Confluence (n) - A joyous coming-together of leaders in narrative change and impactful storytelling, to build relationships and learn from one another across issues, geographies and movements.

This description encapsulated the experience of the first-ever Confluence gathering in Bogotá in October 2023, organized by IRIS in collaboration with Puentes, and the Global Narrative Hive. 

It also applies perfectly to our second gathering, Confluence: Weaving Narrative Strategies, held in May this year, with a focus on the Arab region. In response to rapidly changing world events, we made this a smaller gathering – of some 32 people – and held it in Dublin. IRIS’ collaborators this time were the Beirut-based Aflamuna and Mawred, along with the Global Narrative Hive and Monica Roa from Puentes.

Our collective aim was to deepen the strategic conversations many of us have been having in a range of forums, focused on narratives to support and advance democracy, decolonization and justice. Among others, these included Confluence Bogotá, and a meeting in Bellagio organized by OSF, looking at developing a Democracy playbook. 

Common themes emerging from the various gatherings included: 

• Connection and field building: How do we build a globally coordinated, transnational narrative infrastructure?

• Power: How do we build power, and how do we leverage the power we already have?

• Technology, AI, surveillance and securitization: How do we grapple with the evolving tech and media landscape run by algorithms that favor Big Tech.

• Funding: How can we encourage and develop sustainable funding that supports long-term narrative strategy development and field orchestration?

• Tensions: How do we grapple with the many tensions and paradoxes in our field and our work?

• Vision: How do we develop a shared long-term vision and plan (20-30 years) across issues and regions?

• In Dublin, it became clearer than ever that all of the issues we work on are  interconnected, and that to have impact, we need more narrative work that happens across issues and geographic silos, and a field-wide approach to funding.

We shared many, many powerful stories of the impact of our work, and realized we do not tell these stories often enough. At the same time, we touched on a need to query and innovate on donor-driven impact frameworks.

 A huge highlight was getting to meet amazing Irish activists, and joining a protest march through the Dublin city centre. 

The smaller nature of this gathering enabled the deepening of relationships. and at the same time foregrounded key tensions and questions that we continue to grapple with, such as:

• How do we support and foreground actors and knowledge from the Global South, when resources and knowledge-production continue to be concentrated in the US? 

• More broadly, how do we recognize and address power disparities and imbalances both within our movements and in the world?

• Can we imagine new trajectories of social justice that diverge from western models of democracy?

• How do we achieve visionary transformation rather than just tweaking at the edges? 

• How do we value and integrate both academic and theoretical knowledge, as well as practical on-the-ground knowledge and expertise?

• How do we manage dynamics in a group with participants who live and work in environments that exist along a continuum of what Vanessa Machado de Oliveira terms ‘low intensity’ and ‘high intensity’ struggle?

• Given all of the above, as we turn to planning the Confluence, what does it really mean to center Palestine, or the Arab world?