Together with the Initiative for Peace-building and Democracy the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in 2004 launched a project entitled “Partners in Peace and Prevention” which aimed at endorsing the concept of conflict prevention in order to raise awareness and social responsibility of the stakeholders in the process of peace-building, democratization and integration. Considering the recent history of Republic of Macedonia and the Balkans and the obvious conclusions that the costs of prevention are much lesser than costs of intervention especially in terms of costs of lives, interests, values, human rights and development, it is quite clear that the politics of conflict prevention must be a constant subject of thought for all actors.

Our approach is that conflict prevention should be about comprehensive understanding of the causes of conflict, about comprehensive set of tools to prevent violence that exceed military tools, about strengthening political will whilst providing credible options for action; about early warning and information sharing; about leadership and cooperation and coordination of preventive action.

The activities that Friedrich Ebert Stiftung conducted under the umbrella of this topic have been in the form of seminars for stakeholders on municipal level and in the form of regional conferences intended for Members of Parliament and governmental structures, local and foreign experts, members of the academic community and NGO’s.

Our specific aims are:
- promotion of the concept of conflict prevention among the public and decision
- makers through strengthening and deepening the concept and its regional dimensions while promoting the bottom up approach in conflict prevention with accent on action at the local level
- promoting dialogue between different conflict prevention actors and governmental and parliamentary representatives as well as between them and civil society representatives
- identifying regional and national specifics in implementing international conflict prevention
- highlighting the importance of association, stabilization and integration processes into EU and NATO for the region of South Eastern Europe
- assessing the needs, experiences and lessons learned from an international as well as from a national conflict prevention perspective
- evaluating the scope and effectiveness of policies and instruments of conflict prevention of international, regional and national actors
- connecting the politics of prevention of violent conflicts with the concept of human security.

FES’s partners in establishing a debate in the issue of conflict prevention and human security are the Initiative for Peace-building and Democracy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Macedonia.

The Conflict Prevention topic at FES.de