About us
About us
Who are we?
What is the history of the project?
Issues
Who is interested in these issues?
Activities of this website
Who finances us?
Where we stand
I want to learn more, where do I start?
Who are we?
Dialogue Dynamics is a Brussels-based non-profit organization. It studies the key concepts, values and operational mechanisms of globalization. It produces reports, studies and didactic materials on global cultural and political change and the norms of global governance. It conducts, and participates in, interactive seminars and training sessions upon request.
What is the history of the project?
Between 1990 and 1996, a series of United Nations conferences built an alleged “global consensus” on the norms, values and priorities of international cooperation for the new era.
A new global language emerged at these conferences, expressing dramatic paradigm shifts, new forms of governance and a new, postmodern ethic. The new paradigms, such as good governance, sustainable development, gender equality, the right to choose, quality of life for all, partnership with non-state actors etc. were forged, not by the people themselves, but by a western postmodern intelligentsia at the rudder of global governance at the end of the cold war. Yet the fact is that the new global “consensus”, in practice treated as globally normative, already rules the world’s cultures.
In 1995 M. Peeters created Interactive Information Services (IIS), a private information network monitoring developments at the level of global governance. To date, IIS issued over 275 in-depth reports analyzing the challenges of the post-cold war global cultural and political changes. These reports, based on interviews with leading policy-makers and experts and on the primary documents of international organizations, constitute a substantial corpus of analytical research. But they are not for the layman.
So as to better exercise their responsibilities, diplomats, politicians, businessmen, academics, parents and educators, young people, religious leaders, decision-makers, the scientific community, development agents want to have a clear view of the challenges of the postmodern culture we live in. The Institute for Intercultural Dialogue Dynamics was created in 2003 as a response to a growing demand, from all parts of the world, for information and learning materials on the history, objectives, strategies, realizations and unresolved issues of the global cultural revolution of the 1990s.
The creation of this website marks yet a new stage in the development of this initiative. After a necessary and painstaking analysis of the scope and depth of cultural deconstruction, the time has come to tackle the many issues the revolution leaves unresolved and take a positive approach. Beyond today’s pervasive institutional crisis and prevailing sense of vacuum, a common desire to rebuild the fabric of society from the bottom-up has started emerging. Dialogue Dynamics identifies with this hopeful trend and seeks to encourage a patient, laborious, humble and collaborative effort geared towards a rediscovery of what is real, true and good.
Dialogue Dynamics is not a think tank. We believe finding the way back to what is real, true and good involves not only our reason, but also our conscience and our heart. We shun sterile intellectual and ideological debates: we seek a genuine and lively human encounter and operate on a personal, friendship basis.
Dialogue Dynamics is not a lobby. We believe in freedom and have no normative claim.
Issues
In its modules and seminars, Dialogue Dynamics’ Learning Forum revisits our past research and produces didactic tools on the origins, history, objectives, concepts, ethic, operational mechanisms of the western cultural revolution and of its globalization in the 1990s. Issues we focus on relate to the dramatic shifts the revolution operated, as for example from:
Growth to sustainability
Government to governance
The spouse to the partner
Complementarity of the sexes to gender equality
Moral norms to free choice
National sovereignty to global governance
Representative democracy to participatory democracy
Majority-minority opposition to consensus
Top-down to bottom-up
Universal values to a global ethic
Population control to reproductive rights
Authority to empowerment
Colonialism to “culturally sensitive approaches”
Modernity to postmodernity…
The Dialoguing section of this website tackles the many issues the revolution left unresolved, such as:
- The self-determination of non-Western cultures in an age of westernized global governance
- The identity and role of business in civil society
- Finding the concrete path to integral development away from ideological pursuits
- The implementation of subsidiarity in local cultures effectively governed by global norms
- The authority of government, parents and legitimate hierarchies in a culture of individual rights and empowerment
- Reintroducing the search for love, happiness, truth, the good in a culture from which these themes have virtually disappeared
- Recreating community in societies suffering from the bitter fruits of individualism
- The autonomy of science in a consensus culture
- Returning to reason in a culture shunning reality
- The structure of the human act and the specific function of the reason, the conscience and the heart
- The root-causes of the sense of loss or even despair of an increasing number of young people
- The separation of religion and state and their cooperation in multicultural societies…
Who is interested in these issues?
