Embarking on a new project Contact 3.0: International Reflection Meeting

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By Nikola Turiere (France)

From 8 to 12 May 2023 in Tbilisi, Peace Dialogue NGO in partnership with the German organization OWEN, implemented a kick-off International Reflection Meeting as part of its new project CONTACT 3.0. Involving young activists from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Germany, these series of workshops aimed at understanding personal and dominant national narratives through the lens of young civil society members in conflict-affected areas and striving to identify needs- and human-centered topics on which they would like to work in the future with the communities they are coming from. During the encounter, in addition to the International Reflection Meeting, the project team and the participants planned next steps of the project and reflected upon the implementation of peace-oriented projects in Armenia and Azerbaijan.

• Understanding personal, national, and regional narratives linked to war / conflict perception in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Germany;
• Integrating the human security approach to peacebuilding, as a people-centered approach;
• Identifying and analyzing the obstacles that prevent youth from getting active in local initiatives.
• Developing ideas for local projects to be organized by young actors in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Germany in the upcoming months of the project.

By using interactive methods and working in groups, participants gained different perspectives on war and conflict narratives, both at the individual and regional level, and on the situation in the South Caucasus region as well as in the Western part of the Post-Soviet area and Germany. This focus on narratives allowed the participants to get a broader picture of the impact of the conflict and to raise awareness on confidence and trust-building topics for promoting peacebuilding efforts in conflict-affected societies. The various discussions on narratives gave deep insights on discourse shifts and enabled participants to critically question their own vision of both their personal narratives and the main narratives spread in their respective societies.

These discussions were completed by a human security workshop delivered by a field expert from Georgia, raising the importance of enriching peacebuilding and human rights fields by human-centered approaches rather than focusing only on state-centered security issues. Participants reflected upon how they can put into practice this theoretical approach in their local projects to be implemented in their particular contexts.

This series of workshops ended by a group work aimed at analyzing the obstacles preventing youth from getting active in local initiatives. These reflections helped the participants from Armenia and Azerbaijan to take the first step in designing project ideas to implement further in their respective contexts. In the course of the encounter, more precisions and reflections were added to the work from previous project phases, integrating all the work the participants did during the event. Throughout the upcoming five months, the key actors of the project will lead the local initiatives involving young people from their own communities to develop interest towards relevant topics and empower them to engage in and build sustainable and trustful relationships in their communities.