Formal Dialogue Research Articles

Continuity or Disruption? Rethinking Engagement in Multi-Stakeholder Forums Through the Lens of Boundary Objects

Multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) are crucial for managing complex decision-making; yet ways for evaluating engagement, especially for Indigenous peoples, remain ambiguous. This study examines the Honduran Mosquitia, where conflict over the illegal occupation of Indigenous lands led to the creation and eventual dissolution of an MSF. It questions whether the continuity of formal dialogue structures signifies genuine engagement or if disruption might better indicate it. The study applies the lens of boundary objects—concepts or devices that enable collaboration among actors with differing agendas—to assess engagement. In Mosquitia, territorial governance served as a boundary object, fostering the establishment of an MSF. Government, donor, and Indigenous stakeholders had their distinct interests in supporting territorial governance. Indigenous stakeholders exited the MSF when their aims for securing land tenure were unmet, turning to civil disobedience to assert territorial governance. The MSF’s dissolution prevented the co-optation of territorial governance by government and donors, remaining a contentious term that more accurately reflected the tensions among stakeholders. This case shows how engagement might paradoxically be reflected in the MSF’s disruption.

KENYA: MULTIAGENCY STRATEGIES FOR CONFLICT MANAGEMENT IN LAIKIPIA COUNTY

The paper examined multiagency strategies for conflict management in Laikipia County, Kenya. It provided a solid foundation for understanding the context of the effect of multiagency approaches on conflict management. A descriptive survey research design was used incorporating both quantitative and qualitative primary data from a questionnaire, FGDs, and Key Informants interviews. The area of study was Laikipia County, Kenya with a focus on Laikipia West Sub County. Stratified random sampling was used to select respondents while the purposive sampling technique was used to select informants with in-depth knowledge and experience relevant to the research objectives. Qualitative data was coded, thematically categorized, and synthesized. Statistical modeling and trend analysis for quantitative data were performed with the aid of SPSS V.29. The result was presented using graphs, and charts while prioritizing validity and reliability through rigorous document selection and analysis methods. The research addressed the effectiveness of past strategies, emphasizing the importance of nuanced assessments that considered scope, context, implementation, outcomes, and dissemination. The findings emphasized the need for a nuanced and comprehensive assessment approach, covering scope and context, implementation and outcomes, challenges, and opportunities. The paper advocated for participatory approaches, long-term impact assessment, flexible frameworks, formal dialogue platforms, capacity building, strong leadership, resource mobilization, and continuous learning and adaptation to ensure effective conflict management. It concluded that while multiagency approaches can effectively manage conflicts, successful implementation requires meticulous planning and execution, tailored to the specific dynamics of the conflict landscape. The paper recommended a continued focus on participatory approaches, establishing formal dialogue platforms, and prioritizing strong leadership and inclusivity, benefiting policymakers, multiagency leaders, practitioners, and stakeholders involved in conflict management in Laikipia County. Keywords: Multiagency actions, participatory approach, multiagency strategies, conflict management.

BEYOND RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE: REFLECTING THE INTERFAITH WOMEN’S DIALOGUE

With its diversity in ethnicity and religion, some parts of Indonesia tend to be vulnerable to conflicts. This research aims to reveal the practice of religious tolerance and the active role of interfaith women in maintaining religious tolerance through daily dialogue. It emphasizes the significant participation of interfaith women in fostering religious tolerance. This study collected data from interfaith women in the Fatubesi subdistrict area of Kupang City using interviews and observation. The results show that interfaith women in Fatubesi, especially in the Oeba traditional market, live in harmonious and peaceful relationships. They have practiced the spirit of sisterhood and friendship in their daily encounters. Even though they are rarely involved in formal dialogue, women are active in a dialogue of life through daily interactions in informal spaces. They are connected in solidarity through openness, acceptance, respect, and helping one another. Furthermore, interfaith women are active peacekeepers through their activities of sharing food and other basic needs in their neighborhoods and during their religious celebrations. Therefore, the activism of interfaith women in the Fatubesi area is a practice that goes beyond religious tolerance.

