In an era of deepening polarization and institutional distrust, most people have quietly concluded that genuine conversation across differences is no longer possible — or that it isn’t meant for them. This session is a direct challenge to that conclusion.
Drawing on decades of peacebuilding research and the emerging field of facilitator-free civic dialogue, this session brings together a Visiting Scholar at the Carter School and the founder of Paxior — a structured dialogue platform designed to match strangers across political, cultural, and ideological difference — to explore one of the most urgent questions in the field: what does it take to move transformative dialogue from a specialist practice to a civic habit, and can technology help us get there faster?
The session opens with a brief conversation between the presenters on what the research tells us about dialogue across difference — when it works, when it fails, and what conditions allow ordinary people to surprise themselves. Participants are then seated in groups of four and invited to sit a live Paxior Table: a thirty-minute structured conversation using role cards and talking tokens, with every person in the room in conversation simultaneously. No observers. No spotlight. Just structure, curiosity, and thirty minutes.
What consistently emerges from these tables is not just civil exchange but something deeper: awe at their own capacity to connect, a genuine sense of relationship with strangers, a weakened feeling of powerlessness, and the humanizing insight that comes from finally understanding why someone believes what they do.
A facilitated full-room debrief closes the session, moving from personal experience to field-wide question: how do we scale this? Paxior’s app-based matching platform and the Alliance for Peacebuilding’s network infrastructure represent two complementary answers — and together they point toward a future in which structured civic dialogue is as accessible as a dinner reservation.
Participants leave not just having heard about dialogue across difference, but having lived it — and having glimpsed what it might look like at a million tables.
Speakers:
- Chip Hauss, Senior Fellow for Innovation and Board member, AfP
- Anni Amberg, Founder, Paxior
