Afghanistan Institute of Peace

Over four decades of violent conflict have fundamentally destroyed trust in peacekeeping and has built dangerous alternatives for the Afghan people to survive.^[4] While it's not impossible, but also not easy, peace-building and peacekeeping can be built in Afghanistan. The question of how is contingent on how we preserve and build peace. The approach the AFGIP so far took has been focusing on youths and building youth peace ambassadors. They believe that youth extremism has become a serious challenge not only to the Afghan government but to the entire region and mainly to the families where these youths are coming from. To construct the efforts made in this regard by various stakeholder in the past, AFGIP is working on a bottom-up approach to raise awareness and conduct peace sensitization in the hot-spot communities. Looking back not undermining what has been achieved in regards to peace-building efforts in Afghanistan, the impact of what has been done is limited to the main cities where already peoples' access to information and resources are high. So, to encounter peace in the hotspots AFGIP focused on the conflict zones and this became a priority for them since they are formally established. While all the provinces, but particularly the South, East, and South-Western provinces of Afghanistan are the main target of the insurgents that drives the youths to extremism and became the hot-spots in last decade and so. AFGIP by intervening in these hot-spots through its violence prevention activities work with religious networks and through families to provide alternatives to the at-risk youths in these communities. Previous interventions to address and prevent youth extremism in these provinces have been relatively unsuccessful, due in part, to poor targeting and unrealistic assessment of the true underlying causes of youth extremism in these hot-spots. So to not repeat the same mistake, AFGIP took a bottom-up approach which adopts a multi-prong approach to address at-risk youths and tackle extremism in a different but practical lens. Their approach allows for a broader engagement which provides an opportunity to gradually transform the targeted hotspots into a peaceful environment where youth will actively play their roles to build long-term peace in their communities.^[5]

Peace is the most important element in any community and where it is lacking, it creates moments of anxiety that stifles growth. Drive the force of the community, especially the youths, in the wrong directions and can contribute to unstable environments that threaten everything in that community.^[5] In particular AFGIP:

• Establish mechanisms and take preventative measure to work with at-risk youths
• Build trust and communication opportunities in the communities by squeezing the gaps that often mislead the youths and drove them to the insurgency
• Train and equip the community members to better communicate and address dispute issues with at-risk youths which will lead to positive change and long-term peace in the communities