Context

Over the past century, Armenia has been beset by geopolitical upheavals in and around the country, most notably the genocide by the Ottoman Empire during World War I, which resulted in the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians. This, along with the turmoil of the creation and collapse of the Soviet Union, nourished the Armenian diaspora, with significant communities forming in countries such as Russia, the United States, France, Lebanon, and Iran.

More recently, economic struggles, recurring wars, and independence/reunification struggles in the predominantly Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh have left a deep impact on the country, with negotiations still underway at the time of this writing.

The Future Armenian Initiative

In 2021, in the midst of all this, the Future Armenia initiative was launched by Armenians and friends of Armenia to overcome polarization and despair, and to help the population and the Diaspora take responsibility for systemic solutions for Armenia's future.

Consultations with hundreds of diverse stakeholder organizations and Armenian experts resulted in a set of 15 goals that summarized the full range of challenges facing Armenia. This led to the official launch of the Future Armenian in April with a website and a call to action that garnered 112,000 signatures from Armenia and around the world.

The Convention of The Future Armenian

Preparation

In June 2022, these signatories were surveyed to select the three most pressing issues for a subsequent Citizens' Convention. They identified (1) historical responsibility, (2) Armenia-Diaspora unity, and (3) desired population growth.

Three expert committees were recruited to provide an expert menu of discussion points and possible solutions for each of the three goals - to be deliberated and voted on by the participants of the Convention. Prior to the convention, this menu was reviewed and edited by non-experts and convention organizers. The resulting menus were designed to help ordinary citizens come to reasoned conclusions about these complex issues within the one day they were given to deliberate on each challenge and vote on the options for action (possibly modified by elected representatives from each deliberation table).

The Convention - March 2023

This first citizen-led, high-profile convention was thus designed to produce practical proposals on the three challenges that could be taken forward by a wide range of stakeholders and networks from all sectors. It would also demonstrate that such deliberation would help Armenians - at home and in the Diaspora - to take back their destiny from other forces and address their challenges together, including having a real impact on life for a dignified future. Finally, the process was designed to become a permanent part of Armenia's governance infrastructure.

So this wasn't just another civil society event; it was the launch of a new chamber of governance with a mission to empower Armenians around the world to shape the future of Armenia. Their question was, "How can we create a new citizen-led deliberative process that enables Armenians from Armenia, Artsakh, and the Diaspora to rapidly accelerate our ability to collectively address the critical challenges we face between now and 2041?"

This first convention was held March 10-12, 2023. Its 200 randomly selected participants - from Future Armenia's global signatories and broad outreach - received multilingual briefings, recommendations, and testimony from the expert committees and deliberated in day-long facilitated sessions at tables of ten. (The 5600 unselected applicants were given the opportunity to contribute comments and suggestions to the ongoing discussions through an online platform).

During the deliberations, conference facilitators distilled the information emerging from all the deliberating tables and displayed it on a large screen for all participants to see.

After deliberating on each goal, participants adopted recommendations by majority vote from the "menus" they'd been provided. Taken together, the most popular proposals formed a comprehensive set of actions to be implemented by a network of Armenian institutions, private sector and civil society organizations, international partners, charities and individuals.

Commentary:

This was the first time that a citizens' assembly-style process was undertaken with participants from across the diaspora of a nation, more independent of existing governance structures than the vast majority of previous assemblies, with its decisions made collectively by citizens based on expert-informed templates to guide implementation by multi-sector, multi-stakeholder networks and organizations.  It's an ambitious vision, and the more than two years of preparation and design leading up to the three days of deliberations are worthy of further study.

I honor how many of the co-intelligent wise democracy patterns this work embodies, including Creative Experimentation, Iteration, Generating Shared Orientation, Out of Many, One, Experts on Tap not on Top and, perhaps most significantly, Citizen Stakeholder Integration.  

As we seek to address the increasing systemic complexity of our challenges-especially the meta-crisis – we'll need the full engagement of both citizens and the diverse networks of stakeholders active in the various social domains where change is needed. 

The Future Armenia initiative is an example of the kind of innovation we need to pursue in the field of deliberative democracy across the board.

See also:

The full report of the Convention of the Future Armenian in English.

Account of the Convention process by Iswe (advisors to and observers of the convention.)