IDI 16th ANNUAL MEETING
Vienna, Austria – 19-21 October, 2018
The Sixteenth Meeting of the International Dialogue Initiative (IDI) was held in Vienna, Austria from October 19th to October 21st, 2018. The IDI was once again hosted by EUNEPA Eurasian Nexus Partners GmbH (formerly Atieh International GmbH), a strategic consulting group established in Vienna in 2010 by IDI member Bijan Khajehpour. This was the IDI’s second meeting in Vienna.
The Sixteenth Meeting of the IDI marked both the continuation of the group’s decade-long study of the psycho-political manifestations of societal conflict and an expansion of its training and consulting activities. In addition to the general meeting and attendant Board meetings, events in Vienna included a screening of the award-winning documentary film, Vamik’s Room – which focuses on the work and career of IDI founder Vamik Volkan – at the Freud Museum and a two-day training session on Large Group Identity with participants from around the world. What follows is a summary of presentations, themes and observations.
SUMMARY
Preliminary Events: Documentary Screening and Pre-Conference Training
On Tuesday, October 16th, a public screening of the Gradiva Award-winning documentary Vamik’s Room, by director Molly Castelloe, was held at the Sigmund Freud Museum, Berggasse 19, Vienna. The documentary focuses on 5-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee Vamik Volkan’s career as a psychoanalyst and as (according to the Museum) “a leading contributor to what many see as a new form of international diplomacy, based on the emotional life of nations, the historical traumas of a people and their collective efforts to work through disturbed relationships toward shared mourning.” IDI members Vamik Volkan and Gerard Fromm participated in a question-and-answer session after the screening with members of the public. More information on Vamik’s Room can be found at www.vamiksroom.org.
On Wednesday, October 17th and Thursday, October 18th, IDI members Gerard Fromm, Vamik Volkan, Ford Rowan and Regine Scholz led a two-day intensive training workshop entitled “Large-Group Identity and Societal Conflict: Bringing a Psychological Understanding to Conflict Resolution.” Fourteen members from around the world participated in the Workshop, which included didactic presentation, analysis of members’ cases, an IDI case presentation, and an opportunity for members to reflect on their own large group identities. This was the second formal training session offered by the IDI and marked a significant expansion of its training activities. Information on the IDI’s training activities can be found at: www.internationaldialogueinitiative.com/training.
IDI General Meeting: Day One
Introductions
On Friday, October 19th, the IDI formally commenced its Sixteenth Meeting in its customary form, with a welcome introduction and opening remarks by IDI President Gerard Fromm. A total of eighteen members were present at the start of the three-day conference, with the two remaining IDI members joining the conference in progress.
The IDI was also joined at its Sixteenth Meeting by several invited guests. Among them were Ben Ehrenreich, a psychiatrist at the University of Maryland who is working with Lord John Alderdice’s Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict (CRIC), and William Pierros, an assistant professor of Political Science at Concordia University in Chicago and participant in the IDI’s two-day training program. Also joining were the current Volkan Scholar Nimrod Goren, the founder of Mitvim, the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies, and past Volkan Scholar Stephan Alder, a psychotherapist in private practice in Potsdam and founder of the Trialogue Conferences between Germans, Ukrainians and Russians. Finally, the group was joined for one session by Adnan Tabatabai, CEO of Bonn-based CARPO, The Centre for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient. Pari Namazie, co-founder of EUNEPA and the Iranian cultural exchange platform, The Simorgh, also joined the group periodically.
Themes, Outlooks, Individual and Group Engagements
This first session continued with IDI members describing their activities during the preceding year, projects on which they were working, their outlooks both for those projects and more generally for their communities, and themes resonating throughout their experiences. Several members discussed “track two” diplomatic projects between groups in conflict, with one member wondering how to keep a particular conflict relevant in the public’s mind – how to keep empathy alive – amidst competition for attention and resources. Another member described one initiative aimed at connecting Turkish and Armenian expatriates through the creation of an orchestra, and another which takes students to visit the Middle East and thereby experience the context for that conflict directly.
