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The Importance of Intelligent Empathy
At a site launched this week, humanitarians, foreign policy experts, activists and others are remembering the life of the UN's Sergio Vieira de Mello, and discussing how his legacy and principles might inform a smarter American foreign policy. Jonathan Prentice, who works today as UN Human Rights Adviser in Indonesia, wrote a beautiful piece yesterday on the importance of empathy. An excerpt:
Let's be clear: traditional diplomacy's vital importance is beyond question. But it would be wrong to conflate importance with intelligence sufficient to supplant the need to consult with those most affected by decisions being taken (or not taken).
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.
Please join us on the site at www.chasingtheflame.org and let us know what you think. It's very much worth a look.
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Comments (1)
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
This is exactly where Barack Obama is coming from. It is the essence of his attempts to reach across partisan fault-lines and consider ALL Americans as stakeholders in the policy process. As revolutionary an approach as we have seen in a very long time...
Any of us who are worried about the breakdown of government, whether we are on the republican or democratic side of the divide, should hope that Barack Obama can be elected our next President and given the chance to bring his formidable intelligence and his formidable empathy to bear on the problems of the era.
August 21, 2008 5:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
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