Remembrance for Peace

Aims of the tool

SCI believes that a culture of peace can only happen through a culture of remembrance, of critically looking back at injustices of the past and never repeating them again.

The toolkit aims to provide hands-on, innovative and interesting approaches to doing remembrance with young people for youth workers all over Europe and beyond.

Description of the tool

In times when right-wing populism and neo-fascism are becoming the political mainstream in Europe, it is important to remember our past and learn from the mistakes of our ancestors. We need to remember the wars, racism, colonialism and authoritarian regimes of the 20th century and before, and to realise that they should forever remain concepts of the past and not of the present and the future.

The generations that lived through National Socialism, colonialism and the wars of the past are slowly disappearing. This means that young people today have to find new approaches to remembrance work that are not based solely on witnesses and monuments whose original purpose only a few people recognise. Youth, peace and remembrance organisations must find new approaches to reach young people and make remembrance interesting and important for them.

This toolkit was made at the seminar Youth4Remembrance, which was a method-focused and hands-on seminar on remembrance SCI organised in autumn 2019 nearby Berlin, Germany. During the seminar and later on, participants of 10 different nationalities discussed different perspectives on history, national and personal narratives. They shared experiences in different fields and in Berlin also witnessed examples of how remembrance was done in a practical way on a local level. They project was funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union and resulted in the development of a toolkit “Remembrance for Peace”.