Support for Civil Peace Initiatives

December 22, 2017 at the Kyiv office of the Rosa Luxemburg foundation, was the first public screening of an animated film by Dana Kavelina “The Story of Mark Tulip Who Talked to Flowers”.

The ARENA network was established in the framework of the project “ARENA: Community Theatre and Public Art” of Peace Dialogue NGO and its German partner OWEN. The project is aimed at improving the impact of peacebuilding efforts by the civil society actors in the conflict affected post-Soviet area at the grass roots level. In August, 2017 the participants of the network developed a strategy for the ARENA community, consisting of various actions to be implemented in the communities of the network members in the South Caucasus, Russian Federation and Ukraine.

On August 18, 2017 the representatives of the Permanent Mission of Austria to the OSCE hosted the participants of the ARENA Summer School held from 14th to 21st of August, 2017 in the Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution (ASPR). Apart from the representatives of the Permanent Mission of Austria to the OSCE and the Arena network participants, the representatives of the Europe Integration Foreign Affairs Ministry of Republic of Austria and representatives of OSCE delegations from France, Italy and Finland attended the meeting.

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.

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.

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.