In 2016 the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Global Leadership Academy of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) convened two six-day dialogues with “memory workers” from nine countries. This was the second series of international Mandela Dialogues, the first having taken place in 2013-2014. Informing the first series had been a discomfort with what was seen as a growing orthodoxy around “transitional justice”. The discomfort gave rise to a range of questions aimed at generating new thinking about how to do memory work that is liberatory. The second series built on the first, being framed by a focus on two of the “how” questions which had loomed large in 2013-2014: how do we create spaces safe enough for former enemies to enter and listen to one another’s stories, and how is inter-generational memory work best enabled?
