URPEACE - Basel

This study aims to contribute to knowledge about the peace-building agency of civilian actors in marginalized social-housing neighborhoods, who deal with the consequences of terrorist violence in European cities. The bulk of peace and conflict studies literature has provided insight in the dynamics of violence rather than peace. The innovative character of this study therefore is that it interprets existing and new data on dealing with violence with a novel approach, that of geographies of peace. This innovative approach breaks with the tendency of peace and conflict studies to focus on the Global South, state processes and armed conflict and makes it very relevant for studying initiatives in European cities that deal with the aftermaths of paroxysmal violence. The study draws on data collected in three different cities: Grenoble, Freiburg and Brcko. This dataset concerns the data that has been collected in the region of Freiburg (DE).

The title of the sub-project was "Everyday Peace2 and sought to answer how peace is understood, experienced, and lived by migrant women at different stages of an asylum procedure in Germany.

The data is collected by Leonie Bozenhardt and Felicitas Winker under the supervision of Claske Dijkema, in the context of a Research Lab in the MA program Changing Societies at the University of Basel (2021-2022).

“Everyday Peace” is a participatory research project conducted by students from the University of Basel. It is a part of the Horizon 2020 funded URPEACE project that is interested in urban peace-making and the peace-building agency of stigmatized civilian actors in European cities dealing with the consequences of violence.

The everyday peace sub-project invited migrant women at different stages of an asylum procedure in Germany to a conversation throughout a workshop series. The aim is gain knowledge about how peace is understood, experienced, and manifested in migrants` everyday lives in Germany. The research is dedicated to finding out more about how peace is perceived and experienced in the country of arrival, instead of looking at the countries of origin. On the one hand this approach offers a personal insight of the women into very individual ideas about and experiences of peace in contrast to only looking at peace as the absence of war; and on the other hand, it helps to identify overlapping experiences and concepts. We conducted two focus groups, working with migrant women from the area around a city in Southern Germany. Focus group discussions give the opportunity to concentrate on the exchange among the participants. The aim of this project is to improve knowledge about different understandings of peace and the challenges to peace in migrants´ lives in Germany.

The research project “Everyday Peace – How is peace understood, experienced and manifested in migrants’ everyday lives in Germany” was conducted between November 2021 and April 2022 by two students from the University of Basel. Within that period two focus groups were formed and brought together for a total of four workshops; each group participated in two workshops within a week’s time and expressed themselves about how peace is understood, experienced, and manifested in their everyday lives. The workshops took place in Freiburg im Breisgau and each meeting lasted around two to three hours and was audio recorded. To understand how people feel and think about the subject, each workshop day was based on a participatory research method. The first workshop day included certain aspects of the game “Dixit” as a photo elicitation and during the second workshop day the participants created a “Relief Map”. While methods will be described later in depth, it can be already mentioned that the students not only took on the role as researcher but also as a participant themselves and moderator. Furthermore, outside of the workshops one is still being the social worker of two participants of Group A.

Both student researchers have a professional background in social work in contexts of migration and they could draw on already existing and trust-based relationships. The snowball method was used to find additional participants. The used method is described in detail in the document “Research Lab Report Winker and Bozenhardt”. This method led to the formation of two groups of women, one from central and west-Africa and the other from Afghanistan. Their legal perspectives to stay in Germany differed greatly. A list of participants, with their pseudonym, country of origin, age, political status etc. is among the uploaded documents. They have all signed a statement that the discussions could be recorded and could be made public under the condition that the results were pseudonymized. In the transcripts all names have been pseudonymized. The pseudonyms have been chosen by the participants themselves.

This database contains the transcripts of the focus groups that took place on:

29 January 2022 (Workshop 1, Group A)
05 February 2022 (Workshop 2, Group A)
07 Mach 2022 (Workshop 1, Group B)
08 March 2022 (Workshop 2, Group B)