Support for Civil Peace Initiatives

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.

All the participants had the opportunity to apply for a project which would allow them to get closely acquainted with each other, share their own experience among each other, learn about the situation in the local communities, as well as present projects aimed at cooperative learning and strengthen the ties between the activists and independent artists functioning in the spheres of human rights and peace-building in Russian Federation, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine and Georgia.

German Foundation Culture Counts in cooperation with the Federal Foreign Office organized the first “Global Peacebuilder Summit” from September 4-9, 2016. 30 peace and human rights activists from around the world gathered in Berlin to discuss the role of civil society in peacebuilding processes. The objective of the “Global Peacebuilder Summit” was to strengthen these key actors in their commitment, to make their work better known to the broad public, and to facilitate the networking between them.

The inaugural ARENA: Summer School for Peace and Art was held this year in Borjomi, Georgia. During the Summer School a group of 47 activists, independent artists and trainers from 9 different countries including the Russian Federation, Netherlands, Armenia, Lebanon, Azerbaijan, Italy, Ukraine, Georgia, and Germany worked in three groups: theatre, graphic design and video.
The Summer School was organized under the scope of the three-year project ARENA: Community Theatre and Public Art launched in 2015. ARENA aims to empower civil society representatives of former Soviet Union and Eastern partnership countries and the Russian Federation to work together to develop creative approaches, new methods and activities in the field of human rights and peace building.