Organizing our experience into categories offers the opportunity for greater depth of understanding. Users of Do No Harm have learned that organizing a broad context into as few as two categories makes a significant difference in understanding and insight.^[1]

People who use Do No Harm continually analyze their situations according to the issues and factors that divide individuals and groups from each other and the issues and factors that connect individuals and groups. These two simple categories of Dividers and Connectors provide them with a depth of understanding of the contexts where they work and of the impacts of their work on those contexts. Using these two categories for the basis of their program designs makes a significant difference in understanding, insight, and effectiveness.

Dividers are . . .

Dividers are those things or factors that increase tensions between people or groups and may lead to destructive competition.

Connectors are . . .

Connectors are those things or factors that reduce tensions between people or groups and lead to and undergird constructive collaboration. We also use the phrase “local capacities for peace”.

The two concepts can be elaborated, but users of Do No Harm say that these definitions work well enough to start applying the other lessons of Do No Harm.

Caution
 
Any single factor cannot be both a Divider and a Connector.
 
People will sometimes identify something—such as the environment or land or business—as both a Divider and a Connector. But this kind of identification does not help guide program design or implementation. In order to be able to predict how an intervention is going to worsen or lessen conflict, it is necessary to be specific.
 
The question to ask is: What aspects of this divide people? What aspects connect people’s interests?
 
Once you understand exactly which things are the dividing ones and how, and which are the connecting ones and how, then you have the information you need to develop an intervention that does not reinforce the dividers and that does strengthen and buttress the connectors.

Previous Page Dividers and Connectors Analysis
Next Page Context and Conflict Analysis

Related Topics
Understanding Dividers and Connectors
Using Dividers and Connectors
How to do a Dividers/Connectors Analysis
Do No Harm SAVES: Categories for Disaggregating a Context

[1] “Organizing our experience into categories offers the opportunity for greater depth of understanding. Users of Do No Harm have learned that organizing a broad context into as few as two categories makes a significant difference in understanding and insight.”
 
The process of categorization and the ways we then mentally manipulate objects within those categories is significantly more complex and profound than we ordinarily realize. George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Other Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind demonstrates this at length, and I recommend it.