A Commentary and Critique on Progress in Ocean and Climate Change Action at Recent COP Meetings

Abstract The ocean was finally recognized within the formal UN climate change negotiations at COP 25 in 2019. This result was due to a decades long multinational, collaborative effort spearheaded by the Global Ocean Forum under the inspired leadership of Dr. Biliana Cicin-Sain. This article describes some of the major events leading up to COP 25 and the developments in ocean-climate change activities at the following two COP meetings in Glasgow, Scotland (COP 26) and Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt (COP 27). Observations about each of the COP meetings are presented, and successes and failures are identified along the way. In particular, the importance of the formal dialogues on ocean and climate change are assessed, and the urgency of translating hopes and aspirations into real climate action for the ocean is highlighted in preparation for the COP 28 in Dubai in 2023.

Social Dialogue as a Problem and Prerequisite for Mediation

The article examines the efficacy of social dialogue as a mechanism for addressing societal issues. While social dialogue was once viewed with great optimism, its effectiveness has waned in recent years, despite participants employing various persuasive strategies. The study distinguishes between two forms of dialogue: formal and substantive (productive), emphasizing that only the latter genuinely catalyzes shifts in participants’ perspectives. By analyzing historical examples and contemporary cases, the study identifies key factors that influence the success of social communication. Employing J.L. Austin’s speech act theory, the article frames dialogue not merely as an exchange of information but as a form of social action, where the utterances of participants are performative, possessing the power to directly transform social reality. A historical case study is presented, examining the dialogue between Western-oriented Russian liberals who viewed their nation as socially and economically backward, and thinkers who challenged this assessment, perceiving Russia’s unique spiritual potential to address pan-European challenges. The statements of P.Ya. Chaadaev and F.M. Dostoevsky are analyzed as performative acts that shaped a new vision of Russia’s role in world history. Additionally, the author explores the role of identity in social dialogue, showing through examples from the lives of A.S. Pushkin and M.I. Tsvetaeva how identity structures can influence one’s openness or resistance to personal transformation in the face of internal conflict. The study hypothesizes that dialogue effectiveness correlates with participants’ ability to integrate new values into their identity without compromising its core. Furthermore, the author argues that rhetorical commitment to mediation alone is insufficient for bridging deep social divides and examines the historical social conditions required for effective mediation, such as a shared cultural foundations, formal dialogue platforms, robust legal frameworks, and flexible power structures. In conclusion, the author considers the question of whether it is inherently possible to create effective mechanisms for social dialogue under the current conditions of globalization and information society.

Muslims and Christians in Nigeria: A Proposed Solution to Interreligious Violence

This article discusses religious violence in Nigeria, particularly the conflict between Islam and Christianity that has been ongoing for about a century. Various factors contribute to this violence, including socio-economic, political, and governance deficits, as well as disputes over religious beliefs or identities. Additionally, the ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural diversity in Nigerian society plays a role in escalating the violence. This situation poses a threat to Nigeria's stability and territorial integrity, and the high number of casualties also impacts the country's economy. Numerous primary causes of religious violence in Nigeria include the agitation for the implementation of Sharia law, imbalances in the political and economic systems, extreme interpretations of religion, and external influences. To resolve this conflict, the author suggests several measures that can be implemented by religious leaders. First, they should strive to integrate religious institutions and faith-based organizations. Second, they must avoid conflicts among religious figures and institutions. Third, they should facilitate formal dialogue. Fourth, promote interfaith discussions. Fifth, establish local groups aimed at understanding each other among followers of different religions. And finally, organize conferences, seminars, and open discussions. Conferences and seminars can be held at national and international levels, while open discussions can be broadcasted on national television to reach various layers of Nigerian society, especially vulnerable individuals who could be used or targeted in interfaith conflicts.

