Nonviolence and Social Empowerment theme group

Report back

1. Our Agenda

This
was the largest theme group, beginning with perhaps 60 people. It was also the
most diverse group, with a substantial group from Bosnia and Croatia, and three
Chileans. The first session began late as all the theme groups had to be
formed and shown to their meeting rooms, and interpretation arrangements had to
be made.

Day 1: Sunday

The
opening session was simple:

• a go-round of names, organisations, countries;
• a name game (throwing a cushion and calling the name);
• language group meetings on why people had chosen this and what they
  expected/hoped for;
• setting an exercise for tomorrow: "a moment when I sensed my/our power"

Day 2: Monday - Personal Empowerment

We
began by sketching out the rough progress we wanted to make in the week, moving
from micro to macro, from personal to societal. Then today:

• groups of 4, first, a round telling each other a story "a moment when I
  sensed my/our power"
• second, a round asking "what did this sense of power consist of?", "what
  factors made it possible to behave?" and "was it real or an illusion?"
• combining two of the groups of 4 (or in one case three groups) to
  brainstorm "factors that increase sense of power, factors that demotivate", and
  then choose six most important
• reports back (a small group afterwards, not including us, compiled a joint
  list)

Day 3: Tuesday (Gender Day)

Culture of Obedience, Solidarity and Resistance

Introduction
to gender day, noting that similar exercises could be carried out with the
lens of race or class

Obedience

• a women's groups and a men's group to discuss factors which create
  obedience or conformism: in the family, in institutions, in the community.
  
  The women's group was slightly larger and did this with a go-round.
  
  The men's group did a listening exercise in 2s or 3s, moving on to making a
  list of some of the "pressures to be a man, to be `one of the boys'".
• reports back, and discussions

Solidarity

• a brief talk by Vesna on Ethics of Justice/Ethics of Caring, and the
  confusion of solidarity with self-sacrifice

Resistance

• brief presentations
• Greenham Common women's peace camp (women only)
• Insumisión: a campaign that tried to reach beyond the traditional
  male constituency and to include a feminist consciousness
• Chile: a movement initiated by women against torture and disappearance but
  including men
• Croatia: Centre for Counselling Women in Zagreb

Day 4: Wednesday: The characteristics of Social Empowerment

• Latino-Hispanic, Balkans and Rest groups
• Comparison of conclusions
• Drawing up what they had in common

Day 5: Thursday - Conclusion

• Barometer on "Nonviolent society"
• Language groups on what people had valued in our discussions, what was
  missing, what they would like to see further developed
• Reports back
• Additional points for evaluation
• Closing round

2. Written outcomes

• lists of factors giving sense of power and factors demotivating/reducing
  sense of power
• list of characteristics of social empowerment
• list for WRI future work on social empowerment

Evaluation comments

1. Reflections on Theme Group as it was

This
is a huge topic and this was a huge group to try to tackle this through
participatory and "elicitative" methods. We welcomed the rich diversity of
experience within the group. However, the difficulties of bridging the
Latino-Hispanic and Western peace movement contexts were much less than those
of making a good connection with the Bosnian-Croatian context. The first time
we divided into groups it was into English-, Spanish-, and local-language
speaking groups. Then came a request for more mixing, which we did, but that
in turn brought a request for more similar context groups with the differences
being addressed in reports back to the whole group.

We consistently underestimated how much we could cover in a session with a
group of this size and diversity. I think a better beginning would have been to
pose the question "what power do we want?" - at a personal level (power to be,
power to say no, power to act, etc) leading in to thinking about how power is
structured in society, and the goals for change we envisage. This would have
brought out the contextual differences more acutely, and earlier clarity about
goals would have helped stimulate more strategic thinking. A natural follow
on would have been the Culture of Obedience section. The group/movement level
would later emerge as the bridge between personal and social empowerment - I
suppose!

Most participants expressed appreciation for the work on Day 2. However, what
we produced were lists, containing some items that needed to be taken deeper.
Above all, a list is not a structured analysis, does not bring out the patterns
or suggest the tools for analysis of specific cases.

There was general appreciation that we had introduced gender day by putting
gender in the context of other power-relations, such as race and class.

The Culture of Obedience part of Day 3 was also widely appreciated, although
one woman told me it was just another "sharing" go-round without deepening
anything or addressing difficulties. During the reporting back, there was some
tension between men and women. The different methods followed by the groups
meant that the women reported back a more discursive list of points, including
more personal experience, while the men produced a shorter and more pointy
list, having discussed the most personal elements in pairs or trios. This
accentuated the difference perceived by one woman that "women feel a pressure
to conform, men a pressure to perform".

The men's group had an interesting detour into whether conforming to a
masculine role model should be seen as "disempowered behaviour", as in some
senses it is "overempowered", taking power from women. As gender issues
permeate the question of empowerment, it might have been more effective to have
a gender spot at the end of each day.

The Culture of Solidarity discussion was largely seen as a diversion, and
raised all-too-briefly a major theoretical approach of which some people were
very suspicious.

The Culture of Resistance stories were all interesting in their own right, and
suggested interesting differences from the gender perspective But there was
no time at all to get into them.

At the end of Day 3, there was specific criticism of our metholodogy and a
desire to get more clarity on some basic agreements around Social Empowerment.

We responded to these criticisms on Day 4, concentrating on defining the social
characteristics of Social Empowerment. Some difficulty arose because
Empowerment is a process but also a goal. The difference in the strategic
frameworks between the Bosnian-Croatian group and the others became especially
marked, as peace groups in B-H and Croatia are less oriented towards explicit
goals for the whole of society or for building a movement, but rather seek to
maintain a core of values at least among a minority in their societies. A
major discussion cropped up about the place of Nonviolence in empowerment. One
participant raised the specific point that she wanted to live in a society free
from the threat of socially-sanctioned violence against any social group. This
was the starting point for the barometer exercise at the beginning of Day 5:
this helped keep people awake after the previous night's party, but also was
quite participatory.

On Day 5, the group was asked to think in content terms but mainly reported
back about process and methodology. Symptomatic of the experience in this
group throughout the Triennial.

People felt that the group had stimulated a lot of ideas, which now needed
digesting. I felt we had not helped get those ideas into shape. I was
strongly aware that we hardly touched the question of alternative institution
building and did not look at all at the transformation of social structures.

People enjoyed our "elicitative" methods to begin with, but I think to get
beyond their existing limits needed to concentrate on some specific cases and
to be offered some specific frames for analysis. This means more theoretical
input, either that comes from the convenors and is implicit in some of the
exercises, or from a resource person in the group. (Even getting participants
to fill in a particular grid around power implies some theory.) Perhaps we
could have had a session with three or four groups making a case study and
analysing it according to a particular model - but to do that the theory behind
that model (and its limits) would need to have been introduced.

2. Connections with what was happening in the conference:

Most
of the talks at the start-of-day plenary session could have contributed to our
discussion, especially the one from Yeni from Indonesia, which described how
they built their movement up. To some extent that came at the wrong time of
the week for us, but I think we weren't really doing enough to connect with
different parts of the conference.

Perhaps it would be good for each theme group to begin with a brief round,
offering people the opportunity (but not obliging them) to report back on
things they'd heard elsewhere in the conference that added to our discussion.