Thoughts on democracy, healing, and deliberation from a visit to Northern Ireland

Earlier this month I had an opportunity to travel to Northern Ireland with a fantastic group of IWM - Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen / ERSTE Foundation Europe’s Futures fellows. Katy Hayward has introduced us to the community there and its past, present and possible futures.

I am yet to process all the learnings from this incredible experience, but here are a few thoughts on democracy that crystallised from talking to the people living there and listening to colleagues’ reflections about the former Yugoslavia and Central and Eastern Europe.

As Robbie Stamp would say, how do we nudge the dial to the more constructive aspects of humanity away from destructive?

• Northern Ireland and Yugoslavian experiences have much in common - and they bring a wealth of lessons about democracy and human nature. So much peace building and reconciliation and care work is done by women and NGOs and remains largely unrecognised, however essential. Care, mending, grieving is critically undervalued, but is as crucial as mycelium to a thriving forest.
• Traumatic experiences in the past influence our behaviour and can lead to black and white thinking, difficulty holding complexity and uncertainty. The complex challenges we’re facing require practicing the skill of openness to be influenced by others while staying true to yourself, embracing paradoxes and dilemmas that life is full of. It’s about a different way of being in the world, one that can help us remain connected, come together, and heal from some of those shared traumas that are so often close to the surface of our collective psyche.? ?
• Lived experience of trauma also brings wisdom and can propel positive action. How can this wisdom be passed to future generations without passing the trauma that caused it? How do we move on, but don’t forget to make sure we’ve learned our lessons for the future? Humans have an important flaw of a surprisingly short memory, and lived experience is short-lasting.
• Living in democratic societies for a prolonged time can inadvertently break peoples’ democratic resilience - we start taking democracy and freedom for granted, we start loosing the skill of staying vigilant and holding government to account, we become susceptible to disinformation as we do not have the need to constantly practice critical thinking as much. This makes us vulnerable to malignant external influences or wishful thinking. At the moment Central and Eastern Europe is taking an exam whether it has learnt this lesson well, with Russian information operations and intense efforts to manipulate public opinion underway.
• What are the political consequences of the multi-layered loss we are experiencing collectively and as individuals? How can we feel and relate to the suffering of so many others that we see on the news every day instead of becoming indifferent as a protective reaction? How do we grieve the harm we caused to our natural environment? How do we accept and go through the shame and anger about the historical injustices and the colonial past? All of that without jumping to quick conclusions and simple answers that many populists are waiting with. Such work with feelings and emotions is crucial work and is part of the answer to why we see democratic backsliding across societies - people seek emotional relief and clarity in these complex and emotionally loaded times.
• Deliberative spaces can have some of the elements that create conditions for mending the broken societal fabric. Inspiration can be drawn from Jane Suiter ’s thinking systemically about Citizens’ Assemblies in Northern Ireland (https://tinyurl.com/3uce6zr9 ) and Jamie Pow ’s experimenting with citizen deliberation on cross-cutting issues in NI that can bring polarised societies together (https://tinyurl.com/2axzbp6e ).
• We need more exploration of how deliberative spaces can also become spaces for healing.? ?

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