“Their End Is Destruction”: Reading Philippians as Philosophical Dialogue

Paul’s address to the ekklesia in Philippi evidences an ideological conflict within the community. The letter encourages the community to persevere in a prescribed philosophy while simultaneously recognizing the presence of “opponents” (Phil 1:28) and “enemies” (Phil 3:18) against whom the community must “stand firm” (Phil 4:1). Building on Pierre Hadot’s work in identifying ancient philosophy as a “way of life”, this article examines the nature of this ideological conflict by reading Philippians in light of the conventions of ancient philosophical dialogue. While the letter does not take the strict literary structure of a formal dialogue, it can rightly be understood as a philosophical text that is engaging in a critical conversation about competing philosophical “ways of life”. In this philosophical dialogue, Paul critiques the alternative way of life on offer to the Philippian ekklesia by portraying it as an insufficient way of life that will lead to destruction. He simultaneously presents his own philosophy as the one that is consistent with the appropriate “goal,” the right “mind,” and a consistent “way of life” that will help the community attain their ultimate telos.

Hipótesis interactivas: hacia un fundamento dialógico del razonamiento sustitutivo

The aim of this paper is to propose a logical justification for the process of surrogate reasoning in modeling practice in science. To this end, we understand hypothesis generation as the creation of an interactive, formal dialogue between the model and the target system. In order to describe this idea from a logical point of view, we will rely on the pragmatic approach of Dialogic as the ideal framework to illustrate logical interactions.

Deliberative Democracy Innovations at Citizen Level: Challenges of Local Government in Indonesia

This paper examined the roadmap for deliberative democracy development through village-level regional development planning forums in Indonesia and connected it with the strength of traditions and local values of a region. Roadmap innovations can solve problems and increase governance capacity. This study aimed to identify innovation challenges & factors affecting the innovation environment; using a qualitative method with a case study design. As a result, innovation is able to increase interaction and agreement on solving public policy problems and improve local government governance capacity. The challenge was determined by the open leadership, responsive village leadership behavior. Forums transform as a formal dialogue space and media for the contestation of knowledge with informal meetings in the community. The community traditions are present, recognized, valued through institutionalizing local institutions, local actors, and features that drive democracy in community consultation and cooperation. Several factors affecting the innovation environment included legal culture and policy, political& administrative environment, government & civil servant traditions. The government needs to carry out institutional conversions along with changes from the government, deliberation spaces, &communities to achieve these two goals.

The French National Council for Statistical Information: Lessons from a formal dialogue between producers and users on sustainable development

Focusing on the French National Council for Statistical Information (Cnis), this paper offers an overview on the value and strength of the dialogue between producers and users of official statistics in France. Highlighting its specific contribution to shape official statistics in relation to sustainable development, it presents its role and original value added in the French context on a critical issue for the post-COVID era. If this case study proposes lessons to learn from this experience, its history, and transformation over time, it wants also to point out promising evolutions and paths for the future. In a context of crisis and pandemic, the need to produce quality and timely statistics adapted to the situation has showed its capacity to adapt and to confirm its critical role.

The Impact of Infrastructure Development on China–ASEAN Trade-Evidence from ASEAN

From the formal dialogue between China and ASEAN in 1991 to the establishment of the China–ASEAN FTA in 2010, the economic and trade relations between China and ASEAN countries have developed rapidly. With the continuous development of economic and trade relations, the infrastructural level between China and ASEAN has far lagged behind the needs of exchanges and trade. How to promote the development of bilateral trade through infrastructure construction and interconnection has become a concern of governments of all countries. In the context of China’s “Belt and Road” Initiative and the “Master Plan for ASEAN Connectivity”, new ideas and opportunities are provided for ASEAN infrastructure construction and its interconnection with China. Based on panel data from 2004 to 2020, this paper analyzes the impact of ASEAN infrastructure on the China–ASEAN trade volume. The analysis finds that road, port, shipping and communication infrastructure positively impact the bilateral trade volume, among which ports exert the greatest impact on the bilateral trade volume and roads have the least impact. For a more in-depth study, the transportation infrastructures of land and island countries are compared and analyzed separately. The impact of road infrastructure on trade is significant for land countries, while the impact of port infrastructure on trade is more remarkable for island countries. Finally, measures and suggestions on how to promote the development of bilateral trade are proposed on the basis of the above analysis.

