Caucasus and Central Asia

• Media Initiatives: Increase capacity of a range of mass media groups as well as alternative medisources to provide balanced and challenging media coverage which reduces barriers to progressing conflict resolution.
• Conflict Affected Groups: Strengthen the capacity of Conflict Affected Groups (CAGs) to engage in conflict resolution processes, contributing to the cumulative growth of a critical mass of social groups actively engaged in the peace process.
• Public Policy: Facilitate an inclusive and effective public policy environment in support of a negotiated settlement.

KYRGYZSTAN

The project is designed to address the immediate consequences of the June 2010 violence in Osh and Jalal-Abad and to create conditions for rebuilding inter-community relations in the South of the country. The first component of the project targets students in ethnically mixed universities – Osh and Jalal-Abad State Universities and the Osh State Law Institute. Through the provision of space for dialogue and support to joint initiatives, the project will reduce the tension between ethnic Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbek students and will increase their knowledge and skills to manage conflict. About 120 students will improve their understanding of the needs of each community, build interpersonal relations and gain skills and understanding that will help prevent violence on campus.

As part of the project’s second component, Alert will assess the prospects for private sector involvement in peacebuilding and will identify possible areas for further engagement. Alert will also facilitate a lesson-sharing visit of representatives of the Caucasus Business Development Network (CBDN) to Osh and Jalal-Abad.  

The third component of the project links up grassroots work in the South with the National Dialogue Forum. Alert and civil society organisations engaged in confidence-building work will channel lessons learnt from community-level interventions to the high-level policy process.

KYRGYZSTAN

The project supports the formulation of a nationally-owned approach to peacebuilding through the establishment of a Nationali Dialogue for Kyrgyzstan. The Forum involves 30-35 influential, well respected and committed individuals, over a third of whom are women, from state institutions, civil society, religious authorities, academia and the private sector, including representatives of all major ethnic groups.

The main objective of the project is to conduct an informal high-level dialogue drawing on all sectors of society to exchange views about socio-political and other developments in Kyrgyzstan, with a view to enhancing understanding and contributing to a creative and peaceful resolution of the pressing issues facing Kyrgyzstan. It will be achieved through the inclusion of all major parties to the conflict in a dialogue process on peace and reconciliation, the facilitation and support to the formation of a broad consensus on the need to prevent escalation and to build lasting peace. A series of practical activities can also result from the process and are likely to include research, analysis and presentation of the conflict in its complexity that will allow for opportunities for conflict transformation and conflict prevention to be identified and explored.

More specifically, the project will produce the following outputs:

• a National Dialogue for Kyrgyzstan will be established and its members’ capacities built;
• tools or possible practical activities to support the dialogue process will be developed – these can include in-depth analysis of the peacebuilding and reconciliation needs and processes; conflict mitigation and prevention measures at the community level and promotion of the Forum’s work and key messages to the public.

TAJIKISTAN

The project is a follow-up to the pilot Zivik-funded project ‘Tajikistan Policy Dialogue Initiative’, which Alert implemented in 2009. It continues the policy dialogue set up within the framework of the first project and focuses on youth policies and the prevention of radicalism. One of the key outputs is a policy concept on the prevention of radicalism among youth, which will inform the overall strategy on secular state-religion relations developed with European Commission's funding.

The project promotes participatory planning approaches, fosters social inclusion of youth and mitigates the tension between the secular authorities and the religious communities. The project facilitates dialogue on the critical issue of youth, religion and radicalism at a policy level, enhances dialogue and interaction between secular and religious youth, raises the awareness of youth on religion, democracy and tolerance, and enhances their participation in policy-making processes.

The project is organised around two strands of activity: policy development and youth participation. Within the first strand, a policy working group is tasked to develop a concept paper on the prevention of radicalism among youth and advocates for its endorsement by the State Committee on Youth Affairs, Sport and Tourism. Within the second strand, secular and religious students take part in a student camp on youth participation and the prevention of radicalism, and in student debates discussing policy solutions and needs for state support to youth policies.

TAJIKISTAN

The rise in religious radicalism, combined with other social and economic issues, is contributing to tension in communities, and may even be utilised to foment widespread unrest in Tajikistan given the right triggers.

However, a major exacerbating factor is the government’s response and policy towards religion and religious organisations, which risks alienating these communities. Religious values and communities can play an important role in promoting democracy, tolerance and peace, and as such, religious leaders are important actors in civil society with a great deal of influence over their constituencies.

This project aims to harness the potential of religious leaders for their peacebuilding role, to foster positive relationships with State bodies that define policy towards religion and to improve that policy in a way that reduces tensions within and between religious and secular communities. It does so by combining the peacebuilding expertise of International Alert with those non-governmental actors that participated in the Tajik peace process, building on existing capacities and the positive Tajik peace-making experience.

This project is funded by the European Union.

The repeated recurrences of the Georgian-South Ossetian conflict since 1992 following the break-up of the Soviet Union, along with the increasing isolation of South Ossetia from the outside world have resulted in widespread trauma and the destruction of the South Ossetian social fabric. Since the latest flare-up of violent hostilities in August 2008, opportunities for working on issues related to peacebuilding and civil society development in the South Ossetian context have been reduced to a minimum. Enemy images and stereotypes created during wartime are exacerbated by political and media discourses. Meanwhile, the reinforcement of physical borders hinders both social and economic interactions between people, reducing longer-term prospects for peaceful coexistence.

Confidence building in this context must be approached extremely sensitively, as premature efforts can have negative impacts that would set back the prospect for dialogue and normalisation of relations for decades.

International Alert is working with teachers to provide skills in dealing with individual and social trauma, to help them provide adequate support to their pupils, parents and communities. Through a combination of training and "learning by doing", these teachers are offered a wide range of tools that they can use in the classroom and in their communities. They are encouraged to initiate extra-curricular activities and promote problem-solving at a local level in recognition of how self-help and community mobilisation can be a powerful antidote to social trauma.

Since 2003, Alert has been working to engage the private sectors and economic actors in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, as well as Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorny Karabakh in economic initiatives that contribute to conflict reduction in the South Caucasus.

In the absence of political settlements to the conflicts in the South Caucasus, Alert believes that business offers a common interest for dialogue and cooperation across the region – and an alternative way to address the conflicts. The vision underpinning the work is a region where economic interdependence and mutually beneficial economic cooperation are pillars of stability and peace. The strand’s theory of change and underlying assumptions on the positive role business and economic actors can play in peacebuilding are the result of joint analysis conducted together with Alert’s partners, including From War Economies to Peace Economies and Corruption and Conflict. Alert’s Economy and Conflict work has been instrumental in putting economic issues on the peacebuilding agenda of international and national actors in the region.

The establishment of the Caucasus Business and Development Network (CBDN, www.caucasusbusiness.net) in 2006 witnessed a shift from theory to practice. Since then, CBDN has become a pioneering initiative promoting economic factors and cooperation as a peacebuilding strategy in the region – working towards economically connected and cooperating peaceful Caucasus.

As of today, the work ranges from livelihood and income generation initiatives to promotion of sectoral regional economic cooperation – devising ways to legalise cross-divide economic cooperation and analysing the status of regional economic cooperation and international advocacy work.