The main objective of this project is to foster a more peaceful generation in Europe and in Turkey that approaches migrants with positive attitudes. The project aims to enhance social, civic and intellectual competencies recognized as effective tools to prevent and tackle discrimination, radicalism and racism, and to promote social inclusion through intercultural communication, interaction and empathy. The project aims to achieve this objective via an international peace dialogue campus network of university students, led by 29 “Peace Envoys” trained through rigorous academic preparation, experiential education and leadership development. The Peace Envoys are composed of students coming from different disciplines at the partner universities. The Peace Envoys are composed of approximately equal numbers of native students and migrant and/or refugee students studying at the partner universities in order to ensure continuous intercultural exchange and co-existing in the group as that would be the only way to be in line with the values, principles, and goals of our project.

 

Three boot camps were organized in Rotterdam, Istanbul, and Bologna, designed in topics crucial to peacebuilding e.g. intergroup contact, stereotypes and prejudices, social inclusion, inequality and social justice, European citizenship, project cycle management and so on. The Peace Envoys have been assigned the task of creating peace dialogue students’ clubs in their home universities, which will finally become a “Peace Dialogue Campus Network”, recruit and pass on their knowledge to other students to become peacemakers, and implement their own inclusion projects on their campuses and/or in their cities. Their projects in Istanbul, Gaziantep, Bologna, Berlin and Rotterdam have all been successful, with most of them reaching out beyond the borders of the university campuses.

 

Best Practice Competition

The Peace Envoys are responsible for creating student clubs at their universities, and developing their own social inclusion projects as activities of these clubs. At the end of their first project cycles, each group sent a comprehensive final report that included a comprehensive activity report with the project results. The PEACEMAKERS Project’s steering committee members then evaluated all the projects based on a set of certain selection criteria; viability, innovativeness, inclusiveness, impactfulness, sustainability, dissemination, and report quality. Since all the SC members had also guided and mentored their own students during the project cycle, we made sure each member evaluated only the groups of the other partners to ensure objective evaluation. At the end of the evaluation process, the Peace Envoys from the University of Bologna were selected as the winner of the competition.

 

Through their efforts, all of the Peace Envoys from all partner universities have created positive change in their environments to some extent, and they are determined to take it further even after the lifespan of the PEACEMAKERS project. The PEACEMAKERS project has fulfilled its main purpose and served for the betterment of this world.