Segment 1: Traversing Protractive Conflicts. On this edition of The Doug Noll show we are speaking with Dr. Alma Abdul-Hadi Jadallah, President and Managing Director of Kommon Denominator (http://kommondenominator.com/), an award-winning woman owned firm dedicated to helping government, corporate, and community clients successfully navigate conflict and cultural. Dr. Abdul-Hadi Jadallah became interested in conflict resolution when she went back to school after raising a family. Additionally, moving to the U.S. and interacting in a multi-cultural society drew her attention to many issues: how people come together, how they interact, what kind of issues they are facing.
Protractive conflicts are characterized as conflicts that are stubborn and continue to happen. Their roots are usually in communities and between different ethnic groups. Yemen is an example of a protractive conflict. It is an internal conflict, primarily ethnic-driven, about the distribution of wealth, equality, the North vs the South, and corruption. There is a lot of violence.
Segment 2: A National Dialogue. Dr. Abdul-Hadi Jadallah was invited with other experts to go to Yemen and help begin the process of peacemaking with the goal of designing and implementing a national dialogue. They brought in an international committee and started by thinking about what was needed to build a nation on equal rights and equitable resources. What kind of model should they follow? They put together nine working groups that looked at every facet of building a nation state. They mapped the groups and invited delegates to participate. Dr. Abdul-Hadi Jadallah found that this experience proved that dialog can always facilitate difficult conversation, particularly if there are good intentions and good will.
Segment 3: A Different Paradigm. Dr. Abdul-Hadi Jadallah teaches courses on culture conflict and diversity to Masters and PhD students. She educates the students by giving them tools to analyze conflict, identify conflict, categorize conflict, design a process, and conduct an assessment. Her students see the value of understanding conflict analysis in their day-to-day lives and in the corporate world.
It takes time and effort to resolve a problem, which is a different paradigm. It takes a lot of introspection. Even the most innocent parties of the conflict play a role. Maybe they contributed to the escalation, or were too passive, or didn’t speak up. Additionally, it’s hard for the perpetrator to actually admit they had a role in hurting the other person.
Segment 4: Create a Safe Environment. Even though peacemaking is well-intended, it can be taxing at times, both for the mediator and the parties involved. You see parts of you in them, and they see parts of them in you, which is difficult. It’s also hard to evaluate the results, although Dr. Abdul-Hadi Jadallah stresses what an opportunity it is to be able to sit across the table from the other side and start a dialogue. At the end of the day, the conflict is not the peacemaker’s conflict. The peacemaker merely creates a safe environment and a process to begin the conversation. To find out more about Dr. Alma Abdul-Hadi Jadallah and Kommon Deminator, visit http://kommondenominator.com/.
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