Values, areas of interest & plans of action

This section explores the guiding principles, themes, and activities that your organisation should adhere to. These segments should build on each other in peacebuilding, so it is recommended to read them in order.

Values

Your values are the foundation of your organisation and peacebuilding work. Although these principles change from person to person, some common values mentioned by the interviewees were transparency, accountability, fair representation, sustainability, and authenticity.

Transparency means that you clearly and explicitly make your activities visible to the community you are working with, including your mistakes and insecurities. Accountability means that you take responsibility for these actions as well as their consequences. People will expect honesty from you – these two values are essential to building trust with the communities you are working with and overcoming the issue of credibility as a young peacebuilder. Try to share all aspects of your process (practical, emotional, etc.) as much as possible with the people you want to help and they will grow to appreciate your vulnerability.

Fair representation means that your work encompasses everyone within your targeted group. You must pay specific attention to including marginalised and vulnerable people – such as youth, women, LGBTQIA+ folk, disabled individuals, etc. Only by addressing these groups can you claim that you are helping everyone in a community. This value applies even if your work focuses on a specific group of people. For example, if you want to help the women in a community, you must be mindful of how the aforementioned marginalisations affect their context – intersectionality is a great tool to consult in this situation.

Sustainability refers to the longevity of your work. You should always aim to make lasting changes to the community you’re helping – people will not appreciate short-term distractions. You can make your work sustainable by identifying and addressing the root causes of situations, involving everyone in your solution, and providing tools and skills for the community to independently solve future problems as they come up.

Finally, authenticity refers to your commitment to your core values. You should always practice what you preach by using your values as core principles that guide your work. Consistently refer back to your values at every step and confirm that your plans follow them. This way, you can ensure that you stay faithful to your original vision and purpose.

Areas of Interest

Your areas of interest are the themes you want to address with your peacebuilding work and are guided by your values. There are infinitely many topics you could focus on – this section features some common ones from our interviews.

To make your work effective, it is imperative to know what peace means for you. Some common aspects of our interviewees’ definition of peace were that peace does not equal a lack of conflict and only positive peace can be sustainable. While lack of violence is a prerequisite for positive peace, it is insufficient alone: ‘For me, peace is going beyond the absence of overt violence. [...] Peace is a space where individuals, no matter where they come from, have opportunities to assert their agency and live in full dignity’ (Katrina Leclerc, Canada). Positive, sustainable peace relies on ensuring that everyone can exist comfortably and authentically within society: ‘For me, peace is about respect. When you're not judged, when you're allowed to express your needs, when you're not only allowed but it is encouraged. You're not made to feel bad for this. Your acts and your needs are accepted and respected. It's about feeling safe, not only physically, but also psychologically’ (Maka Sartania, Georgia). Your organisation should thus take into account how you can contribute to the building of positive peace within the community you are helping, not only stopping its conflicts.

As this is a manual made by young people, for young people, it should come as no surprise that youth was a key topic among our interviewees. A common goal among young peacebuilders is the protection of youth and children’s rights. While they work towards providing this, they also want to empower youth to speak up and act by themselves, meaning youth engagement and youth empowerment are at the forefront of their areas of interest. These topics go hand in hand – youth engagement means building a young population with agency, one that is comprised of active citizens that make political contributions to directly affect their living conditions: ‘You don’t have to wait until some adult or politician brings the solution to this topic; you have the power to start by yourself and do something’ (Valentina Testa, Argentina). Youth empowerment, on the other hand, means the encouragement given to the youth for them to be more engaged. Empowerment is almost always emotional, especially when it concerns the betterment of a community’s living conditions. Here are some examples from our interviewees on what they say to the youth to empower them: ‘We have something to say, and we are valuable. And we are not tomorrow's leaders, we are leaders today. In order to achieve that, you have to say what you think’ (Anniela Carrecedo, Venezuela) and ‘[Change is] going to come from us being mad, from screaming, from shouting. We are the force. They are not’ (Yasmina Benslimane, Morocco). Only when youth are motivated to become active citizens can they join you in your fight to secure their rights.

Social unrest was another popular area of interest among our interviewees. An environment of social unrest is caused by frequent conflicts and your organisation can approach these in multiple ways: conflict prevention, conflict management, and conflict resolution. While you can choose to focus on one of these areas, it is recommended to touch upon all of them in your work, at least partially. That way, you will have a higher chance of tackling the root cause of the conflict instead of superficially addressing it. While dealing with conflict, remind yourself that it is an inherent part of society – it is human nature to disagree but the disagreement does not have to end in violence. It is up to you to either prevent the conflict from escalating to harmful levels, manage it while it is happening, or solve the problem that caused it.

