What we do | Citizen's Network for Peace, Reconciliation, and Human Security

In short, what we do is to work on forming a civic advocacy network, through which we hope to create social mobilization for peace, reconcilliation and human security across Western Balkans and Turkey. To this end, we aim to achieving structured collaboration between grassroots advocacy & research community, building a knowledge-based social mobilization, thus effective engagement employing human security approach in public debate. We also work to reinforcing civic-public interaction & political dialogue with policy inputs on selected human security issues – good governance, reconciliation & social inclusion – from regional & country-specific perspectives.

The initiative favours an integrated regional approach that pays attention to country-specific problems and, yet, aims trans-national cohesion in terms of values and practices. To that end, an increased recognition of commonality of the needs and problems, as well as enhanced ability to arrive at commonly developed resolutions is intended. In this sense, human security as the organizing concept of the network provides a fertile ground for members of the network to cooperate, despite their differences in levels and forms of activities.

The network adopts a bottom-up modus operandi, based on capacity building, dialogue and interaction, targeting civic citizenship building, vertical and horizontal cooperation and joint action in regional and EU levels.

More tangibly, we carry out the following activities;

Country Level Stakeholder Dialogue Meetings
Tools and Resources on Human Security
Annual Monitoring Reports
Country-Specific Thematic Reports
Regional/International Conferences
Country Level Advocacy on Thematic Areas
EU Level Advocacy and Lobbying Meetings
Summer Schools for Prospective Researchers on Human Security

Why we do it?

The ultimate objective of what we do is to raise public awareness and create mobilizition around the concept of human security, with regards to not only the politics of national security but also the everyday manifestations of “insecurities” of the people in the region. Each network member, all in their respective particularities, share the common conviction of advocating for the security of individuals and communities over borders and states. They work at different levels on issues bordering with the well-known human security concepts of conflict prevention, crsis mamagement, civil-military relations, as well as on wider definitions of “insecurity” in the sense of economic insecurity, physical violence, organized crime, police brutality.

Read more on the detailed account of the rationale in the section on Regional Context: Western Balkans and Turkey.