GASi President

In our Management Committee meeting, yesterday, one of the committee members wondered why GASi has not organised a response to the outbreak of war in Ukraine, which has been in the foreground of the thoughts of many of us, in the past month.  Have we been failing in our duty to respond to the needs of colleagues who are most intimately affected by the conflict, in Ukraine and Russia?

In the Seasonal Gathering, the previous weekend, a participant suggested that, in the statement published by the MC, GASi had taken sides in a questionable fashion and pointed out that we had failed to do so in response to other conflicts.

Some of us are having a taste of what it is like when war thinking begins to establish itself in the public realm. For others, this was already a familiar lived experience. Very rapidly, taking sides seems to become a moral obligation and the character of the sides is established in a process that makes it difficult to question the dominant assumptions. In such a moment, maintaining a space for genuine dialogue becomes an increasingly difficult task; pretty soon, the very idea of doing so can be perceived as a failure to act, to help, to rescue. Dialogue can come to be seen as paralysis in the context of war.

Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we already faced challenges concerning our ability to sustain what can properly be called Dialogue within us.  A dialogue deficit has developed, at the same time as we have continued to presume and celebrate our capacity for dialogue.  This creates an atmosphere of fear about the immanent potential for war between different positions – fracturing of relationships, withdrawal into bunkers of virtue.

The Seasonal Gathering, which is valued by those who attend it, has a format that seeks to satisfy the desire for both Large and Small groups.  I wonder whether, in the context of escalating global conflict, we need to create a more frequent LG space, where we can consider the destructive pressures on our capacity for true dialogue?

David Glyn
gasipresident@gmail.com