une 4-6, 2024 – Tirana, Albania Justice Call representatives Sarra Messaoudi and Khaled Emam joined the MENA-Europe Cross-Regional Forum, a collaborative event that brought together 30 young peacebuilders from the UNOY Network across Europe and the MENA region. Held from June 4-6, 2024, in Tirana, Albania, the forum provided a platform for knowledge exchange, cooperation, and the development of sustainable peacebuilding partnerships. Participants engaged in over 12 sessions covering topics such as advocacy, storytelling, digital protection, well-being, and resilience, aimed at equipping local peacebuilders with the skills needed to navigate regional challenges. Key Objectives of the Forum: Enhance Capacities: Strengthen skills through workshops, training, and knowledge sharing to empower effective peacebuilding within the UNOY network. Foster Cross-Regional Collaboration: Encourage connections among peacebuilders to exchange best practices and strategies across diverse cultures. Promote Sustainable Partnerships: Develop long-term individual and organizational partnerships to boost the stability and resilience of peacebuilding efforts. Design a Manifesto for Europe-MENA Solidarity: Create a strategic plan with concrete initiatives to foster enduring solidarity and collaboration between member organizations. The forum highlighted the importance of cross-regional cooperation, equipping young leaders to contribute to sustainable peace across Europe and the MENA region. #Peacebuilding #UNOYNetwork #JusticeCall

UNOY Europe-MENA International Solidarity Manifesto

Europe-MENA International Solidarity Manifesto

We, young people from the Middle East and North Africa and European regions today, say “it is enough”. We have grown up in the midst of crises, one after the other. We are angry, disappointed, and facing deep physical and psychological consequences of political decisions and peace processes that were not shaped by us and do not represent us. Between wars and continuous mass atrocities, we carry intergenerational trauma leaving suffering imprints deeply in us. And yet, we remain hopeful. Young people are not passive victims of war and destruction. We realise we hold the power and that we are as much part of society as everyone else. We want to be seen, we want to be heard, we hold the agency and the ownership of these processes. We are leaders and changemakers in our communities, working and spending our energy and resources for our ideals. We come from a generation that changed the present history, a generation that has been in the forefront of different social movements.

Europe and MENA regions share an intertwined history of cooperation and unfortunately, power asymmetry in the form of colonisation, imperialism, occupation, oppression, and orientalism. And young people from both regions now live with its consequences. But we cannot let this history excuse our present failures: we must take ownership of the present and the future. Different political actors throughout the spectrum constantly create oppositions between our two regions to pursue their political interests, but we refuse to fall into the trap of this fabricated polarisation. At this moment, we need each other more than ever to make a change. We are aware that the challenges we face are shared and interconnected. Therefore, we come together across physical and immaterial boundaries, such as frontiers, languages, intersectional gender identities, ethnicities, and ideologies to call upon young people, activists, civil society, and the Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) community to come together in order to reshape the concept and practice of international solidarity.

We reject the double standards imposed by our governments, international bodies and unfair societal structures that give us the illusion that some human lives are more valuable than others. We remain firm in our mutual support for justice, united in humanity for a present and future in which each individual and community is able to live in just peace, harmony and hold the necessary opportunities to fulfil their full potential.

We, youth of MENA and Europe, are here and ready, and this is our manifesto:

