Centre for Conflict Transformation Training

• Training Courses

Our Purpose

To utilise our people and products: provide knowledge, experience and expertise, in bringing together
all those who seek peace, cohesion, transformation and integration.

Our Operational Mission

Provide the best service programmes available in:

• Gauging of inter–communal tension (assessment)
• Diffusing inter-communal disputes (peacemaking)
• Preventing disorder (peacekeeping)
• working with partners towards cohesion and transformation (peacekeeping)
• Specialist mediation to prevent conflict and serious violence (peacekeeping)
• Provision of specialist training in order to deliver the above
• Working with partners in the delivery of transformation (peacebuilding)

Core Business

Our core business centres on the identified elements of cohesion: ‘Making the Peace’ – helping to identify fault lines disaffection and tension. ‘Keeping the Peace’ – helping to prevent flair ups, disorder, violence and working to bring about transformation and integration.

Our People – are hand picked for their skills, intrinsic motivation, experience and inclination towards this type of work.  They are all trained and accredited in mediation and conflict resolution.

Our Knowledge – resides in an understanding (and the ability to apply it) across communities and geographical divides.

• We have a deep understanding of diverse communities across Birmingham, throughout the West Midlands and beyond. Most of our mediators were born and raised in those communities and hold unparalleled insights.  Our approach to social cohesion resides in localised, bespoke action, working with and alongside communities. 
• Because our people are in direct contact with those living and working across all communities, we are privy to their hopes, grievances, expectations and fears.  These are often expressed graphically to us and in a manner, which does not normally reach public authorities. 
• Our insights into formal and loose allegiances – often called gangs – are equally robust.  Some of our front line operatives have lived in and been part of that environment.  Moreover, much of our knowledge is garnered through ‘one to one’ and group discussions with chief protagonists. 
• Our contact and casework is not faceless. We are viewed neither as the acceptable face of officialdom nor, as simply, a bunch of idealists with a strategy.  We get deeper quicker; therefore, many of those deeper relationships are with influential individuals.Because we have direct lines of contact into communities, along with knowledge of public corporate and local aims, we are able to get beyond rhetoric and bring them together.  Community cohesion is a system; it cannot achieve its outcome if interdependencies work against each other and we are often the glue, which cements vital alignment. 
• Some sociologists believe that geography is destiny, others that the link between circumstance and destiny is more meaningful.  We apply the vagaries of both in our work, acknowledging that geographical segmentation helps to both harden perception and shape circumstance. Failure to take account of divergent perceptions can result in disengagement, cynicism and inure opposition to public programmes.  Our work enables us to compare perceptions across communities and geographical divides to assuage concerns and correct distorted fact (myth busting.)

Our Expertise – is grounded in our experience, steered by knowledge and bounded by conceptual awareness.  We use that expertise to guide our advice and interventions.  For example, we share Johan Galtings view of ‘negative peace’ – as the absence of conflict – and ‘positive peace’ – as the presence of decency. Indeed these two concepts inspired our organisation purpose - seeking to forge peace and cohesion, leading to eventual transformation.  Our programmes of monitoring, assessment and intervention seek to bring about the absence of conflict (peace making); whilst our work with partners, seeks the presence of structural and cultural change, leading to eventual transformation (peace keeping).³

Lloyd Dumas has alluded to two chief structural pre-requisites for a ‘positive’ lasting peace viz:

(i) Establish Balanced Relationships – which bind people together in a common interest.

Relationships where benefits are perceived to flow in one direction often lead to hostility and conflict.  We have encountered this in our fieldwork, where members of one geographical community cite the disproportionate opportunities on offer to another as an inequitable division of resource.   Conversely, Dumas goes on, when perceptions are altered to one of mutual gain, relationships are strengthened out of self-interest, and disputes more likely to be settled amicably.

(ii) Emphasise development –This develops the principle that people in desperate straits tend to reach for extreme solutions, and are more open to manipulation (used by many extremists throughout history) (Dumas p8)

Community cohesion rests upon ability to first ‘make the peace’ followed by structural efforts to ‘keep the peace.’ An understanding of this incremental approach underpins and exemplifies our expertise.  We have also enriched the debate surrounding gun crime, building on early failures to arrive at our present success.  For example, much academic effort has attempted to define a ‘gang.’  To the contrary, we are not convinced that reaching such consensus will take us any further forward.  Our experiential hypothesis informs a belief that formal gang membership is only marginally responsible for public shootings.  Much more influential are three common threads (the 3 r’s.)

• Revenue – this refers to shootings, which result from the tensions generated by rival, illegal business enterprises.  Whether drugs, people trafficking or blackmail, when rivalry intensifies – violence usually occurs. 
• Revenge – this refers to acts of shooting (usually execution), carried out as ‘payback’ for a perceived wrong done to another or others.  The tactic is often used to assert the primacy of an individual, and demonstrate to potential usurpers that she/he is still ‘king of the hill.’ 
• Respect – this refers to incidents stemming from a perceived lack of deference by one individual towards another.  The phenomenon is not unusual where either an official or an unofficial hierarchy exists (whether criminal or otherwise.)  What is unusual are the punitive consequences: when persons have been shot for trivial infringements of protocol or manners, without tendering the expected apology. 
• Unique Offerings – our offerings are unique in working alongside communities, which are often not connected.  We get deeper quicker, providing a vital bridge between community and public authorities.  
• Impact – we make a real difference.  Our interventions have saved lives, prevented escalations of disorder and brought people together in a way they would never have believed. We have also changed lives.  Some of our people have in the past, committed acts for which they are not proud.  They have eschewed this lifestyle and now share our purpose - regularly contributing towards our mission. 
• Perception – no matter how much value is added in life, it is only perceived value that resonates.  We not only shape lives, we also fashion perceptions.  Incumbents perceive that someone is listening and giving voice to their views.  Communities perceive that we are active and using their creative talent.  Central Government perceive that we have a model, which adds value – and they tell us so, on a regular basis.