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Irenees.net is a website of Resources for Peace
at the service of Artisans worldwide with the goal of equipping them in their efforts
to rethink peace and propose new modes of action

A website of Resources for Peace

 

How to prepare a dossier ? The Irenees method : to build oneself by building.

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How is an Irenees dossier put together ?

An Irenees dossier is composed of three parts : presentation, development, outcome.

• Presentation

The dossier’s title and presentation acts to clearly describe the author’s methodology. This presentation also serves to identify one of the major challenges to the development of peace in today’s world and to place it in its context.

• Development

It consists of giving priority to the close relationship that exists between the dossier’s topic and the construction of peace using various tools : scientific analysis, presentation of other theories on the same topic, personal experience, precision of concepts used for treating the question, identification of actors pondering the question in relation to peace, presentation of a few concrete work-experiences related to the question for world peace, et cetera.

The multiplicity of vantage points and the diversity of points of view allow the proposal of a multidisciplinary and diverse approach to the question while at the same time showing the potential articulations of various elements.

For instructive purposes, these tools are presented in the form of files (analysis, document, concept, interview, experience, actor, challenge, et cetera) each one endowed with a precise function and format. An Irenees dossier includes approximately 30 to 50 files. Although the majority of files are, on average, but one or two pages, their elaboration necessitates respecting a precise methodology.

• Proposition of a Challenge

The dossier’s author should extricate the questions related to his topic that seem fundamental to the construction of peace. He should respond to the following question : what major challenges to building peace does my topic present ? He should outline these questions and develop them as « challenges » without offering the solution, thus permitting others to pose questions, opening a debate as how to tackle these challenges.

An « Irenees dossier » does not, therefore, intend to propose one single way to look at things; rather, it is a question of shedding light on one of the major challenges to building peace while at the same time showing its complexity as well as the necessity of approaching it in a transversal manner. An Irenees file finds its meaning thanks to its internal richness and its more or less conflicting articulation with the other Irenees dossiers.

How does one elaborate an Irenees dossier ?

Elaborating dossiers, from the stage of capitalizing know-how to assessing it, is a movement that drives Irenees and its partners to establishing deep and long-lasting relationships. It is not a matter of producer-consumer interaction, but rather of a dialogue with multiple exchanges.

We want to take responsibility for the fact that the relationship that Irenees has with its partners is a dynamic one of mutual enrichment and reciprocal construction. We want to validate this movement that shows itself to be fundamental by following a few steps :

• Capitalization and Capital Gain

To capitalize on one’s own know-how acquired via action undertaken for peace : each actor of peace identifies the questions upon which he has built useful know-how throughout his professional journey. Owing to years of work, to the development of different projects, et cetera, what does this experience contribute, in terms of expertise, to the construction of peace ? What does it provide today to enrich the battle for peace ? This will allow, from the beginning, to start to identify the questions for which the actor of peace has a « capital gain » to offer.

• Instructive Systemization

Once the major questions are identified, it becomes a question of organizing them in an instructive, coherent manner so that other actors of peace might find them readily useful. Irenees proposes a simple methodology : group together the various acquired experiences according to a few major topics and create a dossier on each one of these topics.

The documents are drawn up, corrected, indexed and put in place. It can happen that Irenees ask the dossier authors to rework certain aspects of their work : coordinating the title, sub-title, and keywords ; the index et cetera.

Dossier authors receive the necessary methodological training and technique for drawing up their dossiers and putting them in the <irénées.net> database.

• Social Assessment

The created dossiers are shared via the Internet on the website <irénées.net> in order to make them available to other actors of peace, to compare them with the knowledge gained by the experience of others and to assess them socially.

Considering the importance of his dossier, the Artisan of Peace often proposes that we enhance it with additional material : publication, elaboration of a CD-ROM, DVD, et cetera.

In this perspective, the objective of the dossier’s elaboration is two-fold :

• so that the partners of Irenees can be proud of the contribution they are making by identifying and working on the major challenges for building peace today :

• so that they might discover that the first to be enlightened by their participation in <irenees.net> are themselves. When we invite an Artisan of Peace to participate in Irenees, quite often one of his first questions is  :« what will Irenees bring to me ? » Here is the response : by participating in <irenees.net>, it builds itself through building.

Irenees reveals itself to be much more than a tool : it is also a method of identification and classification of major themes, of elaboration of knowledge via the interaction of these themes, of transmission of knowledge via instruments of assessment.

• International Expertise. The various expertise of peace shared by assorted actors via < irenees.net> constitutes a progressive movement. In effect, it is a question of building, step by step, an international expertise for peace, an interdisciplinary and transversal Art of Peace, born from experience, capable of elaborating pertinent propositions for building peace.