Developing Dialogue: A Brief HistoryORG’s founding vision in 1982 was of groups of citizens working for nuclear disarmament through talking to decision-makers – not waving banners outside their offices, not shouting violent opposition, but sitting down and discussing the issues quietly and soberly from a background of real knowledge. We carried out a series of in-depth interviews with fifty British and European decision-makers in the late 1980s, which was published as a book. Our earliest published research included an analysis of those in key nuclear weapons and international security decision-making positions in all five nuclear nations, and the emerging nuclear nations, which included biographies of scientists in weapons laboratories, intelligence analysts, military strategists, defence contractors, civil servants, and politicians. Our aim was to make the information yielded by this research available to professional groups working for nuclear disarmament, so that they too could engage in dialogue. This was done on the understanding that the dialogue was conducted in a non-confrontational manner, and we provided suggestions and ideas on how to communicate with someone remote, busy, perceived as antagonistic, and likely to be hostile to the approach. ORG’s first “Dialogue with Decision-Makers Project” linked 60-70 UK-based groups each with a nuclear-weapons decision-maker in the UK and one in China. By 1985 ORG had established a parallel Nuclear Dialogue Project in the United States which linked concerned citizen groups with thirty American decision-makers, and in 1990 ORG supported a similar project in Sweden, this time with professional groups of medical practitioners writing to French and British nuclear-weapon decision-makers. This model of personal dialogue has been adopted by several organisations internationally, most notably the Nobel Peace Prize winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). Their worldwide “Abolition 2000” initiative was based on a Handbook for a World Without Nuclear Weapons (November 1995) which included chapters commissioned from ORG on the dialogue approach. In 1999 we produced the first edition of own dialogue booklet, Everyone's Guide to Achieving Change: A Step-by-Step Approach to Dialogue with Decision-Makers, now in its 6th reprint. |
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