UNESCO Conference on Peace
January 7, 2024
Rana Raddawi was invited to participate in UNESCO's Fifth Regional Expert Consultation on Intercultural Competencies for Peacebuilding in the Arab States
UNESCO’s Social and Human Sciences Sector is spearheading the UNESCO Series of Regional Expert Consultations on Intercultural Competencies for Peacebuilding. The aim of the consultations is to further peace in fragile, conflict-affected and post-conflict contexts. The initiative aims at protecting shared values and promoting non-violence and socio-emotional resilience as key elements of democratic, inclusive, and peaceful societies. The fifth of the six regional online consultations took place in September 2023 and focused on Arab States.
Rana Raddawi, Associate Professor of Instruction in Arabic and an expert on intercultural skills was invited to be a panelist at the conference as a regional expert on Arab States. Panelists were asked to discuss “the main challenges to intercultural understanding in the region, the role of intercultural skills in building trust among different parties, and ways of improving intercultural competence to better promote Peacebuilding efforts, paying particular attention to the role of women and youth.” The report has now been published at this link and Rana Raddawi’s comments from the conference are copied below. Well-spoken and congratulations Rana Raddawi.
Teaching intercultural competence for peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation
Dr. Rana Raddawi emphasized the importance of intercultural competence in the ability of political leaders to refrain from using hard power and urged to promote intercultural competence through education to increase the acceptance and tolerance of differences, by creating specific training programmes as well as integrating it in other disciplines. She also suggested that intercultural competence should involve communication between different genders.
Taking into account the diversity of the region when dealing with conflicts
Dr. Rana Raddawi urged to take into account differences among Arab countries when dealing with conflicts in the region, pertaining to religions, ethnicities, spoken language, geography, history, gender roles and women's rights, educational systems, as well as economic disparities and inequalities. She stressed the need to consider the nature of conflict and the impact of colonialism, national and international actors on contemporary conflict, to involve local stakeholders in dialogue, and to take into account the importance of media in shaping the public opinion and perception of the conflict. She urged to prioritize mixed schools, where children from different ethnic or religious backgrounds could learn together, over segregated schools in the region, to involve religious authorities and scholars in Peacebuilding processes, because religion played a significant role in the Arab world, and to involve more women in political decision-making and Peacebuilding negotiations as statistics showed that countries with less conflicts had women involved in their political leadership.
Raddawi, R. (Ed.) 2015. Intercultural Communication with Arabs: Studies in Educational, Professional and Societal Contexts. Springer.