Below is the final report submitted to the Davis Foundation. Please read it to get a better sense of the project. We invite your comments.

A New Conversation for Peace in the Caucasus
Georgia
St. John’s College, Annapolis Campus
Noel Brockett (USA, St. John’s College) Nino Aduashvili (Georgia, St. John’s College)
Mariam Aduashvili (Georgia, St. John’s College) Charmaine Benham (USA, St. John’s College)
Acacia Pappas (USA, St. John’s College) Vincent Tavani (USA, St. John’s College)

A New Conversation for Peace in Caucasus set out to provide a space where participants would develop their own perspective and voice, difficult in an environment of inherited opinions, which only prolong conflict. Our goals were to inspire the participants to realize their own ability and to empower them with their own language for a new conversation for peace.

Our first challenge presented itself in recruiting participants for our project. The Georgian Ministry of Refugees and Accommodations and the New Art Union helped us reach out to active and interested refugees and students located in the Tbilisi area.

We had hoped to have participants who live in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but this proved impossible. Relations between the regions have worsened since last year’s August war and strict border control is now enforced. Any civilian crossing the border from Abkhazia or South Ossetia into Georgia is either denied entry or later denied reentry on suspicion of espionage or treason. Families that were separated on different sides of the borders after the conflict are faced with the unthinkable decision, either not to see their family members or to leave other family members behind indefinitely.

Despite not being able to have participants from South Ossetia and Abkhazia we recruited a wonderful group of 18 (ages 16-24) consisting of refugees and students.

The actual course took place in 10 class days during June 8th-19th, 2009 in Tbilisi, Georgia. Each day consisted of a) an hour discussion of a very short but provocative text (selections from authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Kafka, Pascal, and Nietzsche); and b) an hour master-class, having to do with writing, music, theater, or meta-discussion.

The cornerstone for the success of our project was our curriculum for the discussion classes. The idea behind our curriculum was to use short texts from philosophy and literature that raise questions of principles concerning justice, opinions, social responsibility, freedom, and friendship. The task was to choose texts that engage students, cause them to reflect on their opinions, and foster a well-balanced intellectual conversation.

The texts needed to raise issues personal to the participants so that they would be engaged and participate actively, but the readings could not be too personal. When the text addresses a personal issue too directly, often participants tend to speak less. For example, we faced difficulty in our discussion on an excerpt from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics about friendship. Friendship is a very present issue in the culture of Georgians, who pride themselves on knowing how to be good friends and understanding the value of friendship. When facing the questions ‘what is friendship’, ‘are there different kinds of friendship’, ‘am I a good friend’, the participants were reluctant to talk.

Each day our team set specific goals and intended outcomes for the class, such as: to have every student participate in the discussion, maintain equal participation, to have students speak with respect and listen actively on a higher level each day.

The discussions were held in Georgian and were led by American students. Our Georgian teammates provided synchronic translation for the leader as well as for the group of observers. Each discussion was filmed and later analyzed for assessing the progress and setting new specific goals for the next class.

During the first week the greatest challenge was to have participants speak one at a time. The degree of interest and excitement was inspiring, but participants did not listen to one another. The team decided to use the strategy of meta-discussions, where all the course organizers joined the table and held a discussion with participants, addressing the specific issues of their earlier conversation. During the first meta-discussion we discovered that the Georgian participants conceived a peaceful, respectful conversation to be impossible among Georgians. They presented the flaw of talking over each other as their cultural habit. We shared our belief and commitment for them to have a great peaceful conversation and requested from them to give their word for declaring a peaceful conversation possible and committing to it. By the next day and continuing on to the second week, participants started listening to each other more carefully, responded with respect, became conscious of the conversation as a whole and treated it as their own.

During the second week, the team concentrated on deepening participants’ intellectual understanding of the texts and their ability to see the questions provoked by the authors as relevant and important to the state of peace in their communities.  They examined their opinions and preconceived notions of peace and created their own, new way of talking about it.

Each day the discussion was followed by a one-hour master class having to do with writing, music, theater, project planning or meta-discussion. The master-class, through encouraging cooperation and interaction, was meant to allow for more developed discussion, increased participation, a more familiar environment, and a closer community in this small model of a society. We played theater games to get to know each other, shared our voices through reading aloud our own creative writing pieces and learned together from trained artists.

During the second week, the space for master classes was devoted to community projects. Participants were empowered and required to design and plan individual short-term projects for their communities. By the end of the course each participant submitted a completed plan for a community project that inspired them and impacted at least 12 people. The projects included organizing an educational camp and tours around Georgia for refugees, holding an art event for disabled children, organizing a concert for students, organizing students to clean up parks in the city, etc. We had planned to give prizes for the best, completed projects. However, we underestimated the structure that participants would need in order to complete them and as a result the majority of the projects were not completed by the deadline. Since most of the participants are still actively working on their projects we believe that each of those projects will be completed and as result not only the 18 participants of the course will have benefitted from it, but also at least one hundred others will be impacted by their projects.

The Organization for Liberal Education in Georgia (OLEG), a non profit organization that is committed to promoting traditional liberal arts education in Georgia, used their knowledge of the region to make our budget work. We were also met with the amazing generosity of Georgian people. One Georgian family let us live in their apartment free of charge for the entirety of our stay. It also was a common occurrence for Georgians who had learned about our project to offer to feed or host us. All of these generous acts greatly reduced our costs of accommodations and made our work possible.

We are excited about the future sustainability of our project. We are in the process of setting up www.newconversationforpeace.org, which will be a network for our participants to stay in contact, to share and generate support for the future of our project. Furthermore, OLEG has agreed to adopt the program concept and is currently working on designing a similar project to begin next year that will improve on the successes and challenges of our own project.

In our project, we define peace as the state in which independent beings work together freely. A conversation for peace is a dialogue in which all parties listen, are self-expressed and are committed to the resolution of the conflict.

A New Conversation for Peace in Caucasus furthered the realization of peace by inspiring its participants and awakening a desire to learn. There is the idea of Peace and also Peace-in-action and we sought to address both. We required ourselves and our participants to examine deeply some of the fundamental questions of peace and also to practice them in our small society. In challenging their opinions, we enabled people to find their own voice and distinguish it from opinions they had inherited. Successful with this group we inspired them to take their voice to their communities.

When people ask me about my summer I respond: “I spent my summer half way across the world leading a course with a group of people my age who have been living in turmoil and conflict for their whole lives. We did not speak the same language, but with the help of others we communicated about the fundamental questions of peace and human relationships. At first the Georgian students sincerely thought that a group of 18 people their age were incapable of holding a peaceful, passionate conversation. I found that what I saw possible for those students they perceived as impossible for themselves and their country, but together we succeeded; we listened to each other.“ –Noel Brockett