On November 5 and 6, two closed-door events brought TraCe members Tina Cramer, Laura Guntrum, Markus Lederer, Verena Lasso Mena, Mariel Reiss, and Jonas Wolff together with civil society and political actors in Brussels.
On the evening of November 5, the TraCe group was invited to attend the “Democracy Dinner” event, organized in collaboration with the European Partnership for Democracy network. Twenty guests with relevant expertise discussed in a confidential setting the political violence civil society actors face working to defend democracy. After introductory remarks, including by Jonas Wolff, the discussion focused on why and how democratic defenders are targeted and what impact this has on the resilience or erosion of democracy.
On November 6, a closed workshop on “Violence Against Civil Society Actors: Bridging Research and Practice” took place at the Representation of the State of Hessen to the EU in Brussels. The event, organized by TraCe together with the European Democracy Hub (EDH), brought together researchers, representatives of Brussels-based civil society organizations and think tanks, as well as policy makers.
The opening presentations drew on TraCe research on technology-facilitated violence against social activists in Cameroon, Colombia, and Myanmar, on the repression of LGBTIQ+ rights defenders in East and South Africa, and on the targeted killing of human rights and environmental defenders in Latin America. In a subsequent World Café, these findings were linked to the practical experiences of the participants. The discussions focused on key threats to civil society actors, existing protection gaps, and political scope for action at the EU level.
The aim of the three-hour workshop was to bring perspectives from research and practice together: on the one hand, current scientific findings on changing forms of political violence were presented, and on the other hand, the experiences and perspectives of civil society actors were incorporated and brought into dialogue with politicians. Afterwards, the public “Crisis Talk” provided a forum for sharing key findings from the workshop with a wider audience.
The workshop was organized as part of the TraCe stakeholder workshop series: in accordance with a dialogical knowledge transfer, key research findings are to be discussed and reflected upon together with practitioners who are relevant to the topic. TraCe has already organized two such workshops with different target groups: a stakeholder workshop with a school class on NATO in 2024 and a stakeholder workshop with journalists in Bogotà in 2023.