Social unrest might be caused by an Us vs Them dichotomy that forms through the othering of a group of people. This usually leads to these groups becoming vulnerable or marginalised – they are also usually the most affected in violent conflicts, with women and youth being prominent examples:

‘During the course of the war, everyone was victimised, but our women were victimised the most.’ (Abdullah O. Bility, Liberia)

‘When we talk about conflict, old people don't take arms to go to war, old people don't join radical groups, old people are not the victims of these conflicts. Wherever there is conflict, young people are on the frontline.’ (Alhatikou Dagamaissa, Mali)

Thus, it is important to focus on building a united community in your location of work (this does not refer to your personal network but to the social ecosystem in the location of your peacebuilding). This goes hand in hand with the aforementioned insurance of positive peace – you must focus on building a community where people ‘Don’t live next to each other but with each other’ (Nikola Bozanovic, Serbia). A community will always be more powerful than an individual and is essential in creating a peace that they can independently sustain once the peacebuilding efforts are concluded:

‘I think communities hold all the power. And once they realise that they have the power to control what their kids learn, and to determine their community's future - and thus the future of their countries, - we will have a generation that is not self-centred but community-centred, wanting to do for better for the country and community as a whole.’ (Raby Guèye, Senegal)

Your organisation does not have to be focused on social issues – some interviewees’ areas of interest were also related to sustainable development and environmental activism. The beautiful thing about peacebuilding is that it is applicable to every area imaginable. Once every peacebuilder focuses on the betterment of their area of interest, we can become a society that practices peace in everything we do:

‘Peace is interconnected with all of our world’s challenges. If we are able to create an equitable society, a society that takes care of the planet, and the economy, society and environment growing together in harmony, that is going to create peace.’ (Kehkashan Basu, United Arab Emirates).

Plans of Action

Your plans of action are the activities and strategies you wish to carry out, inspired by the areas you want to target and guided by your values. This section features the activities commonly used by our interviewees and who they chose to involve in them.

Your plans can feature a variety of methods that change as your organisation grows. There are some questions to consider before you choose the methods you want to use – for example, is your organisation focused on preventive or responsive action (pre-conflict and post-conflict respectively)? Do you plan to work with volunteers or paid workers? Once you determine the specifics of your resources and your organisation’s direction, you should set clear goals for your organisation. These should be specific, measurable, realistic, and time-bound so that you can assess your progress and be held accountable for it. Afterwards, you can pick which methods you want to use – our interviewees’ favourites consisted of education, skill training, dialogue, and creativity.

In terms of education, some interviewees said their organisations focused on teaching individuals about peace. They stressed how the basic principles of peacebuilding should be accessible to a wider number of people in order to raise awareness. Other interviewees focused on teaching literacy to give their students access to better job opportunities in the future.

Skill training was similar to literacy education in that its main purpose was to increase people’s job prospects. The organisations’ role in this was to provide the necessary tools and environment for people to hone their skills. Interestingly, there was an emphasis on the advancement of technological skills, with social media training being mentioned the most. This training usually had the specific goals of teaching the youth media literacy, critical reading/viewing skills (in order to detect propaganda and false narratives), and methods for them to ensure their personal safety on the internet.

With dialogue, the main goal was to create a platform for conflicting groups to safely discuss and work out misunderstandings that arise from past (usually false) narratives. By providing an environment that encourages discussion, organisations enabled these conflicting groups to examine the roots of these harmful narratives and dismantle them.

Creativity encompassed art, music, and sports. Our interviewees heavily emphasised the community-building power of all of these – sports, especially, were effective in bringing conflicting people together by making them play in the same teams. By collaborating and working towards a common cause (in the case of sports, their team’s victory), these people found out that they weren’t so different from each other after all.

For these activities to take root and create sustainable peace in a community, you need to carefully consider the people you are involving and centering. Youth is always a great community to focus on because of the domino effect: ‘If you plant the seed of peacebuilding in young people, you are planting a huge forest that will ensure future generations’ (Dalia Fernanda Márquez Añez, Venezuela). However, your work with youth should not be isolated from other generations. An intergenerational approach is useful because tensions between people from different generations will mirror those that happen on a wider scale, allowing you to identify and target them in the community you are working with. In more sensitive matters – for example, when dealing with a community that has experienced extreme violence – it is advisable to take a victim-centred approach. This does not mean you should ignore the perpetrators – their rehabilitation and reintegration into society are also important, but in later stages. Regardless of which group you choose to focus on, you should always prioritise local perspectives. A grassroots/decentralised approach will allow you to connect to individuals and smaller groups within a community, provide grounded information on which steps to take next, and prevent your vision from straying too far from reality.

You don’t have to pick only one method or group to focus on for your peacebuilding to be effective. In fact, your work will be more sustainable if you involve multiple methods and approaches throughout your process (not necessarily simultaneously). Although implementing these many factors might seem long and complicated, you need to trust the process and let the steps build on top of each other – your small but intentional actions will lead to the realisation of your goals as long as you stay grounded in your values.