Join OpenEdge's team of scholar practitioners for this 2-day workshop to explore conflict and how we can engage with it for positive transformation internally and in relationships and our systems and structures.

Whether you work in the field of conflict transformation or would like to develop skills to support your in your personal or professional life or community or organisation this could be for you. Join us to develop tools and awareness, skills for system building and your capacity for engaging with conflict as a driver for change.

If we can experience all of life as one complex adaptive system and all that happens within the system as feedback, then engaging with conflict before the volume raises on it and it becomes violent and painful can restore connectivity and flow, building alive systems of human encounter.

Underneath conflict is how we relate to difference and within it are all of the ingredients for empowered co-existence - boundaries; self expression; listening; presence; empathy; feedback; power dynamics and tools for leadership, collaboration and self-responsibility.
​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.

Saturday 18th - Sunday 19th May:  Festival of Conflict - London
​Tuesday 21st May - Wednesday 22nd May:  Festival of Conflict - Frome
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2-day workshop, self-selecting sliding scale £125-£375
For booking and enquiries please contact info@openedge.org.uk
Please see info on bursaries, we will ask for a £75 deposit to confirm your place.

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 perceive and relate to conflict.

We also know that we do all have the capacity to be conflict literate and walk forward into conflicts and challenges with confidence, grace, wisdom and artistry, with enthusiastic understanding that conflicts can actually serve us!
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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)​​

From this understanding, we offer:
  1. support for transforming any specific conflicts that you may be experiencing (through many possible means such as mediation, coaching, restorative circles etc.)
  2. knowledge, skills and capacities for more sophisticated ways of relating to and engaging with conflict in your home, organisation, community.
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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