Let's See... Let's Choose... Let's Change...

by Armine Zakaryan, Armenia

At the beginning of 2011 Peace Dialogue NGO /Armenia, Vanadzor/ launched the project “Let’s see… let’s choose… let’s change…” in the framework of its three-year youth strategy “See Who We Are, Choose Who We Want To Be”. The project is aimed to establish a group of young men and women in Vanadzor, who take responsibility and recognize the importance of their role in achieving peace in their community, country, and region. They will be working towards the creation of a society that is aware and accepting of nonviolent solutions to Armenia’s conflicts, through the mobilization of their peers and cooperation with active youth groups and civil society organizations from other conflicting and post-conflict countries.

The uniqueness of the launched project is the fact that it will be implemented exclusively based on the suggestions and the ideas of the involved participants. Actually, it is going to be an experiment, not in the sense of whether it will succeed or not, but in that there is no developed plan for every activity and single step, and at the same time the expected impacts and outcomes are planned. In the framework of “Let’s see… let’s choose… let’s change…” project the process will really depend on the initiatives, needs, and potential of the involved youth.

The idea of the project comes from the experiences and lessons learned of educational peace work done by the Peace Dialogue’s staff in Armenia and largely, in the Caucasus and other conflicting and post-conflict areas. It’s based on concepts of Paulo Freire’s Liberation Pedagogy and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed approach who perceive the dialogue as the only way for people to build skills to critically analyze their context, to resist violence, and then to find the ways to change their realty. In the framework of the project, two, one-week workshop sessions will be organized on “Newspaper Theatre” and “Forum theatre” methodologies aimed to create a space for topics under taboo in societies to be discussed, and make the unseen problems and obstacles visible.