« History of the Internet? | Main | Coordinated online response to Hurricane Gustav » Chasing the Flame"Chasing the Flame" is a blog advocating for "a smarter U.S. foreign policy," extending the work of Sergio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian United Nations diplomat who was killed in a bombing in Iraq in 2003. A post there by Jonathan Prentice, on the subject of intelligent empathy, caught my eye. Intelligent empathy will mean finding effective ways to hear the views of those most affected and bring them into dialogues from which they are typically excluded - and to do this at the outset of a policy initiative, not as an afterthought. It will mean recognising that these individuals must own a process as much as those in power or the international community do. It will require patience and the imagination to find, and find ways of reaching out, to new partners; it will require a willingness to deal with messy assymmetry; and it will require a conviction that the end goal of a just and sustainable outcome rather than a quick victory really is worth striving for – that the pragmatic and the ideal can be united. jon posted this at 10:26 AM |
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