The State of Conflict conference 2022

The Public Mediation Programme (PMP) of the University of Amsterdam, Public Mediation (PM), and WesselinkVanZijst (WvZ) are pleased to invite you to take part in our fifth annual State of Conflict Conference. This year the Conference will take place on Thursday 29 September at the UvA University Library in Amsterdam-Centrum. The conference starts at 9:30 and ends at 17:00 with a closing borrel. We seek, as in prior years, to bring together a diverse group of practitioners, professionals, and academics to reflect on Dutch society and institutions through the lens of conflict.

This year we take as our theme ‘Conflict as Default’ and explore what it would mean to work from the assumption that conflict will be part of our work on policy themes and public problems. The keynote speakers and topics for working sessions are listed below. As the number of spaces available is limited, we invite you to register and save a space at the conference. The event will take place in the Doelenzaal at the UvA University Library (Singel 4193, Amsterdam). The plenary sessions will be in English to accommodate international participants. The breakout sessions will be a mix of Dutch and English. We ask for registration fee of €75. This also includes coffee, lunch and a closing borrel. 

REGISTER HERE

Program of the 2022 State of Conflict conference

Theme: ‘Conflict as Default’

Within the realm of public policy, conflict has primarily been treated as a bump in the road; a temporary disruption due to a transition in a system that is overall purposive and cooperative. At this year’s State of Conflict we explore what would mean to treat conflict as the core of the politics of implementation and policy development, rather than as the exception or a temporary disruption. What does it mean to look at policy through the lens of conflict?  What working assumptions would a conflict-centric perspective push us to in policy analysis, implementation, administration, and policy mediation?  How would this stance influence the meaning of trust and the  roles of experts, citizens, private stakeholders, and public officials play in governance processes? What influence would it have on perceived needs for experimentation in our democratic institutions?  For facilitators and mediators who intervene in conflict and for those who study the conflicts and the practices through which policy conflicts are addressed, working from within the boundaries of a case and the history of a conflict is an intuitive stance that give sense and purpose to the practices that we engage in. We have adopted themes for the working sessions that will push us to reflect upon these changes on the basis of case studies from the work of practitioners in government and civil society. 


Keynote speakers

Saskia Tempelman: Program manager Maatschappelijke Onrust & Onbehagen, Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations on “Unruly Politics”

The recent escalation of farmer-protests and resistance to Corona-measures show that co-operation between various layers of government and sectors in society is under severe pressure. Some analysts argue that we can see this escalation at least partly as ‘street politics’. When people feel that government ignores their interests, de-valuates their perspectives, and excludes their voices, they take to the street to make sure that they áre heard. “Unruly politics” refers to political expression outside of public order. It consciously aims to dis-order. How can government deal with these forms of politics? How to engage with critical groups who deeply mistrust government? How to balance inclusionary policy-processes and ‘procedural justice’ – on the one hand – with clear boundaries when it comes to forms of expression that disrupt democratic decision-making and even break the law? What attitudes, knowledge and practices do we need to learn? One thing is clear: how to do the change is at least as important as what to do.

Emanuela Saporito: Ph.D. Spatial Planning and Urban Development, Polytechnic School of Turin, member of Labsus on “Citizens are the State”

The Italian administrative order has been built around the belief that State and citizens stand in a conflicting relationship. LABSUS (Laboratorio sulla sussidiarietà (Laboratory on subsidiarity), of which Emanuela is a board member, promotes the contrary idea: that “citizens are the State” and that they can act for the general interest, and can be allies of the State. In her talk, Emanuele addresses the constitutional principle of “horizontal subsidiarily”, which provides the legal framework for this view. She will talk about a proposal that LABSUS drafted with the municipality of Bologna, that aims to facilitate collaboration between government and citizens. It was adopted by more than 260 municipalities, and has led to the daily signing of hundreds of “collaboration pacts” to regenerate and co-manage abandoned buildings, community gardens, parks, schools, etc. This experience also serves as an example for other European cities. 


Thematic working sessions

Topic one: Building trust in situations of uncertainty

There is little trust in government institutions and the policy professionals and technical experts who work in these organizations. Practitioners who engage the public on behalf of these organization can no longer presume trust as a starting point for their work. Trust is transformed in this process from a stable characteristic of entities – organizations, experts – to a contingent feature of relationships that needs to be explained. Practitioners must cope with the consequences of this shift in their daily work.

  • Working session 1. Building trust: creativity and experimentation
    The second working session will be facilitated by Martien Kuitenbrouwer (Public Mediation). In this session, Martien and co-facilitators will explore situations where building trust asks practitioners to be creative and experimental while dealing with different perspectives and uncertain situations. On the basis of a case study, they will look at restoring practices and seek new ways to support parties in their effort to develop trusting relationships and long-term commitments. 
  • Working session 2. Participatory Value Evaluation: fostering trust by focusing on values
    In this workshop Shannon Spruyt and Lotte Fillerup (Populytics) explore how the Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) method can help dealing with ‘intractable’ controversies. Focusing on citizen values helps to foster trust, as these values often remain unaddressed. In the past two years Populytics has worked with and further developed the Participatory Value Evaluation method. With this method citizens are put in the shoes of policy makers and then asked to make decisions on a (controversial) policy dilemma. This method enable the involvement of up to tens of thousands of citizens. The session discusses an example of how PVE can be combined with small scale deliberative sessions (burgerforum) that afterwards facilitated a discussion about values. It explores the intricate balance between involving citizens in the full complexity of policy issues, without scaring them off with too many complicated details! The session also allows participants to practice the design of a PVE consultation.

