ACTIVITIES

From August 14th to 21st, 2017 the participants of the project ARENA: Community Theatre and Public Art gathered at the Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution (ASPR) in Stadtschlaining, Austria, for the ARENA Summer School for Creative Strategizing. The place is known as a unique center for peace education in Europe. “The castle Burg Schlaining, the venue of the Summer School, used to be an agricultural center at peace times and a hospital or a prison during wars. From 1982 it is home for Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution.” – said Lazlo Farkas, the head of the international training programs of the Study Centre, during his presentation of the history of the “Peace Castle” and the current activities of the Study Centre in Stadtschlaining.

Thousands of people have gone missing due to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. More than two decades have passed since a ceasefire agreement was signed, but thousands of families still do not know what happened to their loved ones.

According to a report by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), 4,604 Azerbaijanis and 947 Armenians remain missing in the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Most of them disappeared during the 1988–1994 Nagorno-Karabakh War.

The workshop “Art and visualization in community peacebuilding processes” was the first event of the project’s second year (2017). The aim of the workshop was to understand what peacebuilding means to each of the participants, as well as find out, through a joint work, which particular visual tools are effective and how these tools can be used in the activities condacted with conflict affected groups, based on current social and political peculiarities of the participants’ respected countries.

From 24 to 27 April, 2017, 14 participants were invited to take part in a workshop aimed at implementing a participatory and comprehensive analysis of conflict dynamics in the project involved region and review of the participant’s role in these processes during the last two years. The workshop was entitled “Systematizing the experiences of ARENA project in 2015 and 2016.” With this workshop the organizers intended to establish a relevant basis for developing pro-active, bottom-up peacebuilding strategies, suitable in the specific local contexts of the ARENA community members.

On February 4, 11, and 18, 2017 workshops were organized for 20 young activists and students aged 17-35 at Peace Dialogue NGO office. The aim of the workshops was to discuss with the participants and raise their understanding of the principles of democracy, to understand how much they see human rights, freedom, diversity and equality, as well as people’s free choice and mutual cooperation as important values that serve the basis for building a democratic society.

Human rights in the military is an issue of concern to rights groups around the world. In Armenia, reports by local and international organisations and the US Department of State suggest a concerning situation in the the country’s armed forces.

During the initial phases of the project, the idea of creating sustainable platform/network of civil society actors involved in peacebuilding initiatives in the targeted conflict affected countries remains a priority for the ARENA implementing team.