Photo by: © 2013, Peace Dialogue, Armine Zakaryan
From July 5-9, 2013 Dutch organization IKV Pax Christi met with its South Caucasus partners in Istanbul. The aim of the meeting was to jointly create and develop a new methodology of strategic planning for cooperating peace organizations. The participants of the meeting were representatives from the societies involved in the Nagorno-Karabakh, Georgian-Ossetian, and Georgian-Abkhazian conflicts. They had a chance to deeply and comprehensively present and analyze the reality of the South Caucasus conflicts. They also discussed the opportunities, needs, and perceptions for their performance within this context.
Kai Frithjof Brand-Jacobsen, the founder of the Department of Peace Operations and the executive director of PATRIR NGO, was specially invited from Romania to hold the working meeting. Guided by methodology that has been developed throughout many years by IKV Pax Christi and PATRIR based on their experience working in many conflicting regions, the participants from the South Caucasus organizations developed their own strategies for promoting peaceful settlement of conflicts based on their own experience, the lessons learned, and their knowledge of the situation in the region.
The cooperation between Peace Dialogue NGO and its Azerbaijani and NK partners for the peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict will be directed towards developing social groups with critical thinking skills in all the societies involved in the NK conflict over the upcoming 3 years. These groups will support the achievement of reforms and peace by actively participating in sociopolitical and civil processes on the local level. It is planned to have activities in four main directions: (1) support the elimination of military influence on society, carried out by mass media; (2) promote the role of women in political and social processes; (3) eliminate public indifference in the societies involved in the conflict to make these societies more active and include them in peace processes; and (4) raise the role of citizens in resisting the tendency toward militarization in these societies.
The ideas generated during the working meeting will be used in the development of joint projects by the participants. Moreover, the methodology of developing strategies for peace organizations will be published as a manual and will be available for other organizations and groups working in this sphere after a certain trial period.
