GMF - A Confidence-Building and Reconciliation Field Guide for More Sustainable and Efficient Turkish-Armenian Cross-Border Partnerships
Completed Project (June 2010 - December 2011)
Origin of funding: German Marshall Fund (Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation)
The main objective of the project is to prepare a guide for civil society organizations and individuals that aim to design and implement projects in the Turkish-Armenian context. The project pays particular attention to the transference of insights, ideas, and proposals to the policymaking level and assesses whether and how the civil society actors have made an impact on the inter-governmental normalization and reconciliation process and vice-versa. It will incorporates guidance not only on how to design and implement future projects more effectively, but also how they could engage better the borderland communities and support more efficiently the normalization/reconciliation process.
The expected results of the project can be listed as follows;
1. Identifying the areas in which Turkish-Armenian confidence-building and reconciliation projects have focused on so far. This identification will lead us to create a map (and a database) of these projects in terms of their issue focus, level of participants (elite or grassroots level), duration, region, etc.
2. Identifying the theories of social change that underlie these projects (such as the perceptions of the project organizers as to the core causes of the conflict, what aspect of the conflict their projects chose to address and why, what specific activities they undertook, how did they link the specific activities with their assessment of the conflict, etc.)
3. Identifying the transfer strategies and evaluation of the policy level: This level of analysis tries to find out in which way do the project organizers follow in terms of transferring the insights, outcomes, ideas from their specific project to influence the society and politics at-large? Do the project leaders have an outreach with the policy circles? More fundamentally are they pursuing any policy outcome?
4. Formulating a guide for civil society organizations and individuals that aim to help to design and implement of projects in the Turkish-Armenian context. This guideline incorporates the feedback received from those who implemented such projects in the Turkish-Armenian context and also incorporate lessons learned in similar projects in other identity-based protracted political conflicts around the world.
5. Formulating a set of recommendations and strategy through a participatory assessment process, for capacity building in the borderland regions likely to develop and maintain sustainable cross-border partnerships.
Within the scope of the project, TEPAV has provided the following services;
- Preparing an Inventory of the Turkish-Armenian confidence-building projects,
- Organizing an Interactive Feedback oriented Workshop with selected Turkish Armenian project organizers,
- Setting out recommendations for strengthening cross-border engagement capacities in the borderland regions,
- Laying out a Guideline for Confidence-Building and Reconciliation Initiatives,
- Introducing and distributing the Guideline to potential project organizers as an instrument to generate and encourage new projects.
