The Peace Service Program

The Peace Service Program has three parts: Preventive Presence in Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia; Exchange for Peace and information work. The overall goal of the program is to prevent armed conflict, decrease the level of violence and help create conditions for peace and peaceful conflict management in the countries where we work. We want to create space for and strengthen civil society organisations that struggle for peace, justice and human rights. In Sweden, we want to increase the level of knowledge of and interest in the countries where we work.

Preventive Presence

We send peace observers to Guatemala, Mexico and Colombia, where they accompany individuals and organisations working for peace, justice and human rights. We have sent groups of peace observers to Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico since 2000. The Colombia program started in 2004.
The objectives of sending peace observers to these areas are:
- to increase local organisations' capacity to act and decrease that of the aggressor
- to collect and disseminate information, nationally and internationally
- to offer moral support and hope

Exchange for Peace

SweFOR believes that civil society organisations have a key role in creating a society that is capable of overcoming violence and handling conflicts peacefully. The potential for doing that is already there in the countries where we work, but it needs support. Also, there are few possibilities for organisations from the Global South to meet and exchange information and experiences.

The purpose of the Exchange for Peace Program is to organize exchanges between organisations in the North and the South in order to learn from each other and support each other's work in conflict areas. The participants come from organisations in Angola, West Sahara, Guatemala, Mexico and Colombia. In Colombia, we organise non-violence workshops together with the organisation Justapaz.

Preventive presence

Information work, finally, is about creating conditions for preventive presence by building action networks and channels for disseminating information in case anything happens to our volunteers, or to the people that we work with in Guatemala, Mexico and Colombia. Preventive presence must go hand in hand with information work, so that violence and human rights abuses are met with reactions.

Another reason for us to work with information and communication is that we want to increase knowledge in Sweden of the situation in Guatemala, Mexico and Colombia. Media coverage of these countries is very limited and usually focuses on the spectacular, such as violence. The peace work carried out by local people and organisations get little attention.

For more information about the Peace Service Program, please contact Kari Berg, phone +46-8-453 68 42, E-mail kari.berg@swefor.org.