LOCLALLY LED DEVELOPMENT: With families and local communities as its focus, NAC has built dialogue and conflict transformation into all its programming. Adopting a dialogue method developed by the Nansen Center for Peace and Dialogue, NAC aims to create ‘peace from below’ by starting with families and local communities at the grassroots level.
Decades of war, poverty and natural disasters and a lack of resource management have eaten away at the mutual trust in Afghan communities. In order to respond to this massive challenge, dialogue and peaceful conflict resolution have been incorporated into NAC programming and adapted to the Afghan context.
Training of trainers
Since 2019, 80 staff members have received training in methods to facilitate dialogue and mutual trust. These individuals have in turn trained more than 2,600 local community members, including teachers, religious leaders, and members of local village councils (shuras). In addition, close to 1,300 health students from 17 provinces have received training in dialogue and peaceful conflict resolution.
The training is built on a method developed by the Nansen Center for Peace and Dialogue, based in Lillehammer, Norway and has been incorporated in the various programmatic areas of NAC, such as health, education, and agriculture.
The individual and the collective
The main defining feature of the Nansen dialogue approach is its focus on local communities and households. At the community level, this entails understanding and transforming conflicts within and between villages, which often includes conflicts between community members from different ethnic groups. At the household level, the dialogue approach is useful in preventing violence through fostering better communication between spouses, between parents and children, and within extended families.
The dialogue method mainly involves getting people to talk – facilitating conversations that make people feel safe enough to share what’s on their minds. Another key component of the training is conducting a conflict analysis to map what the conflict is actually about, who are the parties to the conflict, and how do they stand in relation to each other.
In the early stages of the dialogue process, the method involves exercises to explore the diversity of identities among the participants. Afghans tend to perceive themselves and others primarily as part of a collective or group that can be defined by factors such as ethnicity, tribe or family. This is in stark contrast with the Western way of thinking, where we primarily define ourselves as individuals.
In order to explore the individual aspects of identity, participants are invited to reflect on their own interests and preferences and share their thoughts in group sessions. A particular emphasis is placed on enhancing the ability to listen to others’ histories, feelings and needs. In this way, participants discover entirely new sides to themselves and others, and in this way, trust is built.
Fostering listening and mutual understanding
Another building block in the Nansen dialogue approach is shifting focus from presenting and fighting for your own view to understanding the other person and his or her views and perspectives by strengthening the ability to ask open and inviting questions.
In conflict situations, people tend to lead their lives segregated and without access to the thoughts and perspectives of “the other side.” Conflicts between the traditional and the modern are particularly salient, as youth are expected to respect their elders. The Nansen dialogue approach brings people together across ethnicity, gender, and age.
This approach builds and expands on the Afghan tradition of shuras and jirgas, councils where male elders sit together to make decisions regarding their local communities. Through dialogue, these groups are widened to include women and youth with a facilitator who ensures that everybody gets their voices heard in a safe space.
This is what building peace from below represents – a broad inclusion at the local level that enables Afghans to take their future in their own hands and provides fertile ground for durable peace.
