This talk at Google was rather interesting:
The speaker there has had a rather interesting career path looking up to the publication of his book Talking to Terrorists: How to End Armed Conflicts. Here's his Amazon author profile:
Jonathan Powell worked for the Foreign Office for fifteen years until, in 1994, Tony Blair poached him to join his 'kitchen cabinet' as his Chief of Staff. After Labour achieved its landslide victory in 1997, Powell spent ten years in government talking to the leaders of the IRA in safe houses across Belfast, Derry and Dublin. Since leaving Number 10 he has worked with a Geneva-based NGO, negotiating between governments and terrorist groups in Europe, Asia and Africa, and has now established his own NGO, InterMediate, to continue this work. InterMediate is already active in six countries.
It's a bit different from the highly censorous attitude that seems to have been visible of late - with the irony of the 50th anniversary of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement wherein students pushed for free speech against administrators to now student groups pushing for administrators to impose censorship amongst other similar occurrences.
I personally think that a lot of the actions being done may push people a direction other than the ones that the pro-censorship crowd may wish them to go. The post The Problem of “Social Justice Elitism” containing the reflections of a Harvard Divinity School student on what happened when a neo-Nazi wound up debating him and some of his fellow students at a party where their paths intersected:
I woke up the next morning feeling frustrated with my fellow divinity students. What did it mean that we spent so much time in seminar challenging each other over increasingly subtle concessions to the kyriarchy, but retreated when confronted by an honest-to-goodness Neo-Nazi? What if well-meaning academics had made this Neo-Nazi feel vilified and ashamed, driving him into the arms of the white supremacists?
... true discussion about social justice is conjunctive rather than disjunctive. That is, it creates connections by promoting an understanding of the experience of the other. By contrast, the rhetoric of social justice elitism divides people by assessing the degree to which they contribute to a system of injustice. Second, while sincere dialogue about social justice requires courage, social justice elitism rarely involves risk. Speaking truth to power is a frightening undertaking. So is talking about social justice in a way that leverages one’s privilege or runs the risk of being misunderstood.
