Mediation Perspectives is a periodic blog entry that’s provided by the CSS’ Mediation Support Team and occasional guest authors. Each entry is designed to highlight the utility of mediation approaches in dealing with violent political conflicts. To keep up to date with the Mediation Support Team, you can sign up to their newsletter here.
Mediation Perspectivesis a periodic blog entry that’s provided by the CSS’ Mediation Support Teamand occasional guest authors. Each entry is designed to highlight the utility of mediation approaches in dealing with violent political conflicts. To keep up to date with the Mediation Support Team, you can sign up to their newsletter here.
As mediators, we need to be highly flexible and context oriented. It is therefore sometimes easier to focus on what we should not do than what we should do. This focus on the “not” provides more than just parameters in which one can move freely, it also increases an awareness of ‘orange zones’ where we have to be careful as we may end up in a red zone where one can do more harm than good. Lakhdar Bramhimi and Salman Ahmed provide a fantastic write up of this kind of approach in “Seven Deadly Sins of a Mediator.” In particular, the sins Brahimi and Ahmed describe are ignorance, arrogance, partiality, impotence, haste, inflexibility and false promises.
Mediation Perspectivesis a periodic blog entry that’s provided by the CSS’ Mediation Support Teamand occasional guest authors. Each entry is designed to highlight the utility of mediation approaches in dealing with violent political conflicts. To keep up to date with the Mediation Support Team, you can sign up to their newsletter here.
Swisspeace has been involved in and on Myanmar since 2012, focusing on the nationally-driven peace process between the government, the army and ethnic armed organizations. In addition to direct support to local actors involved in the process, we have also contributed by capturing the stories and experiences from Myanmar actors to draw lessons and nourish the next phases of the national efforts.
This blog is about our new publication and shows how essential it is to write about and value local peace efforts in order to better understand the situation and respond in more sustainable manner. In this blog we also implicitly reflect upon our rather unique methodological approach. This text is adapted from the editors’ reflections in the publication itself. The full publication is available online, or can be ordered in print.
Mediation Perspectivesis a periodic blog entry that’s provided by the CSS’ Mediation Support Teamand occasional guest authors. Each entry is designed to highlight the utility of mediation approaches in dealing with violent political conflicts. To keep up to date with the Mediation Support Team, you can sign up to their newsletter here.
The fourth instalment of the CSS Mediation Perspectives Blog Mini-Series on the use of religious resources in peace mediation (Part one: Criteria, Part two: Christianity, Part three: Buddhism) comes from a Muslim perspective and looks at how peace, conflict and mediation are part of Islam.
Religions promote peace and provide moral guidance and legal injunctions to restrict and moderate the use of violence. Followers of a religion can comply with these guidelines or transgress against them as such followers are neither angels nor devils. Instead, they are human beings with all the complex aspirations to peace and temptations to violence that the human condition entails. In that respect, Islam is no exception.
The author and Buddhist leaders from different schools gather at the White House in 2016 for a Vesak Day celebration.
Mediation Perspectivesis a periodic blog entry that’s provided by the CSS’ Mediation Support Teamand occasional guest authors. Each entry is designed to highlight the utility of mediation approaches in dealing with violent political conflicts. To keep up to date with the Mediation Support Team, you can sign up to their newsletter here.
As part of the CSS Mediation Perspectives Blog Mini-Series on the use of religious resources in peace mediation (part one on criteria and part two on Christianity), I look at how, throughout the Buddhist world, peace practitioners have drawn on the religion’s ideas, stories, and practices in order to shape, legitimize, and motivate their efforts to resolve disputes and build peace more broadly. The 2500 year old tradition, born in India and now practiced throughout the world, is ripe with material to support such efforts. Indeed, any attempt to distill such a huge and diverse corpus into key points for the purpose of a blog is a challenge. After all, the Buddhist tradition lacks a core canon that’s considered authoritative for all Buddhists. Rather, thousands of Buddhist scriptures circulate in an ongoing conversation. A vast number of commentaries on these texts are also considered influential, including those written by the 5th century CE Buddhagosa. Moreover, chronicles such as the 6th century CE Sri Lankan Mahavamsa, stories surrounding key historical figures like the 3rd century BCE Emperor Asoka, the jataka tales that recount the Buddha’s myriad previous lives before his incarnation as the historical Buddha, and local stories and teachings that have been incorporated into the Buddhist imagination all constitute wells from which one can draw Buddhist teachings that might apply to mediation. Finally, different teachings, practices, and ideas resonate within different schools of Buddhism – from the Zen of Japan to the Vajrayana of Tibet to the Theravada Forest Tradition of Thailand.
Mediation Perspectivesis a periodic blog entry that’s provided by the CSS’ Mediation Support Teamand occasional guest authors. Each entry is designed to highlight the utility of mediation approaches in dealing with violent political conflicts. To keep up to date with the Mediation Support Team, you can sign up to their newsletter here.
As a U.S. citizen living abroad, I have watched social media recently expose deep divisions in my country between particular communities and the authorities. (The documented and high profile killing of several black American men by law enforcement agents exemplifies the point.) What strikes me about this mutual estrangement is the parallels it has with communities around the world that suffer from weak or absent governance. In both cases, it is not surprising that individuals and communities would want to prevent further violence. One consensus-building tool they could use is the Early-Warning/Early Response (EWER) framework, which is designed to address tensions that might escalate into overt violence.
In a contribution I made to this blog series last year, I looked at top-down/bottom-up approaches to EWER. In today’s blog, I would like to elaborate on my CSS Mediation Resources publication, Preventing Violence: Community-based Approaches to Early Warning/Early Response, which provides a ‘best practices’ resource for communities, practitioners, policy makers, and researchers, looking at the successes, pitfalls and promises of EWER mechanisms. At its heart, the publication affirms the essential role of building relationships and trust within communities, and between them and the authorities that should ideally serve them.
