First joint project with Initiatives of Change and Creators of Peace to run Peace Circles

Description
Peace Circles are sessions for deep reflexion on peace. Participants seek to develop their capacities to contribute to peace by deepening their mutual understanding and weaving links of friendship.
These Peace Circles are built around two key principles:

1. they create a space in which women or men of different cultural and religious backgrounds can share their life story in an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect. Each Peace Circle is set up to try and reflect the diversity of the communities involved.

2. they give participants the opportunity to carry out exercises that explore personal challenges to create peace, the role personal of transformation and inner listening, the specific needs of those communities from which the participants originate and the search for initiatives to be undertaken together to attain peace.

Background History
The project was initiated and run by women active in the Creators of Peace/Artisans of Peace network, an IofC entity, supported in particular by Janet Museveni, First Lady of Uganda, following a conference in 2005.
The methodology has been developed over the last 12-14 years to reinforce the peace building capabilities of women living in areas of conflict in urban areas or in the third world. The project has been implemented in several African countries, in Colombia, Australia and England.

Our objectives
The two organisations share the common objective of encouraging peace by developing relations of mutual understanding between persons of different cultures. The goal is to train sufficient numbers of people to spread the action in Switzerland and abroad, particularly in conflict zones, or where participants have contacts or family. Themes to be covered include Western world- Islam relations, Judeo-Muslim relations and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Participant Objectives
The goal is for each participant be able to identify potential obstacles to peace by looking inside themselves and within his/her own community, to analyse the points of contention, and to engage in positive action using these newly acquired experiences and perspectives.

The Programme was made up of 6 sessions of 2.5 hours which covered the following themes:
1.  What are our personal images of peace?
2.  What destroy peace, what brings peace ?
3.  Listening to others
4.  Inner listening
5.  Which qualities are required to be a peace artisan?
6.  Inner peace
7.  Can anyone build peace?
8.  Practice
9.  The power of forgiveness
10. What next?    

The sessions provided useful tools (educational tools, figures of peace etc.)
Dr. Christiane Garin Al Azhari, of Initiatives of Change - Creators of Peace, was the facilitator for these sessions.