Help Young People to Build Peace in Armenia

In the 1980s a group of Jewish scholars and teachers were concerned about the growing hostility towards democratic values and growing ethnocentrism in the Jewish society. They had already recorded long time ago the failure of the education system in the area of peace and democracy. These factors, as well as the murder of a peaceful activist in 1985 during the protest against the war in Lebanon became stimuli for this group of teachers and scholars, who are devoted to the principles of democracy, to establish the Adam Institute for Democracy and Peace in Israel. It was meant for playing an active role in bringing up reforms in political and peace building sciences.

The founders believed that the education programs in democracy and peace should include and address the conflicts and values in the society. Based on this notion the institute program was developed which contained a completely different approach - a system of experience based / practice oriented methods. The educational program created by interested people was named Betzavta (Togetherness).

Following the logic, we decided to organize a training in our city and give an opportunity to our participants to measure how democratic and peace-minded they are.  On April 19, 2014, seventeen young people from Vanadzor took part in the first training course based on this methodology at Peace Dialogue NGO. The training course aimed at creating controversies and alternative situations on equality and freedom, the principles of democracy, the majority and minority issues. The participants who shared the same cultural values, when put in difficult situations, were to try to find non-formal ways of cooperation and to identify their own behaviors.

The peculiarity of the training was that it created a platform for the participants to measure the degree of respect and importance towards democracy, as well as the capacity in cooperation and willingness in the peaceful resolution of conflicts. The method was quite interesting and powerful for the participants. One of the participants mentioned: “Despite that fact that we consider ourselves democratic and it seems like all our actions are driven by that principle, however, during the activities very often it became clear that in our daily life and in similar situations we pay little attention to our behavior and perceptions, and their connection with the democratic principles.”

Now we are working on preparation of a workshop related to the topics about stereotypes, gender based issues and cultural violation.  Young women from all over Armenia will be involved in the process. As we mentioned in our project description, there would be no achievement of peace in the region without reducing or in a better way- overcoming indifference, taboos and culture- based violence within the societies. In our socio-cultural context it’s very important to work especially with young women who are the most suffered part of the society bearing on their shoulders the most heavy part of cultural violence.

Once again we want to say great thanks to those people who supported us and gave us an opportunity to extend our work in a hard process of peace-creation.     

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• HOW DEMOCRATIC AND PEACE-MINDED ARE WE?

Leading by the concept that violence within the society is possible to reduce by following the  principles of democracy and civil involvement  we initiated the workshop giving chance to men and women for equal participatory in community budget planning experience.  

How to make people more responsible for their districts, towns, and cities? How to bring the community closer to local decision making? How to achieve participation of ordinary people in local politics? These are the questions that the participants of the workshop were trying to answer during a simulation game on participatory budgeting for an imaginary city called “Noravan”. 
The workshop was held on March 22 at Peace Dialogues office. More than 25 people took part in the workshop. It was prepared and facilitated by the project manager of "Violence has many faces" from Peace Dialogue NGO and an EVS volunteer from Poland.

Participatory Budgeting offers an alternative to representative democracy. It is a democratic way to manage public money. PB is a democratic process in which community members have direct participation in public expenditure management.

The mechanism was developed in the early 1980s in poor slums (favelas) at the city outskirts of Porto Alegre in Brazil. It was a time when Brazil was under military regime driven by the Armed Forces against the democratically elected government. The PB was initiated as a response of ordinary citizens towards negligence of their local governments.

Currently, there are several thousand participatory Budgets around the world. They exist in such countries as Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Germany, USA, France, England, Italy, Poland and many others. Most of them are for the city budgets; however this method is also used in schools, universities, cooperatives, regions and other institutions to give real power to people.

During the workshop participants played roles of the residents living in four districts in an imaginary city “Noravan”. They were making collective decisions on public expenditure according to the needs of their particular characters and the priorities of their neighborhoods.

Due to simulation, participants could exercise in practice how to bring ordinary people closer to decision making process.

The simulation was followed by a discussion during which the participants highlighted the necessity of a similar mechanism in Armenia. "It's hard to input this practice in Armenia, but it's not impossible. There should be civil will and consciousness for such kind of civil involvement" - said one of the participants of the workshop.