Youth Empowerment and Nonviolent Conflict Transformation

A brief look on Europe´s history shows a continent full of conflicts of different scale and outreach: interstate wars, civil wars, community conflicts and social revolutions, not to speak of all the intergroup and interpersonal conflicts occurring every day. Though the political transformation process in Eastern and Central Europe was mainly free of violence, the wars in the Caucasus in the past two decades brought direct physical violence and the long forgotten images of wars as an extreme form of conflicts close to the European Union and its citizens. While Western and central Europe did not face those drastic outbreaks of violence in the last decades, conflicts can also be found in the old and new European Union member states reaching from various forms of community conflicts, structural violence to political struggles. As everybody admits, conflicts are part of daily life and consequently part of the relations between states, nations and communities. That cannot be changed. However, it is important how conflicts are dealt with. Nonviolent approaches to conflict transformation offer the chance to use the potentials of conflicts to build a just community within a city, a country and within Europe. That is why peaceful approaches to contemporary European conflicts and processes of social change have to be elaborated and an understanding created for the demand of the involvement of active citizens in conflict transformation. Education for Peace offers a complex and value-based respond to acquire those competences that people need to be capable of in order to live, apply and promote peaceful means of conflict transformation every day. With this training course we would like to share educational tools that empower young people to be active agents of peaceful change in their communities and in Europe. - Objectives: To make youth workers familiar with a value-based approach of education for peace To share educational methods for working with young people in conflict transformation and nonviolence To design educational programmes on peace education for young people - Content Peace Education as an educational approach Educational tools to work with young people on conflict transformation on interpersonal and societal levels Designing educational programmes for young people