Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am pleased to address your crucial meeting today.
The UN Alliance of Civilizations has, from its outset, been mandated to work on countering the factors that cause polarization, radicalization, and violence between and within communities.
The founding principles of the UNAOC attaches great importance to the need to counter radicalization, extremism, and violence.
In addition, as you are aware, both Security Council Resolutions 1624 and 1963 emphasized the importance of encouraging greater dialogue between cultures and civilizations. At the same time, Resolution 1963 directly references the UN Alliance of Civilizations and its vital role in fostering greater understanding and dialogue.
UNAOC is concerned primarily with the root causes of the radicalization of individuals and communities. Therefore, we have activities that fall under Pillar 1 of the UN Global Strategy.
In this context, UNAOC’s interventions specifically focus on three areas:
1. Young people: Our work strives to empower marginalized, at-risk young people in communities around the world and to mainstream youth voices into political processes through workshops, trainings, and small grants to fund local projects.
2. Media – here our focus has been to counter narratives that lead to incitement and hate speech. To achieve this, we have engaged in two types of activities:
a. Organizing training workshops for journalists in collaboration with senior media professionals and conflict resolution experts.
b. Providing a platform to voices of credible individuals who put out messages that counter hate speech and negative narratives.
3. Religion – in this area of work, we have engaged leaders of different faiths to speak out in their communities and engage in intra-faith dialogue to confront the issue of extremism.
As part of our community-focused approach, UNAOC builds trust and credibility with local civil society actors that is essential to our ability to provide effective programming that is, context-specific and tailored to local needs.
In terms of collaboration with CTITF, I am proud to note that in the coming months, we will implement a CTITF-funded project to engage Somali diaspora media.
I look forward to learning more about your discussions and enhancing our collaboration further more.
Thank you and I wish you successful discussions.