HOW GIJTR WORKS From the Ground Up: Primary Takeaways and Tools for Transformation
“I remember participating in a GIJTR workshop where, for the first time, you also heard victims’ voices. That’s unusual because you usually have organizations who either parade victims or speak themselves for victims, but here they were speaking for themselves... GIJTR has tried to be exactly that, a space where the voices of victims can be heard. I would say that that’s been quite revolutionary.” —Global scholar, 2023
Having worked in 80 countries worldwide, GIJTR utilizes six primary and interlinked programmatic approaches to support and sustain civil society actors who seek to promote positive change in conflict and post-conflict settings. At its core, all GIJTR work is:
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Victim-Centered and Victim-Responsive GIJTR knows that lessening the long-term impact of human rights violations on survivors and affected communities only happens by centering those very groups as leaders in societies undergoing transition. Doing so promotes recovery, reduces the risk of further harm and reinforces survivors’ agency and self-determination. To this end, GIJTR works with victims and survivors at every stage of programming: from listening to their needs and co-designing the activities that will address those needs, to implementing and amplifying activity outputs. Further, its flexible methodology allows it to deploy a broad range of interventions in response to evolving opportunities and threats in real time, which are all too common in conflict and post-conflict settings and most affect civilians on the ground.
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Context-Informed There is always a long history behind any conflict, authoritarian regime or systemic oppression. While a civil war or a dictatorship may have a start and an end date, the root causes that fueled them often existed for decades, if not centuries. Left unaddressed, those underlying factors—be they legacies of colonialism and slavery; patriarchal systems; or ethnic, racial and religious tensions—will perpetuate inequitable power structures and feed further violence and conflict. Sustainable peace always requires confronting and dismantling root causes. GIJTR understands that this process does not happen overnight, nor does it unfold in the same way in every context. For this reason, GIJTR’s approach is highly contextualized. GIJTR Consortium partners work alongside local partners—who know their own histories
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How GIJTR Works
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