Region: Syria

Increasing awareness of a conflict aensitive approach to aid interventions in Syria

Posted on April 18, 2018 by -

There are many groups and countries involved in Syria, who bring their own agendas to the context, making conflict dynamics extremely complex.  In 2018, Peaceful Change initiative worked to bring together International NGOs, UN agencies and donors, working in Syria to start a conversation on the delivery of humanitarian, development and peacebuilding assistance and explore understanding around the interaction of aid with the conflict, which can have positive and/or negative effects.

Two meetings were convened for representatives from 7 Syrian NGOs, from both government and opposition controlled areas and 13 International NGOs and UN agencies. In the meetings, the Syrian context was analysed to support increasing awareness of what drives peace and what drives the conflict in Syria. This helped implementing agencies to apply a conflict sensitive approach, when delivering aid, in efforts to minimise negative effects and the risk of exacerbating the situation – and maximise positive effects by identifying opportunities, to build peace.

A one one-day exploratory War Economy Retreat was also convened for 7 Syrian NGOs, alongside a parallel retreat organised for 9 donors and 15 international implementing agencies. Some examples of how assistance interacts with the conflict were explored with a couple of examples outlined below.

Distribution Effects

  • The benefits of assistance are distributed unevenly and reinforce existing social, political or economic divisions or tensions
  • Or assistance can reduce tensions between groups when assistance is delivered across existing tensions or divisions in a collaborative manner

Economic market effects

  • Intervention may distort the local economy
  • Or the intervention could build supply chains across conflict lines

Some key insights from these meetings include:

  • It is not the norm for projects in Syria to explicitly take conflict sensitivity into consideration and the development of conflict sensitivity tools could enhance the effectiveness of aid
  • Embedding conflict sensitivity into a project cycle may create challenges due to the monitoring limitations in Syria

Supporting national trust building amongst Syrian youth

Posted on November 24, 2018 by -

After 7 years of civil war, Syrians on different sides of the conflict are deeply mistrustful of each other and can be afraid to meet. Peaceful Change initiative worked to bridge this trust gap by convening a group of 12 young people from politically diverse areas at a dialogue forum outside Beirut, Lebanon. It provided the opportunity to build bridges and share perspectives, whilst developing a genuine respect for ‘the other’. Trust and confidence was slowly built.

Nadia is a 27 year old graduate in Civil Engineering from Aleppo. She said: ‘The different realities I heard during the dialogue forum helped me to break down the stereotypes I had formed about people during the war because I lacked access to information. I listened to how it was for other young people to exist during the war and it has been helpful for me to know about their lives.’

The dialogue forum also provided an opportunity for the young people to learn about peacebuilding and concepts such as human rights, conflict and violence. The facilitators led a guided discussion on economic and social violence (visible and invisible) that need to be addressed in order to bring conflict to an end.

Khalid is a 19 year old student from Homs, the third largest city in Syria, who implemented civil society activities in his locality. He said: ‘It was helpful to learn about peacebuilding concepts as they underpin my work as a civil society activist. I want to empower myself and understand actions that respect human rights and non-violence.’

PCi work in Syria

Posted on January 7, 2020 by - Uncategorized

Peaceful Change initiative have worked with civil society in Syria, working in both Opposition and Government-controlled areas of the country. Our work has included:

  • facilitating dialogue between Syrian Arab, Kurdish and Assyrian community leaders on coexistence in Hassakah Province
  • convening and building the capacity of a network of community leaders to prevent, manage and resolve local conflicts and maintain/expand civilian space. 470 human security and community safety initiatives were  implemented, including through small grants
  • capacity building for civil society actors, focusing on transformational leadership for peace-building; cross-divide dialogue between youth
  • convening conflict-sensitive assistance capacity building and reflection process for international donor governments, international aid agencies and Syrian NGOs

We have worked with partners to introduce innovative technology-based solutions to support their work in conflict-affected areas. This has included the development and management of a Community Peacebuilding Training Portal with written and audio-visual material designed to enhance the knowledge and skills of a network of 60 track-three peacebuilders based in Syria and in refugee communities in Turkey and Jordan.

Leadership and governance video resources in support of peaceful change in Syria can be found in Arabic with English subtitles here

Video One: Leadership and Transformation

Video Two: Transformational Leadership

Video Three: Peace Capital

Video Four: Good Governance 1

Video Five: Good Governance 2

Supporting community peace resources in Syria

Posted on March 28, 2014 by - Uncategorized

PCi is providing support to community peace resources – those individuals and organisations involved in local initiatives to prevent, manage and resolve conflict. The first task of this work was to map such peace resources; this was done in March 2014. PCi captured learning from this research and outlined an agenda for supporting the development and strengthening of community-level resources for peace in Syria.

Download the report in English

Download the report in Arabic

Webinar: Conflict sensitivity in remote programming

Posted on March 22, 2017 by - Uncategorized

In this webinar, PCi’s Senior Advisers Lesley McCulloch and Anthony Foreman shared the key findings of a new PCi report on the challenges and opportunities of, and lessons learned from, mainstreaming conflict sensitivity in remote programming contexts. They discussed the evolution of the remote programming model employed in Syria and Libya, where PCi works to support and build the capacity of local leaders to manage conflict.

Lebanon: PCi supports the Syria Peace Process Support Initiative (SPPSI) in Beirut

Posted on June 3, 2019 by -

PCi’s Senior Peacebuilding Adviser Raj Bhari, with a colleague from International Alert, facilitated a working group on peacebuilding at the Syria Peace Process Support Partner Event on 20 June 2019 in Beirut, Lebanon. The European Union and Germany set up the Syria Peace Process Support Initiative to contribute to peacebuilding in Syria, based on the implementation of UNSCR 2254. The workshop session facilitated forward-thinking discussions on what the track-three peacebuilding agenda in Syria needs to encompass and the possibilities and entry points for track-three peacebuilding in the current Syrian context.