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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | The positive management of conflicts in West Africa |
Authors: | Enda Graf Sahel, Dakar Renapop, Dakar |
Year: | 1998 |
Periodical: | The Community Development Journal: An International Journal for Community Workers |
Volume: | 33 |
Issue: | 2 |
Pages: | 150-156 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Senegal |
Subjects: | NGO 1996 conflict resolution conference papers (form) |
External link: | http://cdj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/33/2/150 |
Abstract: | From 30 September to 4 October 1996 village associations and local committees from all over Senegal met at Thiès to discuss the possibility of utilizing conflicts as a means of promoting change. The workshop was largely organized and led by Renapop, the National Network for the Progress of Popular Organizations. The key objectives were to discover ways of dealing with conflicts within popular organizations, to reinforce the possibility of directing conflicts toward innovation and change, to identify ways in which conflicts could be used to reinforce Renapop, to overcome the rifts which are currently dividing urban and rural popular organizations, to create a programme and launch a research process in Renapop, and to foster a collective research drive. Three fundamental axes for an alternative approach to social and political thinking were identified as goals for action: breaking the mechanisms which turn difference into inequality, destroying the mechanisms which lead to exclusion, and reinventing the role of leaders and changing the 'how' and the 'where' of decisionmaking. In line with this thinking, Enda Graf Sahel, the Forum of Action-Research Groups, no longer sees the programmes it develops with other organizations as relationships based on aid or support, but rather as alliances with a view to creating change together. Note. (Published simultaneously in: Journal of Social Development in Africa, vol. 13, no. 1 (1998), p. 29-35.) |