UNESCO – Page 2 – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

UNESCO Intercultural Competencies for Peacemaking IV

Fourth Regional Expert Consultations on Intercultural Competencies for Peacemaking: Latin America and the Caribbean, UNESCO, 14 September 2023, 17:00 to 19:00 GMT+2, (Paris, France, but online).

The fourth of the six regional editions of online expert consultations will focus on Latin America and the Caribbean and will be held on Thursday 14 September 2023, from 17:00 to 19:00 GMT+2 (via Zoom). The fourth edition will bring together experts and practitioners 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.

To register for the online event, please click here.

UNESCO Intercultural Competencies for Peacemaking III

Third Regional Expert Consultations on Intercultural Competencies for Peacemaking: Africa, UNESCO, 27 July 2023, 15:00 to 17:00 GMT+2, (Paris, France, but online).

The third edition will bring together experts and practitioners to discuss the main challenges to intercultural understanding in Africa, 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 consultations are open to the public. Simultaneous interpretation in English and French will be provided for the third edition.

To register for the online event on 27 July, please click here.

UNESCO Intercultural Competencies for Peacemaking II

Second Regional Expert Consultations on Intercultural Competencies for Peacemaking, UNESCO, 11 July 2023, 10:00 to 12:00 GMT+2, (Paris, France, but online).

The second out of six regional expert consultations will focus on Asia and the Pacific and will bring together experts 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 consultations are open to the public. The discussion will be held in English.

To register for the online event on 11 July, please click here.

UNESCO Reimagining Our Futures Together

UNESCO Futures of Education Commission. (2021). Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education. Paris, France: UNESCO.

UNESCO’s Futures of Education initiative aims to rethink education and shape the future. The initiative is catalyzing a global debate on how knowledge, education and learning need to be reimagined in a world of increasing complexity, uncertainty, and precarity. Over the course of two years and drawing on the inputs of over a million people, an independent International Commission under the leadership of the President of Ethiopia, Her Excellency President Sahle-Work Zewde prepared a global report on the Futures of Education. That report is now available in 12 languages.

Download the full report: Arabic | Bahasa Indonesian | Catalan | Chinese | English | French | Italian | Korean | Latvian | Mongolian | Portuguese | Spanish

[CID was one of the organizations consulted by the initiative, and is acknowledged in the report; see the CID Report for UNESCO Futures of Education for the conclusions of 3 focus groups we organized at their request.]

UNESCO Intercultural Competencies for Peacemaking

Regional Expert Consultations on Intercultural Competencies for Peacemaking, UNESCO, Paris, France.

UNESCO’s Social and Human Sciences Sector has launched the UNESCO Series of Regional Expert Consultations on Intercultural Competencies for Peacebuilding. Through these consultations, UNESCO aims to explore the potential of the development of intercultural and socio-emotional skills to serve as an enabler for peace in fragile, conflict-affected and post-conflict contexts. The first out of the six regional editions focused on Europe and was held 20 June 2023 (notice did not reach CID in time to advertise it). The goal is to bring together policymakers, practitioners and researchers in the fields of peace and conflict studies, psychology and intercultural education to discuss the main challenges to intercultural understanding, the role of intercultural skills in building trust among different parties, and ways of improving intercultural competence to better promote peacebuilding efforts, paying a particular attention to the role of women and youth.

The consultations are held online and open to the public, so if you are interested, look for future announcements.

UNESCO Futures of Education Update

Negotiating the Future of Education: The UNESCO’s Futures of Education-initiative and the OECD’s Future of Education and Skills 2030-initiative, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.

Researchers at Humboldt University (Germany) are studying the entire process of the UNESCO Futures of Education initiative, and they contacted CID to learn more about our involvement in that project. They were interested in our participation for 2 reasons: our focus group was uncommonly diverse, and we proposed a 10th point of action, rather than just discussing the 9 points that the draft proposal outlined. We suggested that

Learning to live together requires intercultural dialogue

and produced a poster showing the relationship between their 9 ideas and our 10th.

Here are further details about the research project:

“In the project “Negotiating the Futures of Education”, we want to analyse how visions of the future of education are negotiated and contested, looking at how narratives about the future of education are constructed by UNESCO and OECD in two currently running projects, Futures of education (UNESCO) and Future of education and skills 2030 (OECD). Our main focus is on understanding the micropolitical “backstage” processes involved in constructing these narratives. We are particularly interested in whether and how formerly marginalized voices and groups are integrated in the process and whether and in which ways these challenge reigning “orthodoxies” in the liberal education script. The project employs a qualitative approach, relying particularly on ethnographic methods, narrative and discourse analysis.”

When the report appears, this post will be updated to include a link.

NOTE: The Center for Intercultural Dialogue held three focus groups as part of the information gathering stage of the Futures of Education project, preparing what we learned as a report for UNESCO, in 2021. A few months later they requested concrete examples from around the world, and we prepared an addendum.

UNESCO Silk Roads Youth Research Grant 2023

Silk Roads Youth Research Grant, UNESCO, Paris, France. Deadline: 31 May 2023.

UNESCO calls on young women and men under the age of 35 to apply for the 2023 Silk Roads Youth Research Grant. The grant aims to mobilize young researchers for further study of the Silk Roads shared heritage. Twelve grants of US$10,000 will be awarded per research project.

The research needs to address specific issues relating to:

the shared heritage and plural identities developed along the Silk Roads,
its internal diversity,
its potential in contemporary societies for creativity, intercultural dialogue, social cohesion, regional and international cooperation, and
ultimately sustainable peace and development.

UNAOC Youth Solidarity Fund 2023

Youth Solidarity Fund, United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, New York, NY, USA. Deadline: 14 May 2023.

Through a competitive evaluation process, Youth Solidarity Fund (YSF) will award seed funding of up to USD 25,000 for the implementation of outstanding and impactful projects that use intercultural and interfaith dialogue and are aligned with the mandate and mission of UNAOC. The YSF only supports projects that are entirely developed and managed by youth, for the benefit of the whole society, especially youth. The YSF supports youth-led organizations that foster peaceful and inclusive societies. UNAOC additionally offers capacity-building support to help youth-led organizations strengthen the implementation of their projects.

The age definition used by UNAOC to characterize youth is an individual between the ages of 18 and 35. While the projects target mainly young people, they have an impact on entire communities, often involving religious or political leaders, policy-makers, educational institutions and media organizations.

UNESCO: We Need to Talk: Measuring Intercultural Dialogue for Peace & Inclusion

UNESCO. (2022). We Need to Talk: Measuring Intercultural Dialogue for Peace and Inclusion. Paris, France: UNESCO.

In addition to providing 5 case studies, and 5 think pieces, this new global report from UNESCO provides several explanations for understanding intercultural dialogue:

ICD …is a process undertaken to realize transformative communication that requires space or opportunities for engagement and a diverse group of participants committed to values such as mutual respect, empathy and a willingness to consider different perspectives. (UNESCO & IEP, 2020, p. 6)

ICD is understood as a process undertaken to realise transformative communication across cultures and identities (UNESCO & IEP, 2022, p. 12)

As made clear in these two quotes, “We Need to Talk builds upon earlier work outlined in the Conceptual and Technical Framework, published by UNESCO and IEP in 2020…ICD does not occur in a vacuum; instead, it requires specific structures, skills and processes to support it…Using the data from the Framework, this report analyses key trends and provides deeper interrogation of insights, particularly the effect of ICD on broader development and security outcomes.” (p. 6)

…the core purpose of the global report is to help governments, civil society stakeholders and other practitioners see the value of ICD, understand it conceptually, and know how to support it in practice. (p. 7)

Article about UNESCO Futures of Education

Sobe, Noah W. (2022). The future and the past are unevenly distributed: COVID’s educational disruptions and UNESCO’s global reports on education. Paedagogica Historica, DOI: 10.1080/00309230.2022.2112244

“the future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed”

Willian Gibson

“For half a century the UN’s principal agency on education, UNESCO, has sought to shape the world’s educational landscape through a once-every-generation global report (e.g. the Faure report of 1972 and the Delors report of 1996). The latest of these reports – the Sahle-Work Commission’s “Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education” – was developed and released amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. This article considers the ways the pandemic entered into the production of educational futures – and pasts – in this tradition of UNESCO global reports. It argues that the uneven distribution of pasts and futures is one of the key, already- existing systems of difference that set the stage for a disruptive event like the COVID-19 pandemic.” (Sobe, 2022, p. 1)

“The core of the proposed transformation agenda is the call for building “a new social contract for education” that consists of agreed-upon core principles, a redesign of education on multiple dimensions, and a rethinking of the actions and actors that implement and manage educational institutions, programmes and processes.” (Sobe, 2022, p. 8)

As more than one of the Sahle-Work Commission members has noted, the word “together” is the most important word in the report’s title. (Some, 2022, p. 10)

NOTE: The Center for Intercultural Dialogue held focus groups as part of the information gathering stage of the Futures of Education project, preparing what we learned as a report for UNESCO, in 2021.

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