The Political Necessity of Transpersonal Work

Book excerpt: Marcella Rowek explores the paradigm of Deep Democracy and its potential to transform polarized conflicts in the context of the current refugee situation in Europe. Her approach to peace work and research is embedded in the Innsbruck School of Peace Studies’ philosophy of Transrational Peaces and Lederach’s Elicitive Conflict Transformation. At the heart of a deeply democratic attitude is the idea that all perspectives, experiences, feelings, body sensations and awareness levels of the conflicting parties have to be acknowledged and consciously worked with. Only then conflict transformation processes can unfold. This is linked to a systemic and transpersonal perspective, which assumes that not a single person, event or group triggers a conflict, but that it is systemically co-created.