On November 19 - 21, the Swedish Dialogue Institute for the Middle East and North Africa hosted its first workshop since moving to Amman. The meeting was hosted jointly with the Folke Bernadotte Academy (FBA) and focused on peacebuilding in Yemen, with interactive discussions about conflict analysis, peace-building initiatives and mediation initiatives. The workshop sessions were interspersed with team building and experience sharing.
The background to the meeting is a growing realization that the violent conflicts of our time are characterized by complexity, fragmentation of conflict actors and societies, as well as incoherent responses from the international community. Complexity requires increased efforts to work at different levels of society to create lasting and inclusive peace.
The FBA, together with the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, ETH Zurich and SwissPeace, has developed thinking on these issues and in 2020 they presented Beyond the Tracks? Reflections on Multitrack Approaches to Peace Processes (link). Building on this publication, and in light of Sweden's strong commitment to work for conflicts resolution and peacebuilding in Yemen, this workshop was arranged in Amman. The aim was to identify mediation initiatives at different levels (so-called "multitrack") to take a closer look at how different initiatives relate to each other and to formal political processes in a Yemeni context. The Actor-Content-Context-Process (ACCP) method was used to analyze the conflict in Yemen. The workshop was attended by FBA, the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, ETH Zurich and SwissPeace, as well as Search for Common Ground, Sanaa Center and the Dialogue Institute.
“The meeting at the Dialogue Institute was a much-appreciated opportunity for us to meet physically and lay the foundation for a collaboration between six partner organizations. Our hope is that it will lead to a better understanding of peace processes in Yemen and to new entrances and creative ways to support dialogue and mediation initiatives”, said Christian Altpeter from FBA after the meeting.
