New handbook: Nonviolence!

Dear friends, Our new handbook, bringing together experience gained over 20 years of trainings, has just come out in print. It is an expanded and revised version of our first handbook Nonviolence?! (available in BCS, Albanian, Macedonian and Hungarian), published 18 years ago, which still garners an impressive number of clicks online. The difference between the current version and the first version of the handbook is made by 18 years of work and it symbolically contains an act of eradicating the question mark from the title. The handbook is titled: Nonviolence! Peacebuilding Training Handbook. Experience that we gathered in our struggle against injustice and legacies of past injustices, has strengthened the power of our conviction that nonviolence is always the right principle to apply. The PDF is available for download free of charge on our website and the printed edition is available at both our offices. In it, you can find suggestions for workshops and exercises about a whole range of topics closely related to peacebuilding, including: nonviolent communication, cooperation and teamwork; perception, leadership; violence, prejudice and discrimination; identity and diversity; understanding of, analysis and creative conflict resolution; gender equality; dealing with the past; peacebuilding; reconciliation; dealing with fear; power; trust building; nonviolence and peace activism; and nonviolent action. The introductory chapters describe in detail what CNA trainings entail; their aims and scope; the participants and how to select them; the trainers and their roles; how the training is prepared; what to keep in mind already during preparations and what to watch out for during implementation; the workshop structure; the training concept and the value framework that underpins it; how we understand terms such as conflict, violence, nonviolence, reconciliation, peacebuilding, dealing with the past. And finally, we collected a range of difficulties we faced in our work and described our more successful responses to them. We intend to keep collecting new methods as we create and apply them in future, and to publish them in the online version of the handbook. We plan to create the website as the interactive tool for training preparation and implementation. For now, there are only some downloadable materials at the address https://handbook.nenasilje.org  We believe this handbook will be most useful to people working in education, whether formal or informal, primarily with adults and youth, and particularly to those working to bring about social change in their communities, precisely because it was written from our perspective as actors who are both part of the problem and part of the solution. We hope this handbook will be of assistance to those of you brave enough to change the world by changing yourselves and create a future of more certainty and freedom for all. We would like to thank the Austrian Development Agency (ADA), the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), KURVE Wustrow, Diakonie Austria and the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR Austria) for supporting the publication of this handbook.