Using Testimonial Dialogue to Promote Healthy Debate

Just about everyone you talk to feels that the current social climate of opinion and debate is much harsher than usual—in fact it is so harsh that many see it as an increasing challenge to democracy. Whether it's climate change, right-wing populism, or security and defense issues—diametrically opposed positions within civil society seem to be clashing everywhere.

Conflicts often escalate to such an extent that there is barely any constructive and critical debate between the different positions. Instead, the parties just entrench themselves behind their own ideas and convictions and deny that the opinions of their opponents are legitimate at all. In the end, people only talk about each other instead of with each other, and this results in negative stereotypes, abstract “us and them” mentalities, and a systematic refusal to talk increasingly dominating public debate.

The problem outlined above is the reason for the Volkswagen Foundation-funded research project “Testimonial Lab”, which was carried out last year at RWTH Aachen University and in which academics from the Chair of Political Theory and History of Ideas and the Chair of Sociology of Technology and Organization joined forces with society partners from the MörgensLab at Theater Aachen, the DGB North Rhine-Westphalia, and the network Regional Resilienz Aachen e.V. to form a transdisciplinary research team.

The conflict in the Rhenish lignite mining area

The aim of the project was to trial opportunities for constructive dialogue between hostile social groups, especially in situations where it is difficult for such discussions to take place. The project focused on the conflict in the Rhenish lignite mining area, and it was a showcase project. For decades, disputes about the lignite phase-out, Hambach Forest and Lützerath were fought out here. These disputes were sometimes fierce, and emotions ran very high. The rifts between the parties directly involved in the conflict had deepened significantly, such as employees in the regional energy sector on the one hand, and various groups of environmental activists on the other. This meant that in the end, neither side wanted to engage in constructive discussion with the other, nor did many of the people involved even believe that such discussion was even possible. The aim of the Testimonial Lab research team was to use this example to experiment with new forms of civic discussion during conflict situations in a transdisciplinary experiment, in which the conflicting parties actively took part.

In times of strong polarization of public debates, these questions are becoming increasingly pressing. However, there are no simple answers here. As communicative encapsulation and fragmentation continue, the feeling of being on the losing side of social developments or of not being properly heard and represented in the public debate often spreads among those people involved in the conflict. However, this feeling often leads to a loss of trust in established methods of communicative mediation and conflict resolution in political and media institutions, as well as faith in democracy in general. What’s more, social science research has no patent remedy to offer here either. Many participation formats have been tried and tested in the social sciences, such as citizens' councils or “mini publics” [deliberative bodies, editor's note], are intended to open up new opportunities for citizens to participate directly in public discourse. However, all these methods require a minimum level of trust and willingness to communicate. They therefore often fail exactly at that point where communication breaks down, since these requirements are then not present.

The "witness dialogue"

The Testimonial Lab project was therefore faced with the task of breaking new ground and trying out new participation formats in place of the established ones. To this end, the new experimental communication setting of the “witness dialogue” was developed, which is essentially based on two basic ideas: Firstly, the aim is to accept the breakdown in communication as a given, but at the same time, we aim to translate it into an experimental format of “indirect communication” that allows the participants to view the situation from a different perspective and which allows them to at least begin to accept the other side’s legitimacy again. Secondly, under the given circumstances of the parties to the conflict not speaking much, witness dialogues cannot realistically be about directly striving for a sophisticated “deliberative” communication process, i.e. one aimed at rational problem-solving and understanding, as is attempted in citizens' councils, for example. Instead, the primary aim is to create space for the highly subjective experiences of those involved in the conflict on both sides—and to confront the other side with these experiences with the help of targeted formats of indirect communication, creative witnessing, and collective experience reports.

This basic idea was put into practice in a workshop experiment lasting several months, in which a group of climate activists and a group of employees in the energy sector took part. In the form of an artistically prepared message in a bottle, the idea behind the social experiment of the witness dialogue was for each of the two supposedly irreconcilable groups to write a message for the other one. To achieve this, the two groups met for separate workshops in the MörgensLab at Theater Aachen. The groups therefore did not communicate directly with each other but instead addressed their own message to the other side indirectly, and they conveyed their message by creatively examining their own experiences.

In a final workshop, the content of the respective message in a bottle was then presented to the group for whom the message was intended and it was discussed in detail with them. Interestingly, both groups perceived the messages of the other group primarily as a complete distortion of their own position. Despite initial indignation, this type of indirect testimonial dialogue with the others ultimately inspired a fruitful process of thought and discussion in both groups, in which moments of cautious curiosity about the other group and attempts to break the deadlock also emerged. The project ended with a meeting between the two groups, which at least showed signs of the resumption of talks that we had hoped for.

A promising project

The research team sums the project up like this—the project is able to give a voice to positions that are being ignored, they can articulate form of truth that is subjective in nature, and they can offer listeners the opportunity to discuss various aspects of the shared experiences. In addition, they can also reveal and constructively address obstacles to communication that ae often latent. Above all, however, they can help to re-establish threads of conversation between hostile groups in conflicting situations, thereby strengthening the communicative openness of public disputes over positions and, at the same time, the democratic cohesion of society. However, we will not be able to bridge the very deep rifts between extreme political positions and strongly ideologically radicalized groups using this method.

But as a means of constructively dealing with the increasingly hardening front lines that are currently increasingly cutting through the middle of the democratic debate and which may be the bigger problem for democracy, these testimonial dialogues in the first Testimonial Lab experiment have proven to be very promising. A broader follow-up research project based on the previous results is already being planned at RWTH.

– Authors: Roger Häußling and Hans-Jörg Sigwart