Ep. 004:  Nagmeh Sobhani

Show Notes

• A citizen of Burkina Faso, where she was born to an Iranian family
• Her father was from a minority in Iran that was persecuted
• After his passport expired, while working in Burkina Faso for the United Nations, the Iranian embassy did not issue a new passport, making the family stateless.
• Currently lives in Brussels with her husband and two children
• Because you cannot go somewhere and start something in the name of helping without engaging with the people in that village who know what needs to happen
• You have to take into account the human dimension in order to have any effect
• There can be a bit of an allergy to the concept of peacebuilding
• The initial mandate for the pilot initiative of the Education For Peace Institute was small.
• 13 autonomous ministers of education in a country of less than 4 million people illustrated the level of division
• You must address the fundamental assumption about the other, the dichotomy between us and them
• You must create safe spaces that allow a reexamination of this dehumanization
• It starts from within and feeds into systems and structures and human interaction
• Unity in the context of diversity
• Preserving identities within the collective
• You have to create a safe climate
• Peacebuilding is engaging individuals, primary groups and intergroups, systems, and structures and individuals, in a creative and inclusive process to begin to establish or reestablish relations
• In a fragile environment there had to be an ongoing collaborative partnership with the government
• There needed to be engagement and ownership for the institutions
• Within the international community there was pessimism as to what was possible to accomplish within the area; this had a negative impact
• I wanted to create a space for the practitioners and members of the international community to allow the conversation to unfold, you could call it training
• You must think through the frame of engagement
• The work happens before you get anyone in the room together.
• Successes allowed for people to expand their ideas of what would be possible, while dealing with the realities of a country in transition
• There is an emerging understanding that for processes of reconstruction we cannot put aside the human aspect; the human aspect comes first
• Columbia Teachers College did a pilot to attempt to come up with ways to measure success for the Education for Peace project
• If you truly want to engage in peacebuilding, you need to plan for a sustained presence
• Unicef has a mechanism on the ground for sustained presence
• Unicef is attempting to position and situate peacebuilding as an important element of the way that all programs are rolled out.
• Designing a training architecture for the Unicef staff so that from the beginning staff are able to integrate peacebuilding into their work
• Engage the communities in a consultative process, and create a mechanism to manage conflict issues
• Come into peacebuilding with an attitude of humble learning
• This field has not reached perfection
• Be kind to yourself and be willing to learn and to explore and experiment
• Have conversations
• Listen to your inner voice
• Peacebuilding is a topic which every one of us has something to say about; it touches the heart of our humanness
• The clash of opinions in the field is not a threat, it is how things grow 

Biography

• Naghmeh Sobhani is a collaborative negotiation, post-conflict peacebuilding and conflict prevention consultant with expertise in developing and monitoring large-scale initiatives especially within fragile divided zones
•  Training and facilitating participatory inclusive processes involving disputing groups
• Worked for 12 years of leadership experience in Education for Peace Institute of the Balkans
• Other organizations include UNDP-Crimea, UNICEF, OXFAM, UNESCO Northern Ireland and WINPEACE-Greece UN Secretariat
• Attended LANDEGG International University in Switzerland, where she majored in leadership and management, minor in consultation and conflict resolution
• Trained in principal-based negotiation by the Harvard program of Negotiation

Resources

• Education for Peace Institute for the Balkans (http://efpinternational.org/efp-balkans)
• Harvard Program For Negotiation (http://www.pon.harvard.edu/)
• Teachers College of Columbia University (http://www.tc.columbia.edu/)
• Unicef (http://www.unicef.org/)

Contact Nagmeh

You can contact Nagmeh via email at Nagmeh.Sobhani@Cglobal.com.