Character expression for spoken dialogue systems with semi-supervised learning using Variational Auto-Encoder

Character of spoken dialogue systems is important not only for giving a positive impression of the system but also for gaining rapport from users. We have proposed a character expression model for spoken dialogue systems. The model expresses three character traits (extroversion, emotional instability, and politeness) of spoken dialogue systems by controlling spoken dialogue behaviors: utterance amount, backchannel, filler, and switching pause length. One major problem in training this model is that it is costly and time-consuming to collect many pair data of character traits and behaviors. To address this problem, semi-supervised learning is proposed based on a variational auto-encoder that exploits both the limited amount of labeled pair data and unlabeled corpus data. It was confirmed that the proposed model can express given characters more accurately than a baseline model with only supervised learning. We also implemented the character expression model in a spoken dialogue system for an autonomous android robot, and then conducted a subjective experiment with 75 university students to confirm the effectiveness of the character expression for specific dialogue scenarios. The results showed that expressing a character in accordance with the dialogue task by the proposed model improves the user’s impression of the appropriateness in formal dialogue such as job interview.

Gamification Strategies: A Characterization Using Formal Argumentation Theory

Gamified software applications are omnipresent in everyday life. The idea of using game design elements in non-game contexts to engage and motivate tasks has rapidly gained traction in the human–computer interaction and the psychology fields, but scarcely in the artificial intelligence (AI) research area. In this paper, we propose a software agent perspective of gamification elements to solve two specific problems: (1) a reactive perspective that gamification designers have for those gamified affordances, i.e. the visual cue (output) is only triggered by user interaction, and (2) a lack of formal treatment of gamified software, where strict characterization of software behavior as done in AI, guarantee that the information-based output follows the intended goal of the software. Our contributions presented in this paper are (1) two taxonomies of affordances based on the type of information that every element communicates, and the type of agency that is capable; (2) a framework to formalize the decision-making process for gamified software agents; and (3) a characterization of gamified stories using formal argumentation theory dialogues. We exemplify our contributions with two gamified platforms in the healthcare and financial literacy fields.

Facilitating reflection: a review and synthesis of the factors enabling effective facilitation of reflective practice

ABSTRACT Reflective practice is an inherently personal and relational process, occurring privately within people, and publicly, between people. Consequently, given it positively impacts on professional practice, it has become a personal and professional requirement for professional bodies accrediting practitioners. This literature synthesis aims to consolidate understanding around the factors facilitating reflection by generating insights from a variety of publications across professional contexts. The analytical process involved initial coding and focussed coding wherein article text was fragmented, sorted, and integrated to develop a thematic structure. Analysis resulted in two higher order themes: Factors facilitating reflection; and Facilitator tasks. Results highlighted the value of supportive environments to facilitate open enquiry alongside focussed formal dialogues between peers, more experienced colleagues, and formal facilitators to enrich knowledge, perspectives, insights, and relationships. Further, to begin the reflective process, practitioners and novice learners benefit from support in deconstructing the concept of reflection. Ideally, this would be facilitated by an experienced reflective facilitator who values an open enquiry towards complexity, difference, and emotive responses. This requires safe, supportive, and blame-free environments where facilitators encourage dialogue while modelling qualities such as congruence, acceptance, and empathy.

African Arts — Global Conversations

African Arts — Global Conversations

From Theory of Rhetoric to the Practice of Language Use: The Case of Appeals to Ethos Elements

