In March 2023, in partnership with SAFE LIGHT, we completed a project for community and youth peace dialogue in Arsi Zone. We shared it under a line we keep coming back to:
There is no way to peace, peace is the way.
Peace is not a destination you reach once the conflict is over. It is the way people talk, listen and decide while the tension is still there.
Everyone is part of it
The same post said something harder: It takes everyone’s input to create sustainable peace in the country. As we are part of the problem, we are also part of the solution.
That sentence shapes how we run a dialogue. Nobody in the room is only a victim or only a culprit. The elder, the young person, the official and the community member each carry part of the story, and each can carry part of the solution.
Where conflict has left its mark
In December 2023 we completed training in Gambela City and in Itang Special Woreda, in the Gambela Region. Our message from there, in English and Amharic, was that peace-building, conflict resolution, reconciliation and trauma healing are urgently needed in conflict-affected cities and regions, and that all of us must do our part.
Peace-building and trauma healing belong together. People who carry unhealed wounds find it very hard to sit across the table from the people they hold responsible.
New ground: online and offline
Conflict now spreads on phones as well as in streets. In 2025, as part of the project Increase Resilience to Online and Offline Violence in Sheger City, we ran a workshop on conflict resolution techniques and digital peace-building tools: ways to counter misinformation, hate speech and harmful narratives, promote dialogue and support nonviolent responses to tension.
A few weeks later we trained Sheger City’s administration, communication, education and police offices, health centres, social affairs and community leaders on conflict mitigation and negotiation, mediation and peace-building, and the prevention and management of abuse of women and children, including digital abuse.
What we ask of the room
Every one of these programs asks the same thing of the people in it: to treat peace as a practice, not a hope. It is the way you answer a provocation, the way you mediate between neighbours, the way you post, the way you protect the most vulnerable.
There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.