Another member urged the group to hear the voice of The Other, which in his case included an acquaintance’s defense of the U.S. President, both on pragmatic conservative grounds but also based on what he perceived to be the left’s rush to – and pleasure in – judgement, such that nothing needs to be discovered about the other side or how it made sense that Mr. Trump was in power. Several members discussed new books and papers. Others discussed the development and progress of interventions, such as Dr. Alder’s Trialogue Conferences and Dr. Goren’s track-two work with Israelis and Palestinians.
Through these accounts, themes emerged: negative themes like the deep divisions and polarization within societies; profound economic inequality and the populist response to it; profound feelings of loss and the pull toward hopelessness; the attack on third structures, like journalism; and both active and passive processes of fragmentation (dismemberment, in the context of the very recent murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, came to be seen not only as an act that in its gruesomeness was meant to create revulsion rather than empathy, but also as a metaphor for the authoritarian effort to desensitize people and split them from each other).
More positive themes emerged as well: of reinvention; signs of rejecting the new authoritarianism; the subversive but potentially progressive effects of new technology; the assertion, in the face of “Lock her up,” of the Me Too movement; and ways of working together as citizens that reconnect liberal and conservative outlooks to shared values. A dream brought to the training session by a participant, suggested that a major problem in society today has to do with “ghosts” from past traumatic experiences. Another positive sign was how eager training participants were to learn about and work on the way past trauma was “haunting” the present. A learning challenge, however, was how to hold a consultative stance when working with conflict, a stance both neutral enough to allow for openness and engaged enough to feel what might be at stake for both sides.
Review of the Training Workshop: Themes and Discussion
IDI President Gerard Fromm then reported on the IDI’s first formal two-day Training Workshop. By way of background, prior to the 2017 General Meeting, IDI members had been approached by conflict resolution professionals who expressed concern that there was “something clinical” missing from the way they assembled data and interpreted conflict situations. They invited the IDI to consider offering a short training session to model a psychological approach to societal conflict.
Accordingly, prior to the 2017 General Meeting (which was also held in Vienna), IDI members organized a half-day training module and offered it to two participants. The training module was a success and, for 2018, the IDI prepared a more robust two-day training session and promoted it through the IDI website. Fourteen professionals participated. The attendees included management consultants, educators and conflict resolution practitioners, some trained in psychoanalysis and others not, from the United States, Europe, the Middle East and China.
The IDI training module took the form of a tripartite program, consisting of opportunities for members to reflect on large group identity in their personal lives, didactic presentation about large group psychology and interventions, and case studies from members and the IDI, in an effort to apply large-group psychology principles to actual work on social conflict.
A robust discussion ensued among IDI members on the format and content of the training, with workshop participant William Pierros offering his experiences and assessment as well. IDI members discussed future training modules and considered the possibility of online training courses as well. It was particularly significant that the faculty also learned a lot during the workshop. This mutuality of learning and the highly interactive nature of the workshop were part of what made it successful.
Discussion of the IDI’s training module led into a separate but related discussion of IDI structure, goals and methodology. One member who had been part of the training faculty remarked on the challenge for participants to grasp the idea of large-group identity and to realize how it plays out in their own lives, which perhaps might reflect wishful thinking about their own independence? There was also discussion of the loss of a language for feelings, and the realization of one member that, while they had come to learn how to understand others’ feelings, they first had to learn about their own.
An IDI member reflected on one case study to discuss the difficulty of positioning oneself within a conflict so as to hold space for potential understanding. One realization of participants was that structures, long taken for granted as right and necessary, might themselves be seriously flawed, and that progress might be made by looking at things in completely different ways: not how something was obviously wrong but how it might also be right in the sense of serving a purpose. Participants struggled with two major tendencies in themselves: the inclination toward judgement and an eagerness to help.
