Beyond mediation and conflict m anagement : Nurturing transformation and conviviality

1. Beyond mediation and conflict management: Nurturing transformation and conviviality Leuven, February 2016 Brunilda Pali and Ivo Aertsen

2. ALTERNATIVE An action research project that explored the potential and the limits of restorative approaches in conflicts taking place in intercultural settings

3. Contextualising the problematique • Security discourse (security as technology, as obsession, nexus diversity) • Restorativejustice(focus on VOM, CJS, no research in intercultural conflicts, no focus on security, and also social justice) • Action research (gaps between theory and practice, between research and social change, and lack of action research in these areas)

4. Sites • Vienna (urban context/social housing-migration) • Hungary (small town-minorities) • Serbia (border towns-ethnic conflicts) • Northern Ireland (urban contexts/neighbourhoods-intersectarian and other conflicts)

5. Vienna (‘occupied’ field) • Conceptual work (active participation) • Understanding conflicts, narratives, and the practice of partner organisations (conflict and community work) • Interventions (peace-making circles) and capacity-building trainings (tailored to the needs of the organisation) • Evaluation

6. Narratives • Conflict narratives (no conflict, intercultural conflicts, culturalisation of conflicts, covert racism) • Framing of narratives (entitlements, world lost, unconditional adaptation, insecurity about culture, exclusive identities, differences towards conflicts)

7. Strategies wohnpartner (conflict work) Bassena (community work) Framing (concern, collective) Reframing ( Aims (agitation, nurturing conflicts, network, empowerment, representation) Focus (active and political neighbourhood) • Framing (complains, individual) • Reframing (break down needs, withdraw support, check realistic promises) • Aims (pacification, solve conflicts, agreements, conflict containment, emancipation) • Focus (rules of conduct)

8. Restorative justice in intercultural contexts? • Restoration of communication, trust and cooperation • Beyond restoration: open-ended, transformative, and unpredictable processes • Revitalising and redefining communities (being in common) • Boundary making-unmaking, norm clarification, conviviality, ‘restoring the future’

9. Conviviality • Ivan Illich’s Tools for conviviality, based on the Latin roots of ‘living-with’. • Paul Gilroy (2004, xi) has described the process of conviviality referring to processes of “cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life.”   • The art of living together (art of negotiating shared meanings) as a fine tuned negotiation of curiosity and indifference, boundary-crossing and boundary maintenance, solidarities and exclusion, friendliness and conflicts, requires constant labour as well as technical and semi-formal organisation, and this is where restorative justice can provide a valuable contribution.   • ‘Cool conviviality’ or ‘light engagement’, ‘unpanicked multiculturalism’ • Rise of diversity reduce trust and lead to social isolation (‘hunker down’ – to pull in like a turtle), where inhabitants withdraw from collective life.

10. Communitas • Communitas refers to a common munus (the focus shifts from com to munus), which can mean both gift and obligation toward another. Defined as a common obligation towards one another, community exposes each of us to a contact with another, in the face of which a process of immunisation is activated. • The ‘community’ must be different from the close bounded community usually understood as a ‘common being’ (belonging, identity, ownership), towards a convivial ‘being together or being in common’, ‘community as a communication process’, ‘community as togetherness.

11. Transformation in social craftsmanship • Static Repair-Restoration: take something apart, find and fix what’s wrong, then restore the object to its former state. This sort of repairing aims at making the object ‘just like new’. The craftsman attempts to leave as little traces as possible, and sees oneself as an instrument of time, crafting in a certain way an illusion that things can be just the way they were before. • Dynamic Repair-Remediation: restoring the object to its existing form but by using new parts or tools. The craftsman needs therefore a lot of future-oriented judgement on the resilience of the object in time and a lot of inventory skills and knowledge.   • Dynamic Repair- Reconfiguration: the broken object is seen as an occasion to make a radical repair, to make the object different from before. In this case, the craftsman needs a lot of improvisation skills, and as little and incomplete specifications as possible, to allow for experiment and surprise.

12. Further information • http://www.alternativeproject.eu • http://alternativefilms.euforumrj.org/ • https://projectalternative.wordpress.com/category/posts/