All contexts are characterized by Dividers and Connectors

All contexts are characterized by two driving forces of social dynamics (sometimes referred to by users as “realities”): Dividers and Connectors.

• There are issues, factors, and elements in societies which divide people from each other and serve as sources of tension. 
• There are also always issues, factors, and elements which connect people and can serve as local capacities for peace. ^[1]

Outside interventions will always interact with both Dividers and Connectors. Components of an intervention can have a negative impact, exacerbating and worsening dividers or undermining or delegitimizing connectors. An intervention can likewise have a positive impact, strengthening connectors or serving to reduce dividers.

Understanding what divides people is critical to understanding how interventions can feed into and support these forces or lessen them.

Understanding what connects people despite conflict is critical to understanding how interventions reinforce and support, or undermine, those factors that can mitigate conflict or constitute positive forces for peacebuilding in society.

Dividers tend to be more obvious than Connectors in contexts of conflict. Dividers are usually flashier, drawing more attention, especially of outsiders. Connectors often go unnoticed for three reasons. First, where there is violence, the danger of the violence focuses attention on it so other factors simply are not recognized or acknowledged. Second, where people are involved in connecting activities in situations of violence, they often fear exposure because it may cause them to become targets of those who would reinforce Dividers. Finally, Connectors remain hidden because so many of them look just like “normal” life, which is exactly what they are. Normal life is full of subtle connectors and local capacities for peace that maintain functional harmony among neighbors.^[2]

Dividers and Connectors Analysis (DCA)
 
DCA is a context analysis technique that focuses attention on the key factors that, experience shows, we need to understand in order to think about the impacts on social dynamics of any intervention. Organizing our experience into categories offers the opportunity for greater depth of understanding. People who use Do No Harm have seen that organizing a broad context into these two categories provides significant understanding and insight.

Previous Page Lesson 1: Interventions become part of the context
Next Page Lesson 3: Interventions interact with Dividers and Connectors

Related Topics
Lesson 3: Interventions interact with Dividers and Connectors
Lesson 4: Actions and Behaviors have Consequences
Lesson 5: The details of interventions matter
Lesson 6: There are always Options
Dividers and Connectors Analysis
How to do a Dividers and Connectors Analysis

[1] There are also always issues, factors, and elements which connect people and can serve as local capacities for peace.
 
More countries do not go to war than do. More people do not fight than do. Politicians or leaders who try to incite violence fail more often than they succeed.
 
Connectors are often quite powerful. This is why it is so important to not miss them!

[2] Normal life is full of subtle connectors and local capacities for peace that maintain functional harmony among neighbors.
 
“Functional harmony” is the sensibility shared by members of a community of waking up in the morning without the fear that some family member will be killed or harmed by violence before bedtime. Living in functional harmony does not require anything so grand as “reconciliation”. It doesn’t even require liking your neighbors.