human relational needs of belonging, recognition, self-determination and security that must be met for life in dignity, beyond mere survival.

Discourse: A set of ideas embodied as structuring statements that underlie and give meaning to social practices, personal experience, and organizations or institutions. Discourses often include the taken-for-granted assumptions that allow us to know how to 'go on" in social situations of all kinds. They are linguistic in nature (provided that language is taken to include non-verbal as well as verbal practices).

Empathy: The ability to see the world from the perspective of others and evaluate what they have done as a function of the circumstances in which they were operating.

Externalizing Conversation: A way of speaking in which space is introduced between the person and the problem issue. The problem may be spoken of as if it were a distinct entity or even a personality in its own right rather than part of the person. This creates an opportunity for the relationship between the person and the problem to be articulated.
Historical conciliation: is an applied conflict resolution approach that utilizes historical narratives to resolve conflicts, make peace, and maintain peace. Historical conciliation can involve many different methodologies and initiatives, including mediation, sustained dialogue, support of public commemoration activities, and public diplomacy to support adversaries’ efforts to use their histories to resolve their conflict.

Historical memory: Collective awareness of select historical facts, events, national myths, heroes, mission, etc. transmitted via political leadership, education and media systems, passed on within families, through opinion leaders, and so on. Historical memory is sometimes reflective and critical, often times however shaped by personal, social, and intellectual factors that select facts out of the virtual infinity of facts.

Historical timelines:  A tool for analysis of the underlying reasons for the ‘historical hatred’ of groups in conflict and also to outline solutions to the conflict through a structured mediated discussion of events alive in historical memories of the involved groups.

Identity-based conflict: conflict revolving around values, beliefs, and needs that are perceived as fundamental to person’s or group’s existence.

Narrative mediation: Originating in the field of family therapy, narrative mediation works with the stories of people in conflict and uses mediated story-telling as a tool towards conflict resolution.

Participatory action development: process in which the participants in a long term dialogue or project arrive at consensus on what activities they wish to undertake as a group and what actions come out of the entire process.

Problem-saturated story: The story that a party presents to a mediator in which the conflict is so dominant that there at first appears little sign of an alternative story.

Resource-based conflict: Conflict that revolves around distribution, access to, and control over tangible resources or services. Also often referred to as interest-based conflict.

Social Constructivism: The movement in the social sciences that stresses the role played by language in the production of meaning. A central tenet is that people produce through discourse the social conditions by which their thoughts, feelings and actions are determined. In this way, meaning is made in social contexts rather than given.

Sustained dialogue: Dialogue process that convenes the same group of participants over a long period of time (months or years), and is seeking to move through understanding towards collective action.

Sympathy: Understanding somebody’s feelings, feeling of closeness and concern for the other person. Not to be confused with sympathy, which entails also sharing those feelings and viewing the situation from the other person’s position.

Voice: The capacity to speak on one's own behalf, in terms that are not given by others.

Bibliography: 

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