Binalakshmi Nepram Mentschel, Women’s role in Micro-Disarmament in India’s North East, WISCOMP Discussion Paper 21 (2011)

Ashima Kaul and Seema Kakran, Symbol and Substance: Exploring Inter Community Dialogue in Ladakh, Building Constituencies of Peace: Stakeholders in Dialogue XVIII (2011)

Seema Kakran, Competing Realities: Identity, Culture and Dialogue in Jammu and Kashmir, Building Constituencies of Peace: Stakeholders in Dialogue XIX (2011)


OVERVIEW

In keeping with the spirit of universal responsibility and its role in facilitating active coexistence, the Conflict Transformation Program builds a crucial interface between issues relating to conflict, security, nonviolence and peacebuilding. As part of this Program, practitioners and scholars engage extensively to build a synergy between the theory and praxis of conflict transformation in South Asia. Training workshops are conducted for universities, NGOs and think tanks.

The Conflict Transformation Program seeks to:

• Empower a new generation of women and men, in South Asia, with the motivation, skills, and expertise to engage in processes of nonviolent change in different conflict settings. These include conflicts ranging from the intra-personal and inter-personal to those at the community, intra-national and international level.

• Introduce Conflict Transformation as a field of study in South Asia.

• Foreground the lens of gender in the analysis of conflict and in the conceptualization of peace initiatives.

• Provide a reflexive curriculum for peace that evolves in response to changing regional and international landscapes. This is done through knowledge sharing, theory-building, skill enhancement and critical reflection on contemporary thinking and practices in conflict analysis, mediation, multi-track diplomacy, reconciliation, justice and post-conflict peacebuilding.

• Build partnerships, mentoring relationships and a network of peace practitioners and theoreticians who can contribute to peacebuilding initiatives in South Asia and the world.

• Processes that encourage experiential learning and that simultaneously address the conceptual and analytical frameworks for analysis and intervention inform the pedagogy of this initiative.


What is Conflict Transformation?

John Paul Lederach, in his seminal book Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, introduces the field of Conflict Transformation as one that “integrates the emotional and psychological with the substantive concerns of people in conflict, the underlying belief being that more than realpolitik and statist diplomacy are needed to build societies supportive of sustainable transformation”.

Conflict Transformation addresses the questions: How do we resolve violent conflict? How do we build (or rebuild) relationships and institutions that can support and sustain nonviolent social change?

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Wiscomp was established as part of the efforts of the Foundation for Universal Responsibility to build a culture of coexistence and nonviolence that is gender-sensitive and inclusive. A not-for-profit, non-sectarian, non-denominational organization, the Foundation promotes universal responsibility in a manner that celebrates a diversity of beleifs and practices, and that contributes to a global ethic of nonviolence, coexistence and gender equity. The work of the Foundation is global in its reach and transcends nationalist political agendas.

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