- An increasing number of young people and university students, especially in the developing world, take a personal and enthusiastic interest in a project that helps them know who they are and figure out the world in which they live. Some write their masters or doctoral thesis on issues related to the global cultural revolution and the new global ethic and interact with us directly.
- Professors, educators and parents want to understand the origin and content of education reform and the source of the existential malaise of children and the young.
- The business community is confronted with effective NGO normative and ethical global power and no longer knows what its role and identity are.
- Politicians are puzzled about the meaning and practical implications of new political concepts such as governance, participatory democracy, partnerships and do not know how to resolve the current democratic deficit and leadership crisis.
- Religious leaders wish to have the tools to discern the challenges of the new global language, which many of them have already internalized.
- Field workers, NGOs and civil servants working in international organizations experience a malaise vis-à-vis some of the development policies they contribute to implement.
- The scientific community increasingly often experiences the “consensus culture” as a threat to independent research.
- Diplomats and lobbyists want to know the real content of the new language and policies they are pressured to align with.
Activities of this website
This interactive website offers three main activities: a learning forum, a dialoguing section and a newsroom.
- Learning Forum: There is widespread ignorance about the history and challenges of the post-cold war global cultural revolution. Those who come aboard our dialogue want to have a clear view of the norms of the new ethic, their origin, what they replace and deconstruct, the opportunities they offer. The Learning Forum offers the possibility to subscribe to interactive e-seminars on these issues. To the extent of our availability, we also respond to individual requests for conferences, seminars and courses, especially when they are aimed at training trainers.
- Dialoguing: We foster a lively and friendly dialogue with representatives of the great world cultures, professors, students, theologians, men and women of field experience, and others who have a specific contribution to make in the formulation of new perspectives of hope. Our dialogue is inspired by African village meetings under the palaver tree, driven by a common search for what is real, true and good and welcoming the contribution of each member of the community.
- Newsroom: We do keep a watchful eye on those developments at the national, regional or global level that indicate a change of perspective and continue to produce analytical reports, notes and flashes when necessary.
Who finances us?
Dialogue Dynamics is a non-profit organization and depends entirely on individual donations. As many of our correspondents are from the developing world and often do not have the means to support us, we encourage those who can afford it to purchase our products and services and thereby help us cover our growing running costs.
Where we stand
We believe that each human person is endowed with a conscience, a reason and a heart and is able to recognize what is real, true and good.
We believe that commitment to reality and what is true and good is the way to happiness.
We stand for self-determination. At a time when passive conformity to westernized postmodern norms threatens to imperceptibly deconstruct the identity of all people and cultures, we reject the zombie attitude and choose responsibility, creativity and sincerity. We stand for the freedom of each individual and of each culture to be who they are.
We seek friendship with those we dialogue with. We believe that without genuine dialogue, there is no friendship, and without friendship, there is no useful dialogue.
We have a global perspective. We believe the hour has come for non-western cultures to help a dying western civilization get back to what is genuinely human before the western identity crisis, surfing on the powerful wave of globalization, destabilizes their own identity.
We are independent from existing normative frameworks and modern and postmodern paradigms alike.
Our guiding principle is the search for what is real, true and good.
I want to learn more, where do I start?
Our booklet “The new global ethic” and our book “The globalization of the western cultural revolution” provide an introductory overview of the some of the challenges of the new postmodern culture.
If you wish to go further, you can visit our Learning Forum and subscribe to our seminars.
To deepen your research, you may want to request access to our research corpus in the restricted areas of this website.
Dialogue Dynamics keeps the liberty to decline applications to the seminars and to the restricted areas of our website.