{"id":20757,"date":"2013-12-09T15:26:07","date_gmt":"2013-12-09T13:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zeus.aegee.org\/magazine\/?p=20757"},"modified":"2013-12-09T23:01:07","modified_gmt":"2013-12-09T21:01:07","slug":"aegee-subtleties-peacebuilding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zeus.aegee.org\/magazine\/2013\/12\/09\/aegee-subtleties-peacebuilding\/","title":{"rendered":"AEGEE and the Subtleties of Peacebuilding"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Against. \u2013 Against. \u2013 Against. \u2013 …” At the Agora Zaragoza, the Focus Area named “Peacebuilding” received a clear negative vote. Does that mean that AEGEE is not interested in this topic, or do we believe we don’t have the capacity to work on it? Or is there a different explanation? \u2013\u00a0A short inquiry into one of our favourite misconceptions.
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Peace in Europe is a normality for most of us. This doesn’t mean that we do not have conflicts, but at there have been only a few occasions in the last 68 years where Europeans have taken up arms to settle disputes. For a reason that you will come to understand in the course of this article, I am not going to mention any regions here as ‘examples of armed conflicts in Europe’. But most of us have probably have heard about some of the conflicts that have taken place in Europe recently.<\/p>\n

In AEGEE, the way we speak about these conflicts sometimes reminds me of the way my grandma used to speak about her quarreling grandchildren. “C’mon kiddos, don’t be bad, if you stop fighting and just forget about your argument you will get some of my cherry cake!” You may remember that when you were a kid, you weren’t particularly fond of such interventions (even if you were fond of cake), simply because your quarrel was your own business, and you felt that you weren’t being taken seriously.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Now an armed conflict is a bit different from children quarreling. This seems like a redundant statement, but I believe we need to realise that we are not talking about a boy who destroyed his brother’s Lego castle. Forgiving and forgetting becomes difficult when your father was killed, your sister raped, your house burnt and your society filled with thoughts of hatred and revenge. Trauma is still there, even when the last survivors of the war are dying of old age. Peacebuilding after war is something that takes generations.<\/p>\n

We have quite a number of Locals in our network that are located in areas which have been affected by armed conflicts over the past decades. For me it was interesting to observe that nearly all of the locals from these areas (with only two exceptions) voted against Peacebuilding as a Focus Area. It made me wonder about why this Focus Area was proposed in the first place \u2013 had anyone ever approached these Locals for their opinion? I have been asking the delegates who voted in the plenary to comment on their decision and I will to let two of them speak for themselves.<\/p>\n

In the words of Mert Can Y\u0131lmaz\u00a0(AEGEE-Ankara):<\/p>\n