Addressing the Legacy of Violence through Facilitated Dialogue

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Nearly 19 years on from the signing of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, Northern Ireland and the border counties remained deeply divided along communal lines. One driver of this is that the Agreement and other subsequent political efforts have proven unable to adequately address the legacy of past violence. This deficit is most acutely felt in the divisive relationship between victims and survivors’ (hereafter, VS) groups and the individuals, groups, and institutions perceived to have inflicted harm upon them in the past. These groups, individuals, and institutions may include the state security forces (British, Northern Irish, Irish), ex-combatants and their affiliated political parties, other institutions (public and private) perceived, at an organisational level, to have not done enough to protect or prevent the infliction of violence and harm on local communities. This project’s goal is deepening reconciliation across these, some of the most pronounced and persistent social and political divides still scoring post-conflict space. It will do so through promoting positive and humanised cross-border and cross-community relations between four “hard-to-reach” VS groups and representatives of those groups and institutions perceived to have inflicted harm. This will be achieved through a facilitated dialogue approach resulting in meaningful, purposeful, and sustained contacts between people of different communities. Our specific goals in this project are to promote this contact, transform divisive social and political attitudes, decrease sectarianism in project participants, empower women within legacy contexts, increase the confidence of hard-to-reach VS groups, and to share the learning accrued from this project with a variety of stakeholders. The project will convene 20 co-developed dialogue workshops involving VS groups and representatives of groups and institutions perceived to have inflicted harm upon them, each workshop preceded by an extensive preparatory process. 4 of these workshops will be women-led and focused on empowering women within legacy contexts. We also convene 3 roundtable sessions during the course of the project inviting policymakers, academics, and practitioners to dialogue with project participants and close the project with a larger symposium for approximately 150 interested parties. We will additionally produce 2 briefing papers, a mid-term and final evaluation and impact assessment, and two peer-reviewed articles. The project itself is explicitly designed to be regional in scope and involve significant participation from both major communities in the eligible area and groups and individuals from both sides of the border. It is designed to explore regional issues of direct relevance to both communities and to people and communities on both sides of the border.

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