BRIDGES: Building Real Intercultural Dialogue Through Glocal Encounters

The Glocal Forum promotes peacebuilding and development activities designed to promote understanding and dialogue between societies through city-to-city partnerships, youth empowerment, and information and communication technology (ICT). The Glocal Forum's working method is to engage city officials and local stakeholders alongside global organisations - while also creating links between cities and spreading ideas and best practices to improve outcomes and extend the impact of all initiatives involved.

Specifically, an interactive website provides ideas about how Glocal Forum partners (city governments as well as local and international organisations) can build capacities locally, empower youth, reach out to underprivileged children, utilise information and communication technology (ICT) for social change, build peace, and foster smooth intercultural relations. Conferences, events, and agreements are also provided here in an effort to share information about, and spark projects to facilitate, understanding and peaceful cooperation among people of different backgrounds, locally and globally. For example, one project summarised here (which includes links to more detailed information, is called "European Rails of Peace". Selected for their commitment to peace-building and academic records, and awarded with InterRail tickets, beneficiaries in Bosnia- Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Serbia embarked on a month of train travel to attend reconciliation workshops. Organisers state that, in the context of ethnic and religious divisions in the former Yugoslavia, "this combination of structured seminar discussions and of informal interactions during travel, the lasting people-to-people ties so critical to the peacebuilding process were forged among participants."

Peace, Intercultural Understanding, Youth.

In the words of organisers, "[t]he Glocalization strategy empowers local communities, linking them to global resources and knowledge while facilitating initiatives for peace and development. It provides opportunities for the local communities to direct positive social change in the areas that most directly affect them, and to shape an innovative and more equitable international system. In particular, Glocalization attributes a special role to cities as international actors, and to city-to-city cooperation as a tool to counter global challenges and promote economic development and peacebuilding activities....Glocalization is carried out by a number of key players - from the public sector, to international institutions and private sector companies - small and large, local and global. Glocalization entails a shift in the international system, from a framework based on a balance of power between nation states, to a balance of cultural interests and local needs with global opportunities, always taking into account the importance of local actors as agents of change..."