Scaling Urban-Based Local Solutions for Peace:
A Case Study Approach
Day 3: September 12, 2024
3:15 PM – 4:30 PM / Concurrent Sessions
Scaling Urban-Based Local Solutions for Peace: A Case Study Approach
For the recording of the session: https://youtu.be/d37a7zJE5GU?feature=shared
Dr. Aslı Telli:
Welcome everyone – welcome to the last day and last session of the PeaceCon 2024. We are
really glad to have been part of it and hopefully to continue through the discussions, and also
the Impressions that we’ve got all throughout the three days.
We are here with you as a Peace Workers Collaborative. And we have been working together
for a few years, some popping in and out and some coming in later but you know, in our own
corners of the world, we had been working for a long time for peace and about peace. But we
just happen to be now living in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany and this region of
Germany is one that is emblematic of what can be done about peace work, because there are a
lot of diverse communities living in Germany.
Especially in this region there is a long history about that. This also brings into the perspective
different needs of those communities and inspirations for the global issues. We are bringing
our intellect and experiences and curiosity together for transformative work into peace,
basically into peacebuilding and co-creation of peace. And we are trying to do that at micro-,
meso- and macro- levels.
Our micro-level is going to be our example from a local perspective. This would be what
we’re doing in our own cities, even our neighborhoods localities, with the communities that
we’re engaged with. And we are also implementing all these activities with the catalyzation of
Art, Nature and Science. This is a transdisciplinary scope that we have and we are working on
evidence-based solutions. We are looking for solutions together with the communities,
solutions that come out of the communities. The meso-level is basically the regional level so
we also try to take our solutions to talk at regional levels with different actors.
The macro-level is as you can imagine the trans-local and the international level. We also
have different hats in the group with our international experiences and we are also very much
open to hearing what is happening in other parts of the world, and how we can somehow get
inspiration by those experiences.
So once again we are very happy to have you here with us and looking forward to the
discussion and sharing of experiences. I am Aslı Telli. I am a peace worker, also a knowledge
worker, let’s say. I am a researcher of media, communications and social informatics and have
been doing community work for a long time, and very happy to be part of this group, for the
structural changes that we are aiming for in a common future.
I have in this group colleagues, doing very valuable and unique work that we will try to
present. I will be presenting humbly within the first instances of the dialogue for the
transformative dialogue for positive peace.
Burcu Eke-Schneider is also with us with her ecological solutions for peace transformation.
Burcu is a longtime peace activist. She also worked in the field of journalism and she is a
catalyst also for the different solutions at micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. Her perspective is
going to be through the Peace Garden. She has been working for the last few years on an
urban Peace Garden in the city of Wuppertal in the North Rhine-Westphalia region and we
have been really learning a lot from her experience and trying to combine our own intellect
and our own vision into her inspiring work.
Rochus is also with us. Rochus is our life coach. His own expertise and interest is on inner
peace and well-being.
We also have dear Hassan who’s been doing all the heavy load and preparing all these very
nice visuals for you and for the whole group and so he’s doing very valuable work together
with his colleagues and also inviting us all along in the peace platform that they now call the
Peace Hub in Essen. Essen is also a very industrialized city in the North Rhine-Westphalia
region, where we are all coming from.
So it’s really interesting to see all those different actors, with their own capabilities, skills
combining in a Peace Platform in such a city. It also has had a long history of peace and
conflict work; Essen has also hosted a lot of migrant workers. In that sense you know these
plural perspectives can provide different visions for the whole world.
So our last but also very interesting and versatile speaker is Andreu. He is here with his
artistic vision. But he has also been a silent diplomat for a very long time, a solution-oriented
silent diplomat and interested in the process because he’s an artist. Through his work, he
explores preventing conflict by art-based solutions. He’s been working with young people
within the last few years, and he’ll be sharing his experiences in that regard with us. So, this is
the different let’s say focus of the group and we hope to somehow ignite your interest and
discussion all along, while talking about this.
We also have many local partners; mostly Burcu has engaged with, so she will explain the
alliances to you now.
Burcu Eke-Schneider:
Thank you for the nice introduction. We are in Germany, and it is 9:00 PM here. Our kids are
asleep, but we want them to sleep peacefully. We are working hard every day to give them a
nice future.