Topic two: From distrust to violence: engaging with distrustful groups

Actors engaged in policy development and implementation used to depend on the fact that they were part of a civil discussion. Feelings of not being heard or understood have resulted in greater levels of distrust and suspicion amongst groups, complicating interaction with them. Furthermore, the threat and even outbreak of violence in a number of recent cases has brought the assumption of taking part of a civil discussion into question. In the working sessions that relate to this theme, we will look at how it feels to not be heard and the shadow distrust casts over efforts to discuss and negotiate about policy and implementation. The goal is to gain insight into what provokes distrust and violence and the impact it has on the practices in which public officials interact with members of the public. 

  • Working sessions 1. ‘No one listens to what I have to say!’: dealing with distrust in public dialogue 
    Saskia Tempelman (Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations) and colleagues pose the question: how to engage in a dialogue with groups that are deeply distrustful and suspicious? Through a conversation-exercise, we start the session with experiencing how it feels to not be heard. How do we react to this ourselves and what can such a feeling provoke? We will use our own experiences to discuss similar situations on larger scale and the actions that can follow, hoping to exchange different ways to deal with groups that feel disregarded and how to ‘keep them on board’.
  • Working session 2. Engaging the threat of violence in social conflict
    Johanneke de Lint (De Lint consultancy) and Robin Schram (WesselinkvanZijst) will reflect on a specific case in which the threat of violence determined the course of the project. In times of societal discord, groups of citizens lean towards unconventional measures, such as violence and intimidation, to further their interests. In what ways is violence – both physical and psychological – becoming more present in the daily reality of conflict practitioners, challenging the methods they use to deal with confrontation. We will discuss how can we understand this phenomenon, and what we can do as professionals dealing with stakeholders who threaten to use violence, or who actual do so.

Topic three: Creating space for democratic experimentation

The conflicts that develop when public officials and citizens engage often highlight mismatches in expectations about roles and influence. Efforts to understand and respond to these mismatches are vexed by rules and routines that express and enforce an understanding of roles and responsibilities that is out of step with the problems that policy action seeks to address and with the way in which the roles of public officials, citizens, experts, and other stakeholders are defined. This calls for efforts to experiment with new ways of defining the roles that these actors take and – in doing so – to rework the relationships and the practical meaning that they give to democracy. 

  • Working session 1. Hot governance: making policy and politics work 
    David Laws, Floris Vermeulen (University of Amsterdam), Daniel Hogendoorn and Justus Vermeulen (Municipality of Amsterdam) will explore the relationship between the frontline practitioners who are the face of government and the citizens who are the source of its legitimacy. We will explore the challenges and opportunities created by the heat of conflict that has become part of the working environment of frontline practitioners, particularly when they interact with citizens.  We will examine the dynamics of this critical relationship drawing on cases of urban governance.  By working on these cases together, we will seek to diagnose, at a practical level, what makes things goes wrong in some instances and right in others. 
  • Working session 2. How to balance market, government and communities: A reconciliation of representative and direct democracy?
    Fish and chips make each other taste better, it’s like they choose each other. Living and care also choose each other since they enhance each other. In this session, Jurgen van der Heijden (Ella Vogelaar Academy) and Mike Duijn (Erasmus University Rotterdam) will explore the question of how to balance market, government, and communities. Communities naturally integrate care and living, but markets and governments demand a choice. They create conflict between living and care, even between fish and chips. In its control over government the representative democracy only increases the demand to choose. This illustrates the gap with integration and the way communities work. No wonder that both in practice and in theory no one has succeeded yet to reconcile representative democracy with the direct democracy of communities. The balance of power within the trias politica works to reconcile the three quite different branches of government. Could this method be helpful to balance market, government, and communities, and thus also reconcile representative and direct democracy? 

 Closing talk

The importance of non-violent action during a war. Reflections on a recent experience in the Ukraine
Marianella Sclavi, Ascolto Attivo srl (Active Listening) and the Polytechnic University of Milan  

Marianella will offer a closing talk, based on her experiences with the European Movement of Nonviolent Action (MEAN). MEAN is a peace building and humanitarian assistance project in Ukraine with Ukrainians, initiated in Italy. It uses the transformative power of active nonviolence within the conflict, through a massive mobilization of thousands of European civilians in Ukraine. Nonviolent action can create the conditions for the multiplication of options and for a future that excludes the use of war in the resolution of conflicts between states.

We are looking forward to seeing you the 29th of September!

David Laws

Alexander Rinnooy Kan

Marc Rijnveld

Martien Kuitenbrouwer

Marc Wesselink

Hans van Zijst

If you have any questions on the conference, you can contact Amber Bosse: amber@public-mediation.nl


About the State of Conflict Conference

The annual State of Conflict Conference is committed to the proposition that reflecting together in an open and critical way on the conflicts that engage us can produce useful insights about the challenges that our public, private, and civic institutions face. Conflict can provide a revealing perspective from which to view these challenges, particularly in a diverse society that is committed to democratic principles. The challenge of dealing with the differences in the grounded context of conflict can shed light on the potential for impasse and polarization, the risks this poses for sustaining social and political relationships, and the practical options for moving forward. It can also help us see how efforts to limit conflict—and thereby groups’ ability to articulate grievances—can also undermine the health and resilience of democratic institutions and practices. It is in light of these overlapping challenges that we hope to develop insights into a very practical democratic question—how, not whether, to have conflicts.