The Attack on Journalism
The IDI then took up a discussion of inequality and its role in eroding democratic structures and heralding authoritarian ones. This process includes a tension between citizenship and the willingness of citizens to surrender their rights and obligations in order to belong. Thus, as one member put it, “we elect our kings these days.” And indeed it is a male power structure that sustains itself in this process. But politicians also “simplify and amplify” because complexity is so overwhelming and threatening to ordinary citizens. What’s missing is “explaining,” or what might be called interpretive leadership.
Two IDI members then led a discussion on the challenges – and mortal dangers – facing journalists in a world where the political manipulation of information is ever more present, and where “third” containing structures (including the judiciary) are potential casualties to the process of group polarization. One member remarked on the “deep depression” journalists face as their work is both weaponized and devalued. Other members referred to past information revolutions, for example in Iran in 1979. While these have led to crackdowns on journalism in modern authoritarian states, some of the current data is complex. In Russia, anonymous sources are trusted while “professional” journalism isn’t. In Iran, public knowledge of the national budget led to outrage over how money was being spent (even though that was very hard to analyse); once the government shut that information down, 80% of the people found ways around that. Another member observed that it was the very democratization of journalism – the availability of social media platforms for vast, like-minded audiences and rapid delivery of information – that plays a part in its current woes. How do true journalists, operating within a framework of ethics and professional rigor, speak to the power of “fake news”?
Small-Group Reflections
IDI members ended their first day by splitting into two smaller groups to reflect upon the work of the large group so far, the hopes for the Sixteenth Meeting and fears that those hopes might be frustrated, and ongoing questions about the purpose and application of the group, essentially the ‘Who are we now” question for ourselves. One member urged that the discussions to be more proactive, rather than reflective, with the end of producing something of visibility and usefulness or perhaps taking up an advocacy stance. Another member questioned whether the idea of group productivity was realistic in light of members’ political and physical limitations, and sought to refocus the group on the task, which was, as he saw it, to try to understand, within the multidisciplinary group, the wider and deeper dynamics that inform many of the individual conflict issues to which the group has access.
One group took up the question of IDI membership and whether the group might shift from a narrower “recruitment” model to a more open “enlistment” model for future works – the IDI, in that case, modelling some of the social organizations it analyses. The group discussed what an “enlistment” model might mean for the group dynamic and its opportunities, and how the IDI methodology might be scalable. One member noted that the group had long been “process-oriented,” rather than “results-oriented”. Others asked whether, through increased training workshops, engagements and consultations, that orientation toward learning from our own process might be shifting.
The second small group noted that the IDI served for many members as an important network of both information, analysis, shared values and learning. For some members, this was enough; in fact, an expectation to create an IDI “product” would go beyond some members’ resources. But a second theme was that the IDI served a critical support function for many in an emotionally troubled time, indeed it served as a kind of intellectual and emotional refuge. While this could be a source of learning – “Your story is your country’s story” – it also involved bearing considerable pain, a sense of risk and potential feelings of disloyalty.
This discussion carried over into the morning session of Day Two, at which one member reiterated that the training workshop represented not only an IDI “product” – that is, teaching opportunities – but mutual learning opportunities as well. Another member picked up on this point to note that representatives from stable, peaceful societies often find it hard to engage with traumatized societies – not because they don’t want to, but because they must confront the possibly – or likely – flawed presumption within themselves that “their societies have it all sorted,” whereas representatives from traumatized societies are unburdened by such presumptions and feel less shame acknowledging misconceptions and flaws. This inclination in ourselves is tempered by the multidisciplinary nature of our group and, even more so, by the personal stories members bring from various troubled areas of the world.
IDI General Meeting: Day Two
Case Study: CARPO Iranian-Saudi Dialogues
After the reflections from Day One, Day Two began with a fascinating presentation by Adnan Tabatabai on the dialogue work undertaken by his organization, the Bonn-based Centre for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO). In a joint project with the Brussels-based Middle East Department of the EastWest Institute (EWI), CARPO seeks to help policy-makers, NGOS and business research engage in the region by fostering a greater understanding of the dynamics of the Saudi-Iran relationship. Unlike, for example, the US-Iran relationship, the Saudi-Iran relationship is defined by a conflict not only between leaders, but between the people. As Tabatabai observed, Saudi-Iran antipathy runs deep and transcends national borders – expatriated Iranians, for example, often hold even more “anti-Arab” perceptions than Iranians within the country, and vice-versa.
