Supporting Georgian Civil Society in Peace-BuildingThis document was prepared by and constitutes one of the main working results of the project "Strengthening European partnerships for crisis prevention and response: Civil society peace-building round tables for Georgia". The project was initiated and financed within the framework of the European Union’s Instrument for Stability, set up to finance actions that strengthen the Union’s capacities for crisis prevention and crisis management throughout the world.
Georgia has been a partner country of the European Union within its Neighbourhood Policy (now reframed within the Eastern Partnership) since 2006 and aspires to achieve ever closer integration with the Union and European security structures. However, Georgia is also still tormented by territorial conflicts which violently escalated in summer 2008. As this recent outburst of violence has demonstrated, the failure of peacefully resolving conflicts on the European continent and particularly in its volatile regions – such as the South Caucasus – does not only threaten European stability, with possible negative spill-over effects into the European Union. It also hampers the Union’s goal to assist the Eastern Partnership countries in their approximation to EU standards of democratic governance.
The project’s rationale, in line with the programmatic priorities of the Instrument for Stability, acknowledges that much of the field experience and capacity for crisis prevention and response is located in the non-state sector. In Georgia, the unfolding of this potential is impeded by several factors, including insufficient visibility of civil society expertise on peace-building both towards the Georgian Government and international donors operating in the country; lack of cooperation between state and non-state actors; and weak linkages between the main civil society actors themselves.
This project therefore endeavoured to draft recommendations on how these weaknesses might be overcome and on how the constructive role of civil society actors could be strengthened to build stable and "positive" peace in Georgia. The present recommendations document is the result of a working process that included, next to international experts, more than 20 representatives of the Georgian civil society sector with direct working and research experience in crisis prevention, confidence building and reconciliation. The project partners organised two Round Table events in April and July 2010, during which the recommendations of civil society were gathered and debated. A core working group of experts advised on the structuring of the document and saw it through to finalisation.
The document provides in the following sections an overview of the peace-building functions of civil society in general as well as a context analysis of Georgian civil society in peace-building processes. It then discusses seven priority areas for peace-building that were identified in the course of this project and addresses recommendations relevant to these areas to Georgian civil society, the Government of Georgia and international donors active in the country. Recommendations that cut across several priority areas are listed in a separate section.
We hope that the present document, as a result of debate and cooperation within the Georgian civil society sector, will prove useful to its addressees. Follow-up activities to disseminate its recommendations are planned, both within Georgia and in the European Union, after the end of this project.