CEE Prevent Net - Central and Eastern European Network for the Prevention of Intolerance and Group Hatred

In light of increasing levels of intolerance, discrimination and group hatred in Europe, the CEE Prevent Net project aims at safeguarding young people by strengthening their resilience toward these phenomena and their skills to contribute to a peaceful and democratic society. Building on the previous project European Fair Skills, CEE Prevent Net focuses on Central and Eastern Europe and Eastern Germany, since this region shares common socio-historic experiences, structural conditions and current challenges.

The project’s main objectives comprise fostering the capacity of practitioners from social/youth work and non-formal education to deal with intolerance, group hatred and violence among young people; creating a platform for multi-agency cooperation in the project countries and across the CEE region; mustering support from stakeholders and policy-makers beyond political partisanship and societal cleavages; and raising awareness for CEE issues and approaches in European and international prevention networks, where this region is still under-represented.
The project’s activities include a transfer of good practices in an international summer school, peer coaching and youth workshops in each of the project countries as well as the publication of “Compendium of Good Practices”; “Prevent Seminars” that provide practitioners and other stakeholders in prevention work with tested strategies for how to professionally address intolerance, discrimination and group hatred in the local context; two meetings of a multi-agency roundtable in each country to facilitate dialogue between practitioners, stakeholders and policy-makers in each project region; and advocacy activities to productively involve partners from across the political sphere in the project activities and the development of prevention work on the local and national level.

Project duration

October 2018 – September 2020

Partners

The Anti-discrimination Education Society, PL

Ratolest Brno, CZ

REACH Institute, SK

Partners for Democratic Change Slovakia, SK

Centre for Community Organizing, SK

Partners for Democratic Change Hungary, HU

Budapest Centre for Mass Atrocities Prevention, HU

YMCA Dobrich, BG

Centre for the Study of Democracy, BG

Funding

This project is funded by the European Union’s Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme (2014-2020) and the Visegrad Fund.


Advocacy to Prevent Intolerance, Discrimination and Group-focused Enmity of Youth in Bulgaria, Germany and the Visegrad Group
CEE Prevent Net Working Paper, October 2019

As part of the project “CEE Prevent Net – Central and Eastern European Network for the Prevention of Intolerance and Group Hatred”, an interdisciplinary team of researchers and prevention practitioners from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia has investigated into advocacy and communication strategies for advancing prevent work in the region. They have reviewed existing strategies and good practices, conducted field work and interviewed about 150 governmental and non-governmental stakeholders in youth affairs and prevention from different professions and ends of the political spectrum.

Their final report offers strategies and recommendations for practitioners and civil society to engage in political advocacy to prevent intolerance, discrimination and group hatred of youth. In particular, these recommendations focus on the possibilities for advocacy under unfavorable conditions in contemporary (Central and Eastern) Europe, such as growing levels of group hatred and right-wing extremism, shrinking civic space or the erosion of human rights standards, media independence and the rule of law, which pose a serious threat to peaceful and democratic societies in the region.

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