I originally lived in Ankara, and then Istanbul. After active participation in the Gezi Park
movement there, I then studied Peace and Conflict Studies with Johan Galtung, Norman
Finkelstein, Jorgen Johansen, Gal Harmat, Wolfgang Dietrich, and many other world-famous
professors. In 2017, I started to work for Transformation, when I moved to Wuppertal,
Germany. Here I implemented the Peace Garden with diverse communities and voices…a real
laboratory for transformation. As part of the scientific peace process of raising general
awareness about sustainability and just living with a focus on the Wuppertal area, I made
contact with various communities…and especially with the Alevi community…in the
beginning of 2020. This contact was preceded by a two-year actor-analysis process. I also
invited the Wuppertal Institute, which is one of the world’s most qualified institutes about
energy transformation and the environment, to work for…and to be part of…a constructive
change. In February 2020, the Peace Garden was opened. This was an important step in
raising awareness regarding innovative methods of transformative peace science.
I also introduced transformative peace science terminology at Humboldt University in 2022.
The original idea was to build bridges between the various actors and communities in the city
where they were living, under the aspect of just sustainability. The aim was to create a
stronger connection to the environment, while at the same time, finding a constructive
denominator in between people. Which was, simply, soil. It nicely provided dialogue for
creation of a common ground and a common future. Which could then raise awareness of this
neglected aspect, and at the same time, contribute to the strengthening of the communities in
the cities of all stakeholders.
We are a group of peace thinkers. A pioneering group, implementing transformative
peacebuilding methods. Transforming Peace Science. Creating a 3rd side. And advancing –
micro -meso and -macro structural changes. For a common future.
Utilizing a local-partners’ peacebuilding process, we are able to meet the diverse actors in a
city, even those who hadn’t met before. But after our peacebuilding process, they started to
create a connection. Creating Peace Gardens is a metaphorical symbol of such a just
transformation, emphasizing the establishment of innovative order and structure…without
discrimination, exclusion, and marginalization.
A narrow version of the peacebuilding term has begun to appear within the bodies of the UN,
the African Union, the European Union, other regional actors, the international legal system,
and the international financial institutions. We believe that peace can be spread all around the
world: Through teachers, artists, local thinkers, and anybody else who would like to be
involved. We do not need homogenic structures for Peace to grow. We are now transforming
peacebuilding with such an approach. Let’s create these Peace Gardens together.
Mostly in these local-partner combinations, you do not see peace institutes being part of such
a process. And that is because, we just do not have enough peace institutions in the cities or in
the universities. So how can we directly activate the communities to become a peace-builder
or peace-mediator or peace-worker…acting like social workers or teachers? Actually, this
process is already growing by the help of transforming peace science according to
humankind’s relationship with nature and each other. We are finding nature-based solutions to
the drivers of injustice in urban spaces.
And what are the major drivers of injustice in urban spaces? These include:
● Exclusive access to the benefits of urban sustainability;
● Infrastructure racialized or ethnically-exclusionary urbanization;
● Uneven environmental health and pollution patterns;
● No or toxic participation in urban planning;
● Neoliberal growth and austerity urbanism;
● Material and livelihood inequalities;
● Uneven and excluding urban intensification and regeneration;
● Unfit organizational structures;
● Lack of effective brokerage;
● Weakened civil society.
*These data were taken from UrbanA’s collective work two years ago, which can be seen at:
https://sustainablejustcities.eu/.
Many conflicts…like viruses, ecological degradations, economic downfall, racism, and other
forms of injustice…are all interconnected. And if they are all interconnected, we can use
intersectional methods to build Positive Peace. Which can be defined here as: The attitudes
and behavioral changes in the institutions and structures that create Peace and sustain society.
In such a local-partners’ example, you can see that people start to work for peace together,
even though they have lots of limitations or problems between them. But because they believe
in peace, it means that we do not always need “experts” intervening in all issues.
Communities can directly find peace even when they do not have external interventions.
Experts do not always know more than local people or communities. Local people can work
for their future if there is room or space for peace and change. Additionally, nature-based
solutions can play a huge role in such a process, and heal the heavy burden related to our
disconnection from nature and each other. We will continue to explain this new
peacebuilding-process initiative later on. There I will explain in greater depth, how we can
spread the transformative peacebuilding methods to institutions, education systems and
communities…after Aslı’s presentation.
For more information please see, transcription of the Peace Conference:
“Scaling Urban-Based Local Solutions for Peace : A Case Study Approach” Academia Link: https://www.academia.edu/127776477/2024_PeaceCon_Scaling_Urban_Based_Local_Solutions_for_Peace_A_Case_Study_Approach_transcription_of_the_conference