Our work abroad

Nansen Center for Peace and Dialogue works basically at the grassroots level to strengthen peace and democracy processes in close collaboration with local and international partner organizations.

Our regular courses, “Dialogue in Conflict” and “Dialogue Facilitation”, are applied in long term cooperations and processes.

Examples of systematic training over several years include the cooperation with the Norwegian Afghanistan Commitee (NAC) in Afghanistan and with a network of volunteer society actors in Poland, initiated by the telecommunications company Orange.

The OSCE ODIHR (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe – Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights) in Poland is our partner in a pilot project to build expertise in facilitating dialogue on migration, aiming to possibly expand the project to other countries. The goal is to train volunteer community actors to facilitate public dialogues, as well as to assist in conflicts between migrants and local communities.

The Nansen Center for Peace and Dialogue also facilitates inclusive meeting places which focus on peace and democracy processes. Dialogue in Chile is a comprehensive meeting place program (Encuentro Nansen), created to facilitate important and difficult conversations between academics, politicians and the civilians prior to, and concurrent with, the constitutional process.

Dialogue training is part of this initiative, which was initiated in 2020. Hence, the Nansen Center for Peace and Dialogue’s handbook for Trainers in Dialogue and Conflict Transformation, which was published in English in 2019, has been translated into Spanish and mapudungun (the language of the Mapuche people).