  1. We propose the reframing and re-committing to international solidarity conceived by the recognition of our shared humanity that should be protected at all costs. We realise that our struggle is one: the challenges we face, the causes we strive for, and the incurrent crises and instability we have been living through are not mutually exclusive, nor cannot be hierarchised by order of importance. We shall not compete for support, cooperation, and empathy, but rather work to leverage the resources we do hold for the common good.
  2. We come together driven by these values: we prioritise humanity, freedom, and liberation. We commit to courage, social justice, diversity, inclusion, and equality, and acknowledge the importance of intersectional approaches. We support and participate in social movements through non-violent resistance to disrupt unjust systems of power. We value collaboration, partnership, bottom-up approaches, local ownership and accountability. Unity will make us stronger, but we shall refuse to catalyse and maintain solidarity movements based on shared enemies, hidden agendas and hijacked engagements.
  3. We hold ourselves and our leaders accountable ensuring collective responsibility, as well as our meaningful participation in relevant political processes and decisions. We say it loud, we say it clear: solidarity implies action and not only words. This process cannot be fulfilled without recognising power imbalances, as well as personal and structural privileges. It is vital to mobilise and leverage the resources and platforms we hold in order to support and benefit those who, at certain moments, are either not listened to or silenced – including the commitment to respect cultural languages, minorities and their rights. To amplify the voices of those affected by conflict and advocate for their needs, we shall strive for justice and anti-colonialism, in any form it may take.
  4. We call for equal and safe mobility and collaboration, advocating for the facilitation of visa processes between the European and other (sub)regions ensuring that young people have access to equal opportunities for education, employment and cultural exchanges to meet their peers, even across the seas. Young people should not in any circumstance pay the price of their governments’ internal and external policies when it comes to mobility. If the international community is serious about the role of young people as changemakers, mobility issues must be solved. We call upon multilateral fora to support the institution of special travel documents for international civil society representatives in order to ease travel to Europe and beyond; to governments to cease to profit over restrictive migrant rules, and demand that all embassies refund visa applications that have been denied, as some already do.
  5. We stand firm in our commitment to universal human rights. We demand that Europe-MENA agreements prioritise human rights and do not undermine fundamental freedoms and protections of individuals, particularly in matters concerning trade, migration and security. In an increasingly polarized and authoritarian world, we insist on the necessity of appropriate and effective mechanisms that ensure the protection of young peacebuilders and activists.
  6. We invite the YPS community to lead, foster and engage international solidarity efforts. As YPS activists, practitioners and leaders, it is at the core of our work to take action to catalyse, convene, and mobilise for a just peace. We stress the need to include young people as equal decision makers.
  7. We encourage the wide diffusion of alternative narratives that recognise and socialise the role of young people as crucial actors for peaceful societies. We call for media outlets and social media platforms to stop depicting young people in a binary way as either radicalised actors or victims of conflicts. We stress that social media platforms ensure the implementation of inclusive in algorithms, and duly address harmful narratives such as hate speech and disinformation. We encourage initiatives that provide training to journalists on how to properly represent young people, not only as victims or radicalized actors, but in our full power, diversity and agency.
  8. We call for a complete reshape of multilateralism. International organisations, institutions and bodies have been disappointing us for years, and especially in the last months. They need to be structurally reformed if not re-built from scratch in order to end gatekeeping, tokenistic practices, empty and fake solidarity practices that are driven by interest and harmful agendas, and oversight of protection concerns so we are finally meaningfully engaged in (cross)-regional efforts for peace. We embrace initiatives such as the Summit of the Future, and recognize the crucial timing of developing a new organigram for the United Nations.
  9. We call upon accessible, unconditional, non-restricted and long-term funding for a decolonised international solidarity. We refuse to implement hidden agendas and condone the funding cuts by international organisations and agencies in the development, humanitarian and peacebuilding fields, at the same time that we see skyrocketing financing of hard security and militarisation efforts. The Leaders for Peace campaign, for example, asks Member States to devote symbolic sums of their military and defense budgets to scholarships devoted to train a new generation of Global Peace Leaders, and develop their capacity in solving current complex challenges. We call upon international organizations, donors and allies to avoid sophisticated application systems that are not accessible to young people and vulnerable groups; and stress the necessity to focus on areas such as human security.
  10. We acknowledge the critical need to be kind to ourselves in this process. Solidarity efforts come with pain, immense sacrifices and constantly dealing with defeats. We commit to collective care and recognise this is the only way to maintain sustainable, long-term, and healthy movements.
  11. We call upon young people globally, from all regions, to come together in a global solidarity movement to bring change by solving the intertwined challenges we face by recognising the struggle of collective liberation. une 4-6, 2024 – Tirana, Albania Justice Call representatives Sarra Messaoudi and Khaled Emam joined the MENA-Europe Cross-Regional Forum, a collaborative event that brought together 30 young peacebuilders from the UNOY Network across Europe and the MENA region. Held from June 4-6, 2024, in Tirana, Albania, the forum provided a platform for knowledge exchange, cooperation, and the development of sustainable peacebuilding partnerships. Participants engaged in over 12 sessions covering topics such as advocacy, storytelling, digital protection, well-being, and resilience, aimed at equipping local peacebuilders with the skills needed to navigate regional challenges. Key Objectives of the Forum: Enhance Capacities: Strengthen skills through workshops, training, and knowledge sharing to empower effective peacebuilding within the UNOY network. Foster Cross-Regional Collaboration: Encourage connections among peacebuilders to exchange best practices and strategies across diverse cultures. Promote Sustainable Partnerships: Develop long-term individual and organizational partnerships to boost the stability and resilience of peacebuilding efforts. Design a Manifesto for Europe-MENA Solidarity: Create a strategic plan with concrete initiatives to foster enduring solidarity and collaboration between member organizations. The forum highlighted the importance of cross-regional cooperation, equipping young leaders to contribute to sustainable peace across Europe and the MENA region. #Peacebuilding #UNOYNetwork #JusticeCall

This manifesto was created by UNOY members based in Europe and Middle East & North Africa, who attended the cross-regional activity in Albania in June 2024. Read more about the event here.