diverse countries and cultures. In this article, we will share
some stories about how people have adapted and employed
the Reflective Structured Dialogue approach in several
other countries. The lessons of their work are valuable for
thinking about dialogue within and between sub-cultures
of the US as well.
Religious and ethnic tensions in Northern Nigeria have
resulted in sporadic violence that has cost more than 20,000
lives over the past decade. On a cultural exchange project,
Dave met staff from the Kaduna-based Interfaith Mediation Center, which had been working to address these issues
since 1994 and a partnership was born, based on mutual
interest in exploring each other’s approaches to dialogue
and brainstorming together, about whether elements of
RSD might be adapted to the Nigerian cultural context, to add
additional tools to IMC’s toolbox.
This collaboration continued for three years and resulted
in the development of our “hybrid model” of dialogue, combining aspects of IMC’s faith-based dialogue model and
our narrative approach. An important commonality was the
centrality of story, of listening and bridging divides through
curiosity, story-telling, and building relationships and trust
across identity-based divides.
Utilizing the hybrid model, IMC trained 7500 people over
the three years and heard comments like “This is a new idea,
so many people speaking from their hearts. People can come
together…if they can understand, they can change their
hearts and this can bring about more change. It involves listening and speaking sincerely from the heart."
In the words of IMC’s Director of Intervention, Imam
Mohammed Sani Isah, “Through this we will have more peo-
ple in the stream of work that we do and will become better
equipped with the know-how, skills and techniques. But
most important, together we will sow a seed that will ger-
minate and become a source of the antidote to terrorism,
fanaticism, bigotry and extremism.”
On a practical level, how can dialogue improve public dis-
course? Here’s a brief story: a drunk Christian man crashed
into the house of a Muslim in a residential neighborhood
in Sokoto. A number of Muslim youth became very upset
and began to threaten the driver. A community leader had
attended an IMC training and he had "stepped down" the
training (he passed along what he had learned) to some
neighborhood youth. Some of the Muslim youth who had
attended the step-down training called upon their brothers
to slow down and not become violent. In addition to doing so,
they contacted the police, who came and responded to the
situation. The homeowner forgave the man who had crashed
into his house. Peace was restored and there was no vio-
lence. So in a land where only a tiny spark is needed to ignite
a tinderbox, the skills of dialogue make a huge impact.
The CoRe Group Foundation in Manila is responsible for
introducing and mainstreaming mediation in The Philippines,
a process that it began in the 1990s. Essential Partners has
been fortunate to team up with CoRe since 2011 to introduce
and expand Reflective Structured Dialogue in the country.
According to CoRe's Executive Director Mia Quiaoit-Corpus,
"Dialogue was a natural process for us to transition to. The
first and most obvious reason is that it belongs to the ADR
spectrum, where the focus is empowerment and a process
that encourages people to connect with one another." CoRe's
first project, "T-Cells," was begun by founder Belle Abeya out
of concern that young people were not engaging directly
about issues of concern, preferring texting over talking. CoRe,
Bob and Meenakshi Chakraverti prepared university students
and counselors to facilitate on-campus dialogues where students could engage one another on important issues. In a
period of only a few months, over 7,000 students had been
in dialogue. In CoRe's latest project, Bob offered training and
dialogue to mediators, business leaders, activists, government workers to spread dialogue more widely.
We used the dialogue process in larger scale conflicts,
particularly involving communities. In a pilot program of
RSD in the Philippines, the participants chose to speak
about reviving the death penalty in the country. One par-
ticipant worked with the jail system and shared a particular
experience he had had prior to the abolition of the death
penalty. He had met a person who was sentenced to death
but continued to claim his innocence. The prisoner main-
tained that he was not part of the crime but was merely
There are times and places where it may not be
wise or safe to say what you really think in a public
forum, when the cameras are rolling, someone
is ready to tweet out every word you speak and
Internet trolls are waiting to trash you. Sometimes
— especially when sharp disagreement is in the air
— what's needed is a protected space for private
conversations about public issues.
MODELS
