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  2. Category B, Mediating
Mediating

Discipline 5. Peace-builders and bridge-builders

A tall Black woman in her fifties in a headwrap standing between two facing chairs, a pot of tea and two cups on a stool.

Maturity of support

  • 3Codification
  • 4Institutions
  • 4Training
  • 3Communities
  • 4Academia
  • 3.6Overall, mean of the five

These are people who help to repair community trauma and inter-group relationships. This can include relationships between communities and institutions, between groups in a community, or more generally between all of the above in a particular geography. This discipline originally emerged in post-conflict zones – there are strong traditions in Northern Ireland and Colombia, for example – but is now often being applied to mend fractured state-citizen relationships in ageing democracies like Britain and America.

Building trust is an explicit aim of this work, rather than a by-product, and this is one of the features that marks the discipline out. Practitioners set out to repair a relationship, and treat any other outcome as downstream of that work. The methods of the work reflect this; there is a focus on structured dialogue, collective trauma practice, and community-level reconciliation. This work is different from peace-building in post-conflict zones, which is a distinct career.

Examples

Assessing the supporting architecture

This discipline splits into two main halves. Where the work descends from restorative justice, the architecture is well-established: the Restorative Justice Council maintains a practitioner registration framework, and there is a Restorative Service Quality Mark for organisations, accreditation for training providers and an annual continuing development requirement, as well as accredited qualifications, skills-sharing forums for registered practitioners, and a substantial academic literature with its own journal, The International Journal of Restorative Justice. This is one of the few disciplines in this report that has something close to a mature professional infrastructure.

Support for community bridge-building, by contrast, is thinner. There is some recent codification, amounting to the Bridge Builder’s Handbook, written by Neil Denton with the Relationships Project and Durham’s After Disaster Network. There is no formal professional registration. The institutional base is relatively nascent and rests on a handful of small but impressive organisations – the Relationships Project, the After Disaster Network at Durham, and organisations working in the tradition of healing justice, such as Healing Justice Ldn. Northern Ireland has more support infrastructure, including a statutory Community Relations Council, the Executive’s Together: Building a United Community strategy and long-standing practitioner bodies such as Corrymeela, for historical reasons, and only some of this support transfers to other contexts.

These differences reflect the history of the discipline, which emerged in post-conflict situations and has only recently begun to be applied to divided communities in places like Britain. Aspects of the work, such as trauma-informed training, are widely available (e.g. to social workers and NHS staff), but not as applied to community-level peace-building. This is a well-developed discipline, but its application to the work of civic renewal – e.g. in low trust communities in Britain, as opposed to post-conflict zones – is under-developed.