Dialogue and Peacebuilding
Dialogue is a powerful tool for peacebuilding. It promotes empathy, helps to deconstruct enemy images, and builds positive relations over the divide. Dialogue enables people from diverse backgrounds to engage in respectful and meaningful exchange, build mutual understanding, and find common ground. It promotes inclusiveness and diversity of conflict resolution processes and creates a foundation for lasting peace.
At Corridors, we operate in a cross-regional and intersectoral framework. Our dialogue approach combines problem-finding dialogue with interest-driven cooperation across the divides. With this approach, we build safe spaces in heavily polarized conflicts and facilitate meaningful, diverse, and impactful dialogues. Above all, we follow a human-centric approach to support individual actors in developing their human and professional potential to contribute to peacebuilding processes.
Since 2016, Corridors develops and implements dialogue processes with experts from civil society, academia, and civil servants from Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus. Participants from Georgia/Abkhazia/South Ossetia, Armenia/Nagorno Karabakh/Azerbaijan, Moldova/Transnistria, Russia, Ukraine have been meeting in different formats and projects under the framework of dialogue through cooperation. The dialogues are structured into two thematic processes with significant impact.
Education
A central focus of our work is to promote educational opportunities for people from conflict regions and to use joint learning as an opportunity for dialogue over the divide. This goal has been identified by participants within our first dialogue workshops and has guided our work since then.
Together with our local partners, we developed a long-lasting cooperation of educational stakeholders and established an annual peacebuilding summer school. The Corridors Summer School enables joint learning and cross-divide dialogue for youth from conflict affected societies in the South Caucasus and Eastern Europe and has run in cooperation with Jena University since 2017.
Peacebuilding
A key aim of our work is to increase diversity, resilience, and local ownership of dialogues and to increase their peacebuilding impact. For this it is imperative to address or bypass structural, political, and social challenges of dialogue processes in protracted conflicts as identified by local experts.
Since 2016, we have implemented multiple cross-regional dialogues to facilitate knowledge exchange and to identify best practices and lessons learned. The results of this process have been fed into the OSCE human dimension, and key findings and concepts are being implemented by EU4Dialogue. This resulted in a significant impact on the planning and implementation of international organisations.