Peacebuilding in Divided Communities: Karuna Center's Approach to Training by Paula Green The Karuna Center for Peacebuilding Bridging divides. Building sustainable peace. Peacebuilding in Divided Communities: Karuna Center's Approach to Training by Paula Green Karuna Center for Peacebuilding 2012 Copyright © 2012 Karuna Center for Peacebuilding Peacebuilding in Divided Communities: Karuna Center's Approach to Training by Paula Green Book designed by Rose Tannenbaum, Berkshire TypeGraphic Great Barrington, MA Table of Contents Foreword: Kevin P. Clements ..............................................................................1 Preface: Founding Vision of Karuna Center for Peacebuilding .................3 Introduction: Partners and Programs in the Search for Peace ..................7 Karuna Center’s strategies for peacebuilding .................................................. 9 How to use this training guide ............................................................................13 I. Conflict Analysis ................................................................................................... 15 Key generative questions ......................................................................................15 Overview ...................................................................................................................15 Story from the field: Philippines ..........................................................................17 Sample training design: conflict analysis and dynamics ............................. 18 Additional reading and resources..................................................................... 20 II. Peacebuilding Interventions ................................................................... 21 Key generative questions ......................................................................................21 Overview ...................................................................................................................21 Story from the field: Nepal ..................................................................................24 Sample training design: leadership training for sustainable peace in Nepal .................................................................................27 Additional reading and resources..................................................................... 30 III. Intercommunal Dialogue .......................................................................31 Key generative questions ......................................................................................31 Overview ...................................................................................................................31 Stories from the field: utilizing dialogue in Israel/Palestine and CONTACT program ................................................................................................34 Sample training design I: dialogue with Israelis and Palestinians ............36 Sample training design II: dialogue facilitation training for CONTACT ........................................................................................... 37 Additional reading and resources.....................................................................40 IV. Social Healing, Reconciliation, and Forgiveness ..............................41 Key generative questions ..................................................................................... 41 Overview .................................................................................................................. 41 Story from the field: Bosnia.................................................................................43 Sample training design: social healing workshop for Bosnian educators .................................................................................................47 Additional reading and resources..................................................................... 49 V. Preparing Peacebuilding Facilitators: Training of Trainers ............51 Key generative questions ......................................................................................51 Overview ...................................................................................................................51 Story from the field: Sri Lanka ............................................................................ 53 Sample training design: Sri Lanka training of trainers (TOT) ......................55 Additional reading and resources......................................................................58 VI. Creating Learning Communities for Peacebuilding in a Global Context: CONTACT Program ..................................................59 Key generative questions .....................................................................................59 Overview ..................................................................................................................59 Story from the field: CONTACT .......................................................................... 62 Sample training design: teaching and learning in the CONTACT program ....................................................................................63 Additional reading and resources.....................................................................69 Afterword: A Nonviolent Future ....................................................................70 Acknowledgements .......................................................................................... 72 Training Tools .......................................................................................................73 Foreword Kevin P. Clements It is a great privilege to write a foreword for this exciting new training guide, Peacebuilding in Divided Communities. The Karuna Center for Peacebuilding, under the inspired leadership of its founding director, Dr. Paula Green, and current director Olivia Stokes Dreier, has pioneered creative and successful processes for the transformation of violent conflict and post-conflict community peacebuilding in a wide range of violently divided societies. What makes Karuna Center and this training guide different from a large number of other organizations working in similar areas, and many other training manuals, is that Karuna Center combines the insights and wisdom of psychology, sociology, and politics in a holistic fashion. This approach generates respectful and effective dialogue, reconciliation, and collaborative problem solving between warring parties. Over the last 18 years, the Center has generated an enviable reputation for developing and maintaining creative working relationships with a wide variety of official and unofficial actors in more than 25 different conflict zones. It works with these actors to generate hope and cre- ative possibility in situations where many are pessimistic and stuck. Karuna Center training teams know from experience that when trust is replaced by mis- trust, security by insecurity, and hope by fear, it is critical to focus attention on processes that will foster trust and clear communications between groups in conflict. These efforts will only be successful, however, if the process designers and facilitators themselves are committed to creating non-violent solutions to violent problems. One of the primary and deep values within Karuna Center is a strong commitment to building cultures and structures of peace, and to exploring and exhausting all non-violent responses to conflict. That the organization has been able to work with government and non-governmental entities alike in this endeavor is testi- mony to a universal popular yearning to achieve peace by peaceful means, and to create robust, non-violent institutions capable of preventing and containing violence. In my own research and writing, I have been concerned with how we enlarge “Boundar- ies of Compassion,” and I am very pleased to note that this concern lies at the heart of much of the work described in this training guide. This too is another reason why the organization and this guide fill an important gap in the development and peacebuilding field. Far too often, development and conflict resolution experts view the existential dilemmas of working in con- flict environments as technical problems demanding narrow technical solutions. To its credit, Karuna Center refuses to treat direct and indirect violence as technical problems. By imbedding the work in a very firm “compassionate” frame, its trainers are able to work with individuals afflicted by conflict in order to help them see their problems in relation to others. In this way they stimulate higher levels of empathetic consciousness, appeal to altruistic impulses, and generate genuine understanding of the dynamics that have impelled people to divide them- selves from and dehumanize others. These processes of rehumanization, which lie at the heart of much of Karuna Center’s work, are a very distinctive feature of it. The principles that undergird this engagement were developed through work in a wide vari- ety of contexts. Karuna Center, along with other groups working in diverse areas, has established approaches that generate environments conducive to effective peacebuilding. Its staff and train- ers work with local partners, for example, and encourage those partners to set agendas suitable 1 for their local conditions. Karuna Center training teams focus on the constructive side of conflict, utilizing the positive elements of conflict incompatibility to suggest new ways