resistance

Decreasing Polarization through Deep Democracy at the ACR Conference

Join us at the Association for Conflict Resolution annual conference!

Polarization isn’t just for politics. Across the US and the world, people are managing differences by dividing into us versus them camps. Some of this is good-natured (think sports teams), but much of it devolves into name-calling, oversimplification of issues, and demonization of the other side.

Deep Democracy, a method of conflict resolution developed in South Africa to support the transition away from apartheid, was designed to help transform destructive polarization. In this interactive workshop, participants will learn the Deep Democracy approach to interrupting polarization both through presentation and an experiential activity in which we use Deep Democracy techniques to address a polarity present within the group or conference.

Working with Resistance: A Deep Democracy Approach

As facilitators, our job is to help diverse groups come together, engage in dialogues that encourage positive collaboration across differences, enable groups to overcome resistance, access more of the wisdom inherent in the system, and craft solutions that stick. Resistance is a dynamic that slows down or sometimes even blocks the system from moving toward a decision. 

In this session, participants learn about the Lewis Deep Democracy, which was developed in South Africa after the fall of apartheid to help organizations recover from the legacy of racism. We will share a tool to diagnose resistance in a system. We will focus our attention on our inner systems and reflect on where we are with resistance.

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