The conflicts: Cross Cultures approach to conflicts is building on the experience of how wars and ethnic conflicts affect people and their possibilities of returning to a daily life in post conflict areas.
Although the wars and conflicts officially may have come to an end many years ago and although the physical frontiers and checkpoints are gone, still major tasks remain to stabilize the post conflict communities. Mistrust, hatred, fear and the former front lines still linger inside people and dividing parallel structures in local communities are still some of the main challenges to overcome.
Play as tool for reconciliation and conflict management: In Cross Cultures-Open Fun Football School program the conceptual point of departure is different from other conflict management techniques. Children, coaches, leaders, parents and other stakeholders involved gather because of the passion they share (children and children’s football) and the fun they expect from the Open Fun Football Schools – not because the children have specific problems to solve or a given conflict to discuss. The whole organisational and pedagogical set-up is geared toward nurturing the community spirit and the social relations in contrary to the more traditional conflict resolution techniques that start with the problems to be solved, which is, a projection of the deadlocked conflict situation.
For the Open Fun Football Schools to work as means for conflict resolution (and prevention) the community football clubs, leaders, coaches, players, and parents involved are neighbours that do not share everyday activities due to ethnical, political or social divisions. They are brought together at the Open Fun Football Schools across these divisions. This is our reason for the detailed requirements made for geographical, ethnic and social mix of the participants. Coaches and children from various groups form mixed teams. Trained and non-trained players are playing on the same teams. So are boys and girls, locals and refugees/IDP’s etc.
The Open Fun Football Schools are not a conflict management tool that urges the parties sit around a table discussing why they cannot live together peacefully. Instead Open Fun Football School offer the participants a platform and a program of physical activities where people act and play together in a constructive atmosphere, in real time, so to speak.
Thus, Cross Cultures regard the Open Fun Football Schools as a ‘narrative mediation technique’ that wishes to take the focus away from the conflict and away from the cultural categories that put the parties in opposition to each other. Instead Cross Cultures provides a platform for the participants/stakeholders that put them in a context with new relations, new actions, new storylines and new positions to each other[i]. In doing so Cross Cultures are using the Open Fun Football School as a means to construct ‘a counter story’ about friendship and sports-cooperation that are commonly shared – ‘a counter story’ that in some cases has potential to dominate the ‘story of conflict’.
Put it differently:
1. If CCPA invites people living in divided communities for meeting and the topic for the meeting is reconciliation, nobody turns up – due to the conflict. But when we invite parents, voluntary coaches, leaders, municipal officials and other direct stakeholders for a meeting about children – welfare – future – and the development of children’s football, then lots of people would like to participate. In this way it is our twelve years of experience that the Open Fun Football Schools programme can stimulate reconciliation and cohesion without pointing fingers or providing ‘Holy Prayers’.
2. Conflicts host a negative spiral fuelled by feelings such as hatred, fear, mistrust, hate speech and chauvinistic nationalism. To help turn around this negative spiral and stimulate peace-building and constructive processes in the self and between people, the Open Fun Football Schools program offer ‘fun games’, physical activity and storrytelling as tool. Thus using laugh, joy and physical contact as tool we wish to turn the negative emotions into positive relations.
3. Instead of facilitating dialogues between the participants that start with the conflict infected problems, CCPA approach the conflicts indirectly. With a focus on our children their future and well-being we facilitate communication situations and create narratives where the participants discuss and discover basic values in common: What is a good children’s environment? How can we create a good children’s environment together? What are the most important values to address at the Open Fun Football Schools? Etc. This indirect approach is always based on participatory methods and child-centred and value-based pedagogic and it constitutes a corner stone in all our workshops at the instructors, leaders, coach, parent’s workshops and seminars[ii].
4. The OFFS provides an overall narrative about the meaning of Open Fun Football Schools, which is to use Open Fun Football Schools as tool to foster friendship and sports cooperation between people living in divided communities using children’s football, their wellbeing and future as point of departure. This narrative metaphor however, is by itself just “an empty signifier” which only attains a meaning if people accepts the overall narrative and connects to it.
Put it differently it is the participants and the meaning that the participants put into the overall narrative that provide Open Fun Football Schools significance and become a roadmap for reconciliation in the local setting. Since the conflicts, the history, the culture and the personal experiences differ from place to place an Open Fun Football Schools in Srebenica/Bratunac is different from an Open Fun Football Schools in Sveti Nicole, Gori or Tripoli, while the overall narrative metaphor remains the same.[iii]
[i] Narrative Evaluation Methods – in a context of reconciliation. By Anna W. Meesenburg, Lisbeth C. Dolberg & Tina Wiffeldt. Group 41. K2. Spring 2011. Advisor: Stine Jørgensen. Cultural Encounters. Roskilde Universitycenter
[ii]During consultations with Professor Ph.D. Gary Weaver Dec 2010, CCPA learned that Dr. Weaver emphasized the outstanding ability of having an indirect approach to the conflicts in reconciliation programmes like the OFFS. Dr. Weaver backed this point of view by several references to scientific articles among others features in the second edition of Culture, Communication and Conflict. Dr. Gary Weaver is Founder and Executive Director, Intercultural Management Institute at School of International Service, American University, Washington D.C. Dr. Weaver’s areas of expertise include cross-cultural communication and adaptation, intercultural conflict resolution and multicultural management.
[iii]In our organisational work with narratives life is seen as a text and history is seen as a con-text that assigns meaning to our experiences. According to the narrative metaphor we as people are “authors” and “readers” who actively construct stories about our lives. And these stories not only describe but shape the way in which we see ourselves, others and the surrounding world and, hence, shape the foundation for our actions. We create meaning in order to act. In case we do not understand what is happening around us, it is difficult to know how to act. The narrative metaphor consequently captures how we as people not only tell stories about our lives but live our lives through stories. Michala Schnoor. Narrativ Organisationsudvikling – At forme fælles mening og handlinger. P. 22-23. Dansk Psykologisk Forlag 2010.