In their book Commitment in Dialogue, Walton and Krabbe claim that formal dialogue systems for conversational argumentation are “not very realistic and not easy to apply”. This difficulty may make argumentation theory less well adapted to be employed to describe or analyse actual argumentation practice. On the other hand, the empirical study of real-life arguments may miss or ignore insights of more than the two millennia of the development of philosophy of language, rhetoric, and argumentation theory. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for adapting such theories to serve as applicable tools in the study of argumentation phenomena. Our approach is both theoretically-informed and empirically-grounded in large-scale corpus analysis. The area of interest are appeals to ethos, the character of the speaker, building upon Aristotle’s rhetoric. Ethotic techniques are used to influence the hearers through the communication, where speakers might establish, but also emphasise, weaken or undermine their own or others’ credibility and trustworthiness. Specifically, we apply our method to Aristotelian theory of ethos elements which identifies practical wisdom, moral virtue and goodwill as components of speakers’ character, which can be supported or attacked. The challenges we identified in this case and the solutions we proposed allow us to formulate general guidelines of how to exploit rich theoretical frameworks to the analysis of the practice of language use.

Bringing Pyongyang Back: the Prospects for Establishing Multilateral Cooperation Mechanism in East Asia

In this interconnected world, the multilateral mechanisms become more and more present and relevant. However, East Asia is a notable exception with no such institutionalised tool. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) remains the most troubling state and the main reason why collaboration has not resulted in strengthening the stability in East Asia. Although a formal dialogue called the Six Party Talks exists, it currently remains in deadlock after two nuclear tests conducted by Pyongyang in 2009. The actions that took place throughout last year have once again drawn greater attention to the Korean Peninsula, raising the possibility of resuming the negotiations. Nevertheless, the question about what this new agenda should include remain relevant. The purpose of this paper is to outline international relations in Northeast Asia from both theoretical and practical perspective and provide ideas on what can be done to facilitate the cooperation between the states.

“Non-Recognition” of the EAEU by the European Union: Political Aspects

The Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) positions itself as an open integration formation and considers the cooperation with external partners as a key feature of its functioning. However, while it is developing a growing network of trade agreements in the framework of a Great Eurasian Partnership, it faces difficulties in establishing a formal dialogue with a neighboring integration formation – the European Union (EU). In this article we propose to analyze political causes of such “non-recognition”, conditioned by the context of political tensions between Russia and the EU countries and by the perception of the EAEU as a tool for promotion of an integration model, alternative to the European one. The article offers recommendations to enhance the dialogue between the two integration unions, oriented at strengthening of objective economic prerequisites for EU ‒ EAEU cooperation, as well as at the formation of the EAEU identity, separate from the identities of its member-states.

Orthodox–Reformed Dialogue and the Ecumenical Recovery of Theosis

AbstractAgreement about theosis in Orthodox–Reformed dialogues played a small but strategic role in the ecumenical recovery of the patristic doctrine of deification and its emergence as a locus of Reformed theology. Ecumenical dialogue helped dispel the idea that theosis is a distinctively Orthodox doctrine incompatible with the Western tradition. This idea was first propounded in the 19th century by Albrecht Ritschl, Ferdinand Kattenbusch, Adolf von Harnack, and others associated with the Ritschlian school. It was later appropriated by émigré Orthodox scholars. Orthodox–Reformed dialogue helped correct this and other misconceptions about theosis. This began informally in correspondence between Thomas F. Torrance and Georges Florovsky and continued in formal dialogue meetings. Orthodox–Reformed dialogue also highlighted patristic ways of thinking about salvation that were not then prominent in Reformed theology. However, as the Reformed participants consulted the works of John Calvin, they realized that he shared those patristic ways of thinking. Today, Reformed theologians are eager contributors to the ecumenical recovery of theosis. They increasingly discuss theosis as a doctrine native to the Reformed tradition.

Un diálogo entre discursos y hechos: el acercamiento del Mercado Común del Sur (Mercosur) y la Alianza del Pacífico (AP)

El acercamiento entre la Alianza del Pacífico (ap) y el Mercosur ha sido un tema en discusión ante los virajes políticos que experimenta la región de América Latina. A pesar de los discursos oficiales, es posible identificar que no existe un interés o beneficio económico en la convergencia de ambos bloques, incluso con la existencia de diálogos formales como el Plan de Puerto Vallarta. Los hechos señalan que la propuesta responde más a intereses de actores políticos particulares que buscan cumplir sus objetivos de gobierno.