A Greek–Turkish peace project: assessing the effectiveness of interactive conflict resolution

Abstract

This paper evaluates a Greek–Turkish peace project, which was composed of three interactive workshops and was held with university students from Greece and Turkey. We evaluate the project by combining a two-way evaluation methodology. The first is a process evaluation where we examine the project’s ‘theory of change’ through interviews with the organizers and participant observation. A theory of change map has been created as a result depicting the beliefs of the organizers about the conflict, the conditions they see as necessary to transform the conflict, the programmatic activities and macro-level goals. In the second part, we conduct an outcome evaluation measuring empathy and trust towards the members of the other ethnic group. We employ a two-group, post-test experimental design. The findings of this phase suggest that the participant group has significantly higher level of empathy and trust towards the other group than the non-participants. Finally, we compare the results from the two phases of evaluation and draw both practical lessons for peace practitioners and theoretical implications to guide future research.