Peacebuilding Tools

Generations For Peace has trained young volunteers in regions affected by conflict across 52 countries around the globe, empowering them to build lasting peace in their communities. To further this peacebuilding mission, GFP has developed and now implements six distinct and unique tools to bring about and promote peace in local settings, working with volunteers in each area to identify those that are best fit for their communities. 
 
Through activities in sport, arts, advocacy, dialogue, empowerment, and the media, GFP stimulates the leadership of youth and the building of peace. The skills acquired by Pioneers and volunteers in these processes build towards the six expressions of change: building acceptance, fostering cooperation, ensuring inclusion, developing respect, taking responsibility, and building trust. They are then passed along to one volunteer after the next, creating a range of sustainable relationships, partnerships, and exchanges across conflict divides. 
Sport For Peace is Generations For Peace’s original, flagship peacebuilding tool, first implemented when the organisation was founded in 2007. Using specifically designed sports-based games and activities that integrate peer-group and peacebuilding education, Sport For Peace promotes a sense of understanding and unity that transcends the divides found in typical day-to-day life in conflict communities.

Sport For Peace has an important role to play in providing a space for opposing groups to meet each other in a neutral location, a “safe space,” with pre-defined rules and set codes of behaviour. It allows social contact between communities in which relationships have been severed through war and other forms of destructive conflict, helping children and youth overcome negative images and stereotypes about those who have different abilities, religions, and backgrounds to build acceptance and tolerance.

With the aim of reshaping prejudices, expectations, and attitudes, Sport For Peace programmes are uniquely designed to fit the context and culture of the local communities in which they are implemented. Key outcomes of Sport For Peace include building trust and acceptance, developing respect, ensuring inclusion, and encouraging greater cooperation that tears down barriers between groups and replaces them with bridges.

You can learn more about Sport For Peace here.

Art is a universal language that has the ability to overcome some of the most common and divisive barriers. Generations For Peace’s Arts For Peace serves to unite communities experiencing destructive conflict and provide a voice for children, youth, and adults who might otherwise lack an outlet.

Activities in the arts are broad, leading Generations For Peace to implement projects targeting specific groups facing distinct conflicts. Painting and music, for example, have been found to be effective with children and those suffering from traumatic experiences, while interactive role-play drama is especially effective with youth and adults.

Arts For Peace activities help bring to surface many issues of conflict and violence existing in local communities, securing acknowledgement that they are happening, identifying possible responsive actions, and generating collective commitment to actively following through on agreed-upon steps. These programmes are effective both for psycho-social healing after violence and trauma, and for building trust, developing respect, and ensuring inclusion across previously divided social groups.

You can learn more about Art For Peace here.

Advocacy is about making something important more widely known – and that is exactly what Generations For Peace’s Advocacy For Peace aims to accomplish. From print, social, and broadcast media to rallies, marches, demonstrations, and special community events, Generations For Peace works to build support amongst different groups for change in local communities, starting at the grassroots.

The objectives of Advocacy For Peace are what make it unique. Other advocacy campaigns may be aimed at a variety of objectives – for example, advocating for better food or water. However, Advocacy For Peace campaigns must always aim to transform conflict in the communities in which GFP programmes are held, creating awareness of issues of conflict and violence in communities, shifting local perceptions, changing individual attitudes, and influencing overall behaviour.

Additionally, Advocacy For Peace serves to help raise awareness about GFP and proposed programmes, as well as to attract stakeholders, partners, and potential volunteers. From the grassroots, it is an important step in educating and recruiting volunteers, connecting with others and communicating a particular cause, and building and maintaining relationships and partnerships.

Learn about one of our Advocacy For Peace programmes here.

Dialogue is a process for creating new understanding and new knowledge – it is about shared learning. As such, Generations For Peace’s Dialogue For Peace facilitates effective intra- and inter-group sessions with older youth and adults, deepening understanding and supporting changes in personal perceptions and relationships.

Embracing the principles and practices of “transformative dialogue,” Dialogue For Peace programmes create a safe space in which participants can engage in an honest exchange of ideas, all while remaining neutral, non-directive, and non-prescriptive. The end goal is not necessarily settlement or complete reconciliation, but rather the very significant step of transformation in conflict interactions between the parties.

As the newest addition to the Generations For Peace toolkit, Dialogue For Peace helps participants share their own perspectives and develop a better understanding of themselves and each other. What makes Dialogue For Peace a vehicle of peacebuilding is that verbal exchanges among individuals – though not guided in a pre-determined direction – are aimed at conflict transformation through improved relationships in the community.

Learn more about one of our Dialogue For Peace programmes here.

Empowerment revolves around the concept of giving strength and skills to those who might not even realise they have them, and Generations For Peace’s Empowerment For Peace does just that. By creating and putting on activities that build the life skills and capacities of youth and adults who are trapped in conflict due to lack of power, influence, economic status, or specific vulnerabilities, these programmes equip participants with what they need to break cycles of conflict in their daily lives.

Empowerment For Peace is first and foremost a vehicle for peacebuilding, meaning that any activities must contribute to a peacebuilding objective. These activities can include education, vocational training, or income-generating techniques that are combined with conflict transformation education to reinforce personal responsibility, individual capability, and group cooperation. Situations addressed by the programmes include gender inequality, domestic violence, gang crime, or violence as a means of earning money or protection.

Working both from the grassroots and through partnerships with local organisations, Empowerment For Peace provides participants with the appropriate technical capacity-building inputs and secure viable economic opportunities while engaging them with the opportunity to build connections between otherwise divided groups, prompting support for long-term peacebuilding activities

You can learn more about Empowerment For Peace here.

   Media For Peace is one of six peacebuilding tools which Generations For Peace (GFP) has developed for building sustainable peace at the grassroots level, in Jordan and internationally. Media is vital for communicating important events and news and providing a platform for dialogue about social issues. It is hugely influential in shaping public discourse, narratives and cultural norms. It therefore offers a powerful channel for supporting awareness raising, advocacy, and behaviour change.
 
GFP employs Media For Peace through two main modalities:
 
With Media Professionals: GFP’s Media For Peace engagement with media professionals – editors, journalists and media students – provides intensive training covering a wide range of topics, including Media and Photojournalism Ethics, Basic Conflict Concepts, Conflict Sensitivity and Conflict Sensitive Reporting, Gender Sensitive Reporting, and Climate Sensitivity, as well as Critical Media Consumption, Mis/Dis-information and Fact Checking. The training is followed by horizontal learning and panel discussion events to build a community of practice to support effective application of the curriculum in daily work.  
 
With Youth: GFP’s Youth Media activities engage young people directly in the creation of digital media content, on issues prioritised by young people. The media content is spread through digital platforms using multichannel and multiformat approaches including podcasts, visual episodes, fictional series productions and blogs to amplify youth voices, surface their ideas and solutions, and advance positive narratives to support their efforts to reach out, attract, engage and influence young people, communities, stakeholders, parliamentarians, government officials, and experts on different subjects. GFP also has partnerships with local and internationally renowned filmmakers to provide youth with masterclasses in media production and filmmaking to enable them to tell their stories by producing independent films. Participants build their capacities in filmmaking and gain hands-on experience that enhances their employability in the media/film industry, as well as producing film content which is a powerful asset for advocacy engagement.