Our Values
Conflict as Opportunity
We approach conflict as an indicator of a need for improvement and an opportunity for positive change.
Inclusion
We are dedicated to creating safer spaces where participants can learn from each other's differences with respect and care, and to always improve our practice for everybody to feel welcome and acknowledged.
Transformation
We use the term Conflict Transformation because we offer tools to understand and address the root causes of conflicts, and find what needs to be transformed.
Intersectionality
We invite to understand, reflect and acknowledge conflicts as indicators of power dynamics between people or groups with different struggles and lived experiences.
Community Care
We consider that the well-being of the individual and the community are interrelated and that transforming conflict is an act of collective care.
Radical Peace
We advocate for a vision of peace that goes beyond the absence of violence to encompass social justice and good living conditions for all.
More notes/Justification part
Our Inspirations
CAP’s initiative invites everyone to reflect, create and share, with their own tools, capacities and differences, for a better future. The implementation of transformational and participatory peace would enhance our capacities for resilience, creativity, care and mobilization.
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The values presented above are the key components for conflict transformation toward positive, inclusive and long-term solutions. The movement of transformation is part of all aspects of life and social interactions. It requires a deep sense of inclusion and intersectionality. Intersectionality aims for a holistic comprehension of all complexities and factors that influence one another’s lives. As Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw - the expert in critical race theory who first coined the term "intersectionality" - explains: “(...)The better we understand how identities and power work together from one context to another, the less likely our movements for change are to fracture.(...)”
Dr Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw - Indiana University (March 19th 2021)
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Our motive is to put at the center the living within the being, because, as argued by the peace thinker Jean-Paul Lederach, “(...)When we attempt to eliminate the personal, we lose sight of ourselves, our deeper intuition, and the source of our understandings—who we are and how we are in the world. In so doing we arrive at a paradoxical destination: We believe in the knowledge we generate but not in the inherently messy and personal process by which we acquired it.(...)”
JP Lederach - The Moral Imagination (2004)
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We articulate our work around the constant dynamic between both dimensions, the personal and the group. For those reasons, we advocate for integrating peace as an active engagement for community and self-care. Peace values tend to reintegrate the individual within the collective as unseparated items, as complementary, forming a whole organic machinery that needs to be reconnected and reshaped. The feminist, decolonial and Argentinian scholar Maria Lugones describes perfectly how each individual can engage in a specific frame:
“ (...) In attempting to take a hold of oneself and one’s relation to others in a particular ‘world,’ one may study, examine and come to understand oneself. One may then see what the possibilities for play are for being one is in that ‘world.’ One may even decide to inhabit that self fully in order to understand it better and find its creative possibilities. All of this is just self-reflection, and is quite different from residing or abandoning oneself to the particular construction of oneself that one is attempting to take a hold of.(...)”
Maria Lugones - Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception (1987)