Hilary Pilkington (University of Manchester) and Harriet Vickers (Tim Parry and Johnathan Ball Peace Foundation) presented a toolkit for conducting mediated dialogue between groups experiencing tension or conflict at the Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN) Families, Communities & Social Care Working Group Meeting in Stockholm, 4-5 October 2022. The RAN meeting focused on Preventing Polarisation on a Community Level and brought together practitioners from across Europe to share their experience with conducting community dialogue.

Hilary and Harriet outlined the principles underpinning the dialogue process, its origins as an intervention to bring together young people from two milieus studied by Dr Ajmal Hussain and Professor Hilary Pilkington as part of the DARE project and its subsequent development by Harriet Vickers, Jon Nicholas and Kelly Simcock of the Tim Parry Johnathan Ball Peace Foundation assisted by Lee Rogers (StreetTalk films) into a toolkit for working with communities in conflict.

The toolkit has been externally evaluated and will shortly be made available for use to relevant practitioners to help counter extremism and promote community cohesion.

An account of the initial dialogue process conducted with young participants in the DARE project can be found at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/talking-our-way-out-of-conflict

The development of the Mediated Dialogue toolkit was funded by an ESRC Impact Accelerator Account award (via the University of Manchester,01.01.2021-31.07.2022). Funding for the DARE project was received from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 725349. The views reflected are only those of the authors; the European Commission and Research Executive Agency are not responsible for any information it contains.

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