Program Overview
Program Goal
To increase the visions, motivation, trust, and implementing capacity of South Asians to establish collaborative cross-border relationships that will contribute to conflict transformation, sustainable peace, and increased development.
Topics include:
- conflict management skills and techniques
- conflict analysis
- conflict prevention, and interventions
- conflict-sensitive development
- inter-group dialogue
- transitional justice
- negotiation, and mediation
These are tools that can help to prevent inter-communal conflicts from escalating into problems that threaten regional, national, and even global security. Citizen activists, NGO leaders, academics, government employees, social service providers, and others will come to know and trust their counterparts across national borders in order to establish regional stability.
Program Outcomes:
We believe that shifts in attitude and behavior toward members of other identity groups are learned through encounter. CONTACT South Asia will provide structured opportunities to explore differences, stereotypes, and fears, to manage opposing national perceptions, and to create a regional culture of cooperation, understanding, and compassion within and beyond the learning community. We are committed to the development of self-reflective, inter-connected, and deeply engaged South Asian practitioners who have the skills, attitudes, mutual trust, and competencies to strengthen greater regional peace, development, cultural respect, and prosperity.
Structure:
The South Asia Program will be ten days total, held in Nepal in its first year, and will be taught in English by both international and South Asian experts. Forty highly qualified participants will be accepted annually through an application process and selected to represent the diversity of the region. CONTACT Program Manager Mariana Syrotiak will coordinate the program with CONTACT Director Dr. Paula Green, who is based in the US but teaches frequently in Nepal and elsewhere in the South Asian region.
Phone:
877.257.7751, extension 3433
802.258.3433
TTY:
802.258.3388
Fax:
802.258.3320
Mailing Address:
PO Box 676, 1 Kipling Road
Brattleboro, VT 05302 USA