Photo: © 2016, Peace Dialogue, Armine Zakaryan, “Women’s Peace Agency” Group Discussion Workshop in Yerevan.
In 2015 under the framework of its Women’s Peace Agency (WPA) project Peace Dialogue NGO provided small grants to project participants to support their local initiatives. Based on the project methodology, all of the initiatives of the participants were to be directly related to history and memory. A primary goal of the project was to support “insiders” to access marginalized, hardline groups of women severely affected by the conflict. The program focuses on deconstructing widespread war narratives and hate speeches through personal transformation at the grassroots level. Before applying for the grants, the participants were involved in a regional workshop called “Remembering the past, creating the future”, organized by the Finnish organization CMI. The workshop was aimed at encouraging awareness on the different perspectives and experiences of the past and memories. During this workshop, with the support of experts from German NGO OWEN, the participants from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Nagorno Karabakh had an opportunity to get acquainted with contemporary methods for revealing “oral history” and memories. Peace Dialogue NGO encouraged the participants to use the knowledge and approaches they gained during the workshop in the projects they implemented within the framework of the grant.
The documentary film “Fragments” was produced by a creative group “DE Collective” from Yerevan which tells about the NK conflict and the war period from the words of some of the women who survived.
On March 17, 2016 in the framework of the Women’s Peace Agency project Peace Dialogue NGO organised a working meeting with the participants from Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh who carried out projects in the framework of the grant. The meeting aimed to provide a space for the participants to present to each other their projects and the products, as well as to analyze how the methods that the participants gained from the previous workshop Remembering the Past, Creating the future had been useful and productive in their projects.
The documentary film “Memories of the Past and Hopes for the Future” was produced by Sveta Jhangiryan from Nagorno-Karabakh and her team in the framework of the project. The movie tells about the origins of the peace movement in Nagorno-Karabakh, the first actions initiated by civil society and their incentives for doing this work.
Through the grant from CMI, Peace Dialogue provided financial support to a total of five projects. In two of the projects the participants were mainly young people. These projects were intended to analyze public monuments as components of collective memory and the messages they send to future generations. Another three projects were directed at particular segments of the history, for example documentation of the memories of women who survived the war and children born after the war.
The works of the participants from Stepanakert were prepared in the framework of the project “We will warm your souls with our memories” and tells about the brightest memories of the participants. “The First Circus in Stepanakert”, author Robert Karapetyan, was only 13 years old.
During the meetings the participants shared the difficulties and problems they encountered during the implementation phase of their projects, talked about the strongest and weakest aspects of the methodology, and made suggestions for the future development of the Women’s Peace Agency project.
The project “WOMEN’S PEACE AGENCY” is implemented with the support from the Finish organisation Crisis Management Initiative (CMI).
