BEYOND BOUNDARIES – PHASE III
A consortium of SaferWorld, CRSS, and Afghan partners Organization for Economic Studies and Peace (OESP), has started the third phase of the track 1.5/II project Beyond Boundaries from October, 2017, which will run through March, 2020. CRSS and OESP will oversee the development of activities between Pakistan and Afghanistan, building on the successes and lessons learnt from CRSS’s major Pakistan-Afghanistan track 1.5/II – Beyond Boundaries I & II – with the objective to improve and sustain political relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The project spanned over two phases from October, 2015 to March, 2017. It involved enhanced dialogue of the committed group of Pak-Afghan influencers including parliamentarians, security experts, retired civil and military bureaucrats, civil society and media leaders – on key bilateral issues – for policy recommendations and engagement with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, key stakeholders and public diplomacy to contribute to changes of government policy and public perceptions that improve the relationship.
CRSS, alongside OESP, will lead on coordinating meetings and conferences between key political influencers in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The project will continue to have the established mechanism of Pakistan-Afghanistan Joint Committee (PAJC) made up of a pool of security experts, parliamentarians, civil society and business/media representatives from both Pakistan and Afghanistan, who have the ability to engage with and influence Government stakeholders. Over the period of this project, meetings and workshops will be held with the PAJC in federal capitals and major cities in Pakistan and Afghanistan to discuss contentious issues and themes including political security, bilateral and regional economic cooperation, refugees, education, natural resource management, trade, sports and the arts. The PAJC meetings will be convened quarterly throughout the project, starting with the first meeting held in Kabul from 14-17 December, 2017.
The phase III of the project will deliver a quantifiable increase through PAJC dialogues/meetings, high level sideline meetings with both governments, strategic communication strategy of media dissemination through TV shows, press coverage and op-eds, and university visits in major cities of both countries, for engagement with youth and academia. The primary objective of the project remains “improvement in Pakistan-Afghanistan bilateral relations”. Through the multi-pronged approach of the Beyond Boundaries phase III activities it is aimed to lobby and act as a pressure group of influencers by sharing the policy recommendations/proposals with leaders of both governments for impressing upon the increase in amount of official bilateral government meetings leading to progress in mutually agreed contentious areas of disagreement between Afghanistan and Pakistan, by adopting an overall approach which seeks to support existing Track I & II dialogue while widening the actor groups involved in bilateral debates on those issues.
From the success of university visits during the phase II of Beyond Boundaries, where selected members from both PAJC groups delivered lectures on Pak-Afghan bilateral relations in both countries with a view to help detox the respective narratives in a complex socio-political environment. This was aimed to expand and reach out to youth and academia. Besides the lectures, CRSS and its Afghan partners also carried out perception surveys at universities gauging their understanding and perceptions of the complexities of the bilateral relationship. The encouragement received with the results of the surveys showed an overall improvement, between 20 to 24 percent, of the youth before and after the university lectures. The lectures were carried out in ten leading universities at Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif, Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi.
As stated above, during the current phase, university visits remain a core component of project activities. From the successful interaction with youth at universities, CRSS started a new initiative, namely, the Afghan Studies Center (ASC). This is a major initiative – as an offshoot of Beyond Boundaries – to engage with the youth of the two countries and to bridge the gap between them by providing a platform to dispassionately discuss, debate and inculcate out of box ideas and recommendations by disconnecting themselves from the respective government positions.
Two major activities under the ASC are the Pak-Afghan Youth Dialogues and Pak-Afghan Youth Training Workshops held every month. From October 2017 to March 2018, six Pak-Afghan Youth Dialogues and six Pak-Afghan Youth Training Workshops have been held. This is further aimed to develop wider peace constituency and enhance people-to-people contacts at youth levels (both male & female) who can become the future leaders and ambassadors of peace.
