Reframing

One thing I’ve learnt from my years of working and wandering abroad, is that whether we are talking about armed conflicts, governance, abuses by security forces, migration or counter-terrorism, we need to think beyond what is going wrong, towards what could work better than the status quo. If we fixate only on what’s problematic, we risk reinforcing the existing dynamic (after all, who really listens to people who only complain?) We can best challenge entrenched conflicts by reframing debates with our own visions and language. Introduce a new vision of how an entrenched dynamic such as a violent conflict could be transformed it, why it needs to be transformed and what that transformation could look like to the people most affected by it right now. Because this is a better conversation towards change.