Research

The report outlines best practices for evaluating facilitated dialogue and is based on the analysis of academic and practitioner sources. It covers existing approaches, frameworks, and data collection methods used for evaluating peacebuilding initiatives and dialogue projects in various conflict zones.

This research was conducted as the first part of an ongoing project to develop a local methodology for evaluating dialogue initiatives in Ukraine, though the others hope it will prove useful for facilitators internationally. This report be of interest to mediators, evaluators, civil society organizations, international organizations and donors supporting dialogues. The research and the report were produced within the project “Building Dialogue Capacity for Conflict Prevention and Resolution” of the OSCE Project Co-ordinator in Ukraine with financial support from the Government of Germany.

With Tetiana Kyselova
June 2022

Sociopolitical polarization in North America continues to grow, fueling primarily nonviolent but nevertheless persistent societal conflicts
that resist easy resolution. Peacebuilding dialogue, a practice involving carefully planned facilitated contact between hostile outgroups, is
one way that peacebuilding practitioners address such conflicts globally, though these practices are not usually applied to Western
democracies. Other forms of dialogue have emerged in the North American context.

This Policy Brief holds that they can be augmented by
international peacebuilding tools and approaches, though practitioners will need to adapt their methodologies to address local needs. In
particular, sociopolitical polarization shored up by ideologically-based identities such as liberal or conservative, will pose unique barriers to
dialogue processes. Facilitators looking to initiate processes should look out for these obstacles as well as opportunities for dialogue that
emerge from the North American context, particularly liberal discourses of social justice or conservative grievances against cultural or
knowledge-producing institutions.

Ottawa Dialogue
March 2023

This thesis proposes that Johan Galtung's theory of positive and negative peace will gain relevance and applicability in contexts of non-armed societal conflicts like the Trump-era culture wars when the theory is adapted to take into account not only dynamics such as violence, but also felt threat.

In this project, I reviewed the academic literature on culture war and sociopolitical polarization in the United States, as well as the literature on Galtung's theory. I then adapted positive and negative peace theory to take into account conflict dynamics rising from felt threat, which I argue makes Galtung's theory more applicable to conflicts where violence is invisible, contested or difficult to ascertain.

I tested this version of Galtung's theory through 20 exploratory, qualitative interviews with American liberal and conservative partisans. These interviews resulted in a typology of various a) visions of positive and negative peace in the Trump-era culture wars, b) strategies partisans use to achieve them and c) preferences for specific types of peace. These results are discussed regarding their relevance to the field and their contribution to the academic literature.

Saint Paul University
Fall 2023

This chapter describes how the Ukrainian community of dialogue practitioners (UCoDP) responded to the full-scale Russian invasion and uses the framework of Transformative Dialogue to discuss tensions between local and international practitioners over the role of dialogue during the hot phase of a war.

In "Transformative Dialogue: Co-Creating Conversations in Communities and Organizations"
2025

The COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to societal conflicts in which different actors resisted government regulations aimed at curbing the spread of the virus. In the United States and Canada, these disputes were subsumed into wider patterns of sociopolitical polarization as well as a type of conflict known as “culture war.” In this article, I focus on one demographic that offered resistance to government restrictions: Christians who interpreted the virus as a signal of the apocalypse. Using this group as an example of a broader government-resistant coalition, I argue for the use of peacebuilding dialogue as a response to polarization, division and culture war. In particular, I examine the relevance of the deep democracy dialogue paradigm to this type of conflict.

In "Apocalypse Now: Rebirth of Peacebuilding in the 21st Century"
2025