Single title
The period under review covers the past four years: from the beginning of 2017 with the primaries for the 2017 general elections to the end of 2020. Particular attention is paid to the actors and factors in this process that have a particularly strong and ongoing influence on the changes. The citizens' initiative "Peace from the Soil", which was founded immediately after the 2017 general elections, plays a central role here, as it is an important driver of the participatory democratization process in the Ward.
The documentation is oriented towards the guiding research question "What is needed, or what seems particularly helpful, to promote the exercise of democratic rights and duties and to accompany efforts in the sense of democratization in a rural community whose members live under conditions of extreme poverty and low formal education?”
The per se complex undertaking of describing a democratization process with the most diverse facets and players offers countless perspectives and variants of interpretation, each with different legitimacy. The authors describe the democratization process in Marafa Ward as they perceived it and according to the feedback they received from interviewees - and invite discussion about it. In doing so, they consciously and in many places also unconsciously adopt a rather rational White Western perspective, which is closely oriented to processes and patterns of normative democracy. At the same time, there are other explanatory patterns on the ground in Marafa Ward, which can be described as holistic, communitarian and spiritual.
To complete the observation of democratization told here from a Western perspective, it would certainly be informative to contrast it with a version from a local perspective. In the sense of a dialogue approach, however, the attempt was made to integrate the perspective of the local population as far as possible by involving local participants in the research process as well as in the analysis process.
This report was also written because the documentation was explicitly requested by representatives of the citizens' initiative "Peace from the Soil", which is the focus of this report, with the intention of sharing the learning experiences gained in the democratization process and providing input into the international interaction of political education work and democracy promotion.
Such principles, impulses and interventions within the change process are crystalized, which also appear to be meaningfully transferable to aspired democratization and transformation processes in other Wards.
In addition to documenting the central persons, institutions, groups, events, and external influences within the democratization process, the authors also attempt to describe internal "worlds" and processes that have an external impact. In this way, certain cultural and individual abilities and acquired skills are outlined, which contributed to the progress of the process, but also the synchronously developing self-perception of the citizens' initiative "Peace from the Soil" and its participants, which has an impact on the process of change.
The democratization process described should be understood as a model from which it is possible to deduce which internal preconditions and influences can be helpful for democratization. And it becomes apparent with the help of which external impulses and interventions existing democratization tendencies can be strengthened, which is of particular interest for political foundation work.
The documentation is supplemented by an evaluation of the overall process by actors from the community. Within the framework of qualitative online interviews, a total of 21 citizens were asked about their personal perception and evaluation of the change process in the past four years and their assessment of the activities initiated by Peace from the Soil.
