Welcome to The Twiza Project.
The Twiza Project emerges from the human rights crises occurring locally, nationally, and internationally. It draws together young adults located in the Algeria, Morocco, Kurdistan, and the United States who want to imagine, then build, an alternative future marked by greater cultural, economