In the framework of the Youth Engagement on Peace project and in partnership with Novact, Un Ponte Per, the Iraqi Social Forum, the Iraqi Civil Society Initiative, LaOnf and thanks to the funding of the United Nations Population Fund, the OPEV organized an event in which trainers specialized in peacebuilding and prevention of violent extremism held a community memory workshop that to took place in Thiqar, Iraq on the 20th of July. The aim of this workshop was creating a shared space and an interactive environment to gather community memories in order to build a real common peace using nonviolence tools.
The approach was taken according to the fact that this type of memory exercise cannot be carried out by treating exclusively the individual experiences of the participants, because the individual experiences happen within the social context that surrounds them. Then it rather involved the sharing of collective experiences and situations that are determined by the acknowledgements of other individuals’ reality. The community’s memory exercise lies upon the premise the social memory is not only a group of psychological and mental processes correlated with each other, but also lies in the inclusion of several societal factors which embrace the present and the future. So, to get a wider understanding when dealing with this kind of topics, individual memories and experiences can’t be completely separated from societal memories.