CARPO and EWI undertake dialogue sessions with Saudi and Iranian business leaders, advisors and stakeholders designed to counter these perceptions of “the Other” and address the felt self-perceptions of the participants. For example, discussions reflect on shared feelings of underappreciation, as well as differences in regional perceptions of historical importance – Saudi self-perceives as a young, powerful regional leader, whereas Iran self-perceives as a centuries-old civilization. Saudi self-perceives as the guardians of the holy sites, Iran self-perceives as an eternal nation. Perceptions of arrogance toward Iran and of immaturity toward Saudi Arabia feed a chronic sense of underappreciation on both sides and limit each other’s willingness to recognize regional solidarity. Iran’s perceived superiority as a civilization is countered by Saudi’s sense of Sunni superiority. All of this produces barriers to dialogue, which CARPO and EWI work to overcome.
IDI members offered their reflections on CARPO’s important work and analysis of the psychological factors potentially reflected in the dialogue workshops. Members suggested structural and substantive additions to the workshop format, which might facilitate awareness of the large-group identities in play, noting that “different identity constellations require different structures.” One member noted that vocal disagreements at the beginning of each dialogue workshop might reflect a necessary re-establishment of large-group boundaries and solidarity, before carefully grappling with the idea that the real danger of dialogue might be perceived disloyalty to one’s own large group.
One member recommended the “absolutely critical” engagement of regional and geopolitical players within the workshop framework, because if not engaged, those players have the capacity to act as spoilers of the work. Tabatabai and members also discussed the importance of well-designed workshops and a carefully held space for dialogue, because poorly structured workshops could worsen issues between the participants. In the latter environment, Tabatabai noted, it may not be helpful, and indeed may even be harmful, for participants to learn more about each other.
Tabatabai includes a third “buffer” group, generally representing expertise of some sort, in the dialogue work. This might also come to include one or two IDI members as observers. He also spoke to the identification and incorporation of issues of shared concern, such as climate change. Dust storms originating in one country that sweep across the other, for example, impact oil production and other industries in both countries. Another area of solidarity is the annual Hajj pilgrimage, which requires cooperation to run smoothly and on which “people demand collaboration.” IDI members discussed how to incentivize dialogue participants to recognize and acknowledge these shared interests. One member noted that the great lesson learned in working on the Northern Ireland peace process was that conflicts were about disturbed historical relationships between communities. In that context, talking about history is not a distraction from progress, but a necessary part of making progress. An Iranian member remarked “We are part of their identity. They are part of our identity. We just don’t admit it.”
Case Study: Mitvim and Track Two Diplomacy between Israel and Palestine
In the next session, 2018 Volkan Scholar Nimrod Goren presented on his organization’s dialogue work with Israelis and Palestinians, but also on Mitvim’s effort toward better relations with Israel’s neighbors in the absence of solving the conflict with Palestinians. Goren began by noting that, in Israel, “Things are getting worse.” Developments on the ground are making a two-state solution less likely. The international community is, for various reasons, less involved, while in a reversal of past narrative strategy, Israel pushes a narrative of improved relationships with Arab neighbours without mentioning the Palestinians. Within that context, Mitvim asks how to create momentum for peace in an indifferent society increasingly inured to the status quo? How do peace activists re-engage the international community and the EU and highlight the unrealized potential of the region? Like CARPO, Mitvim seeks to promote dialogue through a sort of Track Two-level series of workshops and consultations. One difference for Mitvim is the asymmetric power dynamic between dialogue participants. A summary of one of Mitvim’s 2018 projects can be located here.
IDI members, several of whom have done work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, offered their thoughts on dialogue methodologies. One discussed the “Naqba in your Living Room” project, in which Israelis meet with Palestinians to revisit and confront the family stories associated with the 1948 removal of Arabs from the geographical area of Israel, an event sometimes referred to as the “Arab Holocaust.” Another IDI member spoke about the recent Israeli declaration of “a Jewish democratic state,” and the differing perspectives on that law between Israelis (who are largely happy about it) and Palestinians, whose perceptions of their place within Israel shifts from exclusion to outright rejection. He noted that exclusions and rejection are different, with the former connoting the possibility of eventual inclusion.
One IDI member noted that the problem is that there is no possible two-state solution at this point, that a significant portion of Israelis do not want one, and as a result Palestinians have turned away from it, leaving moderate Israelis with no one with whom to engage. In the context of a “one-state solution,” Israelis and Palestinians are left with two possibilities – an apartheid state or ethnic cleansing, at which point, the breach will be so deep it will not be reparable.
Another IDI member close to the situation offered a slightly different perspective, observing that Palestinians were not disengaging but rather lacked a platform or process within which to engage. “We have come to know each other way too well,” this member observed, suggesting an exhaustion with the pretense of unproductive dialogue structures and echoing a concern raised in the context of the CARPO discussions. This member noted that when Israelis and Palestinians – or other parties, for that matter – discussed “an end to the conflict,” they were discussing different desired ends. She attributed the Palestinian reluctance to engage to a recognition of the futility of engaging in “end of conflict” discussions where the end meant different things. She noted that for Palestinians, time was not on their side, that each day the possibility of progress gets further away. The partitioning of the Palestinian state within Israel leads, over time, to Palestinian groups experiencing different realities, taking on different psychological baggage, and decreasing the chance of collective decisions and productive negotiations on internal issues. She noted that the United States had, in Palestinian eyes, forfeited its role in the peace process, and that its unilateral decision-making and pro-Israel bias was likely to work to the detriment of Israel in the long run.
Israel’s unilateralism also seems to play itself out in making Palestinians feel increasingly passive and increasingly caught up in an immobilizing dependency. As one member noted, also with reference to our own group dynamic, Israel seems to be “going on without” Palestine. One idea of how to help this situation depended on “waiting for the next U.S. President,” but is that waiting part of the solution or part of the problem? Psychologically people treated like refuse begin to take that in as who they actually are; their self-image comes to depend completely on the dominant and valued other. Is this part of the difficulty for Palestine? Would a program, like one taking place in a deeply depressed area of the U.S. called Appalachia, which fosters the self-discovery of internal resources, be useful?
Discussion continued on Israeli-Palestinian dynamics and implications for the region. One IDI member cautioned that the Israeli government plan may be to drive Palestinians into Jordan and make Jordan the Palestinian state. Such a plan carries significant risk for Israel, however, by de-stabilizing the Jordanian government and threatening Jordan’s external support, namely, Saudi funding and Western reliance on a Hashemite government. If Jordan were to fall, this member posited, Israel could very well confront “ISIS 2.0” on its border.
Another IDI member noted a remarkable exchange between a Palestinian and an Israeli in which the Palestinian, speaking of the Nationality Law, said it was good that it passed, because he then knew he had to leave Israel. To this, the Israeli responded that the Palestinian was “lucky, because nobody told Jews they had to leave Europe in 1935.” Another IDI member suggested that he believed the Nationality Law would be struck down, but, struck down or not, its passage still felt to Palestinians like a firm rejection, rather than a potentially temporary exclusion.
There was then a brief discussion of the characteristics of “synthetic countries,” like Israel, one of which was an especially strong need for an enemy to serve as a reservoir for the internal images or qualities that would threaten its tenuous integration. And for Palestine, there is data to suggest that its large group identity has coalesced around an image of victimization. While this has strong elements of truth at the reality level, psychologically victims can come to need abusers. So, at this dynamic level, Israel and Palestine need each other. One member reminded us that victims of abuse also are more likely to become abusers themselves; people raised in bad relationships often repeat them. What did this bode for Jews and for Israel? In its incredibly vulnerable position, could Israel be setting itself up for a repeat of something monstrous?
Case Study: Bosnia, Russia and the Ukraine
The final session of the day began with a report by IDI member Alexander Obolonsky on a conference held recently in Sarajevo, which examined historical memory during times of conflict and the way symbolic politics interferes with efforts at reconciliation. Obolonsky described the work of Sarajevo residents to work with, and through, fresh and painful memories of trauma, and through that difficult work to coalesce around a positive identity based on solidarity in the face of tragedy. One aspect of this work involved efforts, such as those of the Srbrenica Memorial project, to exhume and identify every victim of 1990s-era ethnic cleansing.
This was followed by a presentation on Russia, the Ukraine and the “Other,” delivered by IDI member Anatoly Golubovsky, which began by recognizing the traumatization or numbing of the Russian public consciousness during the post-Soviet era. Because of this, everyday Russians in Moscow think very little about the violence between Russia and Ukraine; it is on the periphery, both literally and figuratively.
Golubovsky then described a project involving eight Russian and eight Ukrainian writers, in which pairs from each country attempted to draft shared histories of significant historical events. Navigating dynamics of victimization, differing responses to the end of communism, and the startling realization on the Russian side that a war was actually going on, over time the two groups managed to agree on a shared historical narrative for all but two incidents. Time did not allow us to examine those two incidents, nor to explore what might actually have been lost in cases of agreement.
IDI General Meeting: Day Three
General Discussion
In a half-day session, the work of the first two days and plans for the future were reviewed. Members offered reflections on the 16th Meeting and on their experiences of the IDI generally, the manner in which they use IDI learning within their own practices, and the opportunities they see for additional IDI interventions. One member remarked on how the IDI meeting dynamic itself – a first day of internal self-examination, questioning, announcing loyalties and “fighting” followed by a second day of focused case study resulting in useful, perhaps transformative, insight – mirrored the meeting dynamic IDI members observed in some consultations, for example, with CARPO and in the Mitvim discussion.
There was then a reflection on the question of “hate,” which had come up in some of the case studies. Did representatives from countries in conflict need the freedom to express the hate their constituencies felt toward each other, and to experience how the work could survive that hatred, before progress could be made toward useful connection? And if so, what was meant by “hate?” Was it really an announcement of loyalty to one’s own large-group and boundary-drawing against the Other? Did it establish the self-awareness of identity, and even the self-esteem that comes from being able to set secure boundaries, all of which are necessary preliminaries to entering into a relationship? Does the importance of establishing boundaries speak to the serious risk of confusion and anxiety implied in an IDI member’s comment that, in his own personal process, he had come to accept that “whatever is part of the Other is part of me.” Added to this reflection, however, was an appreciation of fundamentally different mind-sets that evolve from a group’s history and traditions.
An IDI member summed up the work of the meeting, for him, as “finding the personal within the political,” and indeed there was much personal work during this session. One way to think about the work of the group is that it attempts to refine the personal into “an instrument” in order to work with and enable traumatized groups to recognize their “multiplicities of identities” and ways in which those identities overlap. Another IDI member noted that, across case studies and private work, whether speaking of specific state conflicts or larger geopolitical forces, the ability of a community to recognize the “ghosts” – both positive and negative – which haunted their capacity for rational decision-making was of critical importance. In facilitating that recognition, the IDI could continue to provide value. We concluded with renewed commitment to engage throughout the year, with an increased focus on training workshops and the dissemination of IDI methodology, and with fond wishes between its members and visitors for health, peace and productivity.
——————————————————————————————————–
NEXT IDI MEETING AND TRAINING WORKSHOPS:
The 17th Meeting of the IDI will take place in Vienna, Austria from November 1 to November 3, 2019.
The IDI intends to broaden its training opportunities and offer semi-annual training workshops going forward. The next training workshop is currently scheduled to be held in Geneva in March 2019. The IDI welcomes inquiries from potential participants and others interested in IDI training sessions. Additional information on training workshops will be made available via the IDI website’s Training page.