Europe
01.10.2016

Peace + Conflict Consultant: First ToT in 2016

At the end of September 2016, twelve young peacebuilders from six different countries got together in Kiev, in order to plan their local projects in the context of the project Peace + Conflict Consultant.

The local workshops will take place in West and East of Ukraine, in Chisinau (Moldova), in Northern Caucasus (Russia), in the north of Baku (Azerbaijan), near Yerevan (Armenia) and in Tbilisi (Georgia), with participants from South Ossetia. Subsequently, the participants of the work-shops are supposed to apply their newly gained knowledge and to implement their own initia-tives, the so-called „Peace-Initiatives“, together with the local trainers (peacebuilders) of this project.

The project Peace + Conflict Consultant started at 2014 and is implemented in cooperation be-tween the German NGO CRISP (Berlin) and the Institut für Auslandbeziehungen (Stuttgart). The aim of the projects is to encourage motivated young people from civil societies to become pro-active and to start managing social and political conflicts at local level in their countries (Arme-nia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and Russia).

During the last modules of the project the participants were introduced to substantial theoreti-cal knowledge of peacebuilding. Further they got familiar with the state-of-the-art skills and techniques of peacebuilding. Due to that input they got empowered to organize their own peace projects on the ground. Currently the local peacebuilders are in the implementation-phase car-rying out their own activities. With their peace-projects, the young peacebuilders pursue differ-ent goals, in general all of the upcoming activities aim at reducing tensions between communi-ties and / or between social groups and state institutions.

In general, the organizers aim for a professionalization of the field of peacebuilding. Active peacebuilding is a discipline which has developed rapidly in the last years and in which it is im-portant to take into account numerous "lessons learned". The image of peacebuilding activists with long hairs, hugging trees and preaching that people must love one another is no more up to date and it may never have been accurate at all.

The project makes use of structures that already exist in the respective countries, the aim is to develop them further. The participants come from organizations in the target countries, which organizations are already involved in the field of peace work. In order to make their functioning more efficient, their stuff is additionally trained.