ABSTRACT
Story-based mediation draws on the power of storytelling to address social divisions and inter-group conflicts. Storytelling is an important tool for working, in the context of conflict, with the intangibles of conflict, including knowledge, identity, emotion, morality, time, and cultural geography. All cultures have a body of stories that encoded their knowledge. Stories create and give expression to personal and collective identities. Increasingly, practitioners have drawn on the power of storytelling to mediate conflicts between identity groups. Story-based projects at the community level may be an important way to foster social and cultural awareness, dialogue, and change. An advisory group can take on different parameters in terms of size, formality, and constituency; and it can have different roles in terms of its relationship to the project. For a story-based mediation project, the storytellers will usually include people from both sides of the conflict divide.
