Evolving Common Spaces: Building common understanding and develop consensus through knowledge-based dialogues, the creation of shared knowledge, and the evolving of permanent safe spaces — A presentation by Hannes Siebert at the Rotary Peace Fellowship 10 year anniversary in Thailand, 2015
Over the past 15 years we’ve witnessed the emergence of several unique Track 1.5 initiatives following long periods of civil wars, governance system failures, political instability, or during intractable conflicts. They served as “safe spaces ” for confidential dialogues or as support mechanisms and safety nets for formal and constitutional change processes.
The development of each of these common spaces was determined by the dynamics of the conflict, the depth of the broken relations between groups, the failures of existing constitutional and governing instruments, competing interests and the breakdown in communications. In this presentation he briefly look at five of these dialogue spaces in Cyprus, Lebanon, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Burma/Myanmar