home » Community Dialogue-Stanford Project

Community Dialogue-Stanford Project

Community Dialogue has had a long relationship with the Stanford Centre for Conflict and Reconciliation (SCCN), Palo Alto, USA. [Give Web Ref]. From 2001-2003 we engaged in a three-year project with them. The purpose of the project is to examine ways of making peace building more effective. To achieve this Community Dialogue, together with SCCN staff, asked:

• What does Community Dialogue actually do in the area of peace building?
• What do we think we are doing?
• What are the outcomes?
• How do Community Dialogue activities relate to those of practitioners in other conflict situations?
• Does the language of reconciliation help or hinder our work?

The project was an interaction between practitioners and Stanford staff in which each side bring their own experience and skills.
As part of the project, fourteen people - all either members or staff of Community Dialogue - attended a six day seminar in Stanford University from 25 February - 5 Mar 2001. The seminar also included some invited practitioners and/or academics from other conflict situations: Dan Bar-On and Ifat Maoz, academics who work in Israel, and John Guiney, a Jesuit who works with refugees in Burundi. Click on this link to access the report: CD Dialogue in Stanford

Since then our relationship with Stanford has continued. Some of the outcomes of these are summarised in Byron Bland's paper Getting Beyond Cheap Talk July 2004 and in Chapter 5 of Peace Comes Dropping Slow.

The project is continuing.

Community Dialogue and SCCN have worked together in Malta, the Middle East and the US, as well as in Northern Ireland.

SCCN staff who have been involved in the project are:

Byron Bland
Lee Ross
Steve Stedman
David Holloway
Melanie Greenberg