Stiftung Friedensbildung

Qui sommes-nous

Today, the peace movement is an important part of political life in Germany. It is deeply anchored in the community and in town districts, in churches and trade unions, and organised in various occupational and other initiatives. Since 2007, one of these has been the “Stiftung Friedensbewegung” (Peace Movement trust). It focusses on peace education and upbringing and on the rejuvenation of the peace movement.

The Peace Movement Trust sees itself as a trust for peace education. It works towards the goal of “achieving peace without weapons”. To this end, it supports the organisations and establishments of the peace movement, in particular civil conflict management and peace education.

This non profit-making trust is an active member of the German Peace Movement. There are well-known people from the Peace Movement on its committee, people from the Social Defence League, the Civil Peace Service the IALANA and many others. The trust lobbies for peace education in politics and administration.
The aim is to put “peace competence” onto the timetable and to establish peace education as a school subject. In this capacity it is a member of the Peace Education Network which was founded in Germany recently. The patron, Dr. Peter Becker, is a bearer of the IPB Peace Prize, and has endowed a prize for peace and conflict research, awarded by Marburg University every two years.

Projects:
• The young community – en paz.de: this seeks to communicate interactively with schoolchildren and students, to detect any peace oriented concerns they may have and to support them. It draws attention to projects, supports activities and networks in particular. The more experience we have of possible cooperation, the more effective we will be.
• Up-to-date teaching materials: The Peace Movement Trust evolves teaching materials for schools and sifts through and gathers together existing topical materials.
• Peace education: In a chapter on “Peace and Security Policies”, many school books concern themselves with organisational questions (the United Nations Organisation) their activities (e.g. UN Peace Missions), case examples, especially EU missions, of which civil missions are in the majority, which not many people realise. But some of these missions are highly controversial (e.g. NAST's war against Yugoslavia or the Iraq war). The pros outweigh the contras, which are not sufficiently represented. Many teachers would be glad to have detailed commentaries and links to additional information.
• Peace education includes the initiation and follow-up of curricular developments in courses on peace and conflict research.
• Friedens-Wiki (Peace-Wiki): Wikipedia, the internet encyclopedia, enables us to access relatively thorough and reliable information quickly. Peace policy also has some key terms which are used for practical peace work by activists but which ought to be available to journalists, too, for when they report peace topics. There is a peace policies lexicon being produced now, which will appear in book form. However, the Trust wants to use the internet to spread information and therefore supports the “Peace-Wki” project.

Jenny Becker is the president of the Peace Education Trust.

On request we can offer other net participants advice, give a presentation, and provide up-to-date information and contacts in the field of our work.