Good to see the State Department blog documenting the lessons learned in my country of birth. But I often wish discussions on conflict resolution were not as clear as mud.

Conflict resolution vis a vis the 25 year “war” that has been going on is not easy, even for someone who has been quite familiar with what’s going on. Claire Sneed’s report sounds optimistic, but lacks specifics, and a blog like Dipnote would be a place to go into these details.

Unfortunately –and I don’t mean to be too critical of the writer for this — the language in her report itself is steeped in diplomatic-speak so it’s not easy to decipher what this means: “by broadening the conversation, a facilitated process can aid the expansion of the U.S. Government’s leverage with a wide variety of domestic and international proponents.”

I have two questions for Sneed:

• What’s does expanding the “Governement’s leverage” really mean?
• Who are included in this “variety of domestic and international proponents?, apart from the cited groups such as USAID, the DOD and the Department of Justice? And what will it mean for people there?
  

If I don’t get it, how could a farmer in Pottuvil or a school teacher in Batticaloa understand this conversation?