Turkish and Armenian Civil Society Organizations at TEPAV The workshop organized in the context of the "Turkey-Armenia Research Project" hosted  civil society organizations from the two countries for confidence-building and rapprochement.

ANKARA - TEPAV organized a workshop titled 'Turkish-Armenian Confidence-Building and Reconciliation: Best Practices, Lessons Learned and How to Move Forward?' on 18 July with Turkish and Armenian civil society organizations active in the field of cross-border activities between the two countries. The workshop took place in the framework of a research project of TEPAV conducted with the support of the Black Sea Trust of the German Marshall Fund of the United States which aims to formulate a guide for future civil society organizations and individuals to help with their design and implementation of projects in the Turkish-Armenian context.

The participants from Armenia included Tevan Poghosyan (International Center for Human Development), Aghavni Karakhanian (Institute for Civil Society and Regional Development), Richard A. Giragosian (Regional Studies Center), Mikayel Hovhannisyan (Eurasia Partnership Foundation) and Arthur Ghazaryan (Union of Manufacturers' and Businessmen of Armenia). On TEPAV's initiative, the representatives on the Armenian NGOs were received by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Ahmet Davutoğlu and Under-secretary Mr Feridun Sinirlioğlu. Some of the other participants of the meeting were Delal Dink and Burcu Becermen (Hrant Dink Foundation), Ekrem Eddy Güzeldere (European Stability Initiative), Mert Onur (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung), and Mark Cunningham (German Marshall Fund of the United States).

The one-day workshop first drew the framework of the Turkish-Armenian conflict and then focused on a broad spectrum of issues including how the Turkish-Armenian relations could become a popular item in the respective national agendas, the initiatives could be launched in the future, and the roles the respective parties could undertake.

The Turkish-Armenian fieldguide will be published in October 2011. The assessment will pay a particular attention to the transfer of insights, ideas, proposals to the policymaking level and will evaluate whether and how the civil society actors have made an impact on the inter-governmental normalization and reconciliation process and vice-versa. The outcomes of the project will also be helpful for the community of political analysts, decision makers, donors and international organizations in assessing the efficiency and the coherence of their programs and financial instruments used for confidence-building between Turks and Armenians.

The findings of this research will help to fine-tune the confidence building scheme between Turkey-Armenia on which TEPAV has been working since last year with the aim to maintain the issue of the normalization high in the respective national agendas and strengthen a conducive environment for a rapprochement between Turkey and Armenia.