Join us in developing consciousness, tools, skills for system building and capacity for engaging with conflict as a driver for change.
 
Engaging with conflict as feedback - information as to what needs our attention - before the volume raises and it becomes violent and painful, can restore connectivity and flow, and help us build more positive systems of human encounter
Festival of Conflict - Birstol
Monday 3rd - Tuesday 4th February 2020
Venue: Barton Hill Settlement, Bristol.  
Interdependent Gift Economy 
book via eventbrite 
Join OpenEdge for a 2-day workshop to explore how we can engage with conflict for positive transformation internally, in relationships and in our systems and structures...

Whether you work in conflict transformation and peace building or would like to develop skills to support your personal or professional life, your community or organisation,
​the Festival of Conflict could be for you! 
From OpenEdge's varied, global experiences of conflict work we are clear that positive and transformative engagement with any conflict (e.g. interpersonal, organisational, environmental, economic, armed conflict), as well as any attempts to build new ways for human co-existence, require a change in how we understand conflict.
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At OpenEdge we believe that we each have the capacity to walk forward into conflicts and challenges with confidence, grace, wisdom and artistry, with enthusiastic understanding that conflicts can actually serve us!
​We invite you to reach for your courageous reflective self, break the violence cycle, learn to be multi-partial, sit in the beauty of unmet needs, and come and transform your relationship with conflict!
Through participatory activities for connection, reflection and learning, we offer a selection of key focuses, such as
  • what are conflict, violence and peace?
  • understanding violent and non-violent conflict
  • conflict and personal power, conflict and structural power
  • re-figuring security and belonging
  • understanding identity conflicts -teams, tribes, 'us and them'
  • gender, conflict and peace
  • culture, conflict and peace
  • justice, conflict and peace
  • spirituality, religion, conflict and peace
  • beyond traditional peace building, transitional justice, development
  • finding beauty in contradictions, paradoxes and messiness
  • creating indisputable territory
  • empathy -when agreeing and disagreeing doesn't matter any more!
  • transforming right and wrong, judgment and blame
  • feedback systems
  • staying in the power of your authentic experience 
  • neuroscience and conflict
  • restorative systems building
  • unconscious cycles of violence
  • realising the interdependence of our survival
  • experiencing interdependent needs.
OpenEdge also offers support for transforming specific conflicts that you may be experiencing, through mediation and dialogue, restorative circles, and personal coaching.
Please get in touch and talk to us about what you need.

At OpenEdge we relate to conflict as:
  • Conflict is normal in human relationships
  • Conflict is essential feedback thus a driver for change
  • Conflict and violence/harms are NOT the same thing
  • Conflict is a complex, dynamic process (not static, not a single event, and not only what is visible)​​
If I use Nonviolent Communication [NVC] to liberate people to be less depressed, to get along better with their family, but not teach them, at the same time, to use their energy to rapidly transform systems in the world, then I am part of the problem. I am essentially calming people down, making them happier to live in the systems as they are, so I am using NVC as a narcotic.
​~Marshall Rosenberg
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