Please find below several rules for holding discussions, both online and offline . Compliance with these rules would help all participants to turn the debate into a substantive, meaningful and, most importantly, productive dialogue.
As a starting the point, we would like to share with you Materials for public discussion that you can download on our website https://armenia2041.org/ . If you are interested in a broader context and detailed reasoning prepared by the authors, we would recommend that you read the full version of our discussion paper “At the Crossroads”.
The objective of the discussion is to achieve consensus regarding the concept of our future and to identify the most critical strategic crossroads in the course of our discussion. To achieve our goal, we would suggest that we disregard the particular events of our history and their essence, historical characters and their role, but instead, talk about what contributed to and what prevented the preservation and prosperity of the Armenians in the past centuries and how this experience could be taken into account in the 21st century. Our present is also in the focus of our attention, since it is the starting point of the route, which should lead us to the result. We hope that the assessment of our experience and our present given by the participants in the course of the discussion will be impartial and based on a real-life analysis, including a comparative one, while the results of various studies will support the opinions of the disputants.
We would like our participants to speak their mind freely that is why we do not edit the statements. However, to maintain high standards of discussion and make the discourse meaningful we would like to call you:
- To strive to agree, but not to defeat opponents;
- To reason your viewpoint;
- To avoid referring unverified and unreliable sources of information, third parties’ opinion, and generally held opinion;
- To try, whenever possible, to discuss the specified topic and not to mix different issues during the discussion;
- To avoid rewording the statements and distorting standpoints of the partners in conversation.
It is essential for us to make our discussion space free of aggression, extremism, intolerance and mutual insults, and we will take the necessary measures to make sure these principles are observed.
Finally, we would like to ask you, as far as possible, to refer to the authors and specify the names of their papers when quoting “At the Crossroads” discussion paper or Materials for public discussion, and when posting extracts from them, for example, on social media platforms.
We would be delighted to see these rules observed.
*We like the rules of conduct introduced by Andrei Movchan on his Facebook page and outlined in his book titled “Russia in the Post-Truth Era”, published in 2019 by “Alpina” Publishing House. With the permission of the author, we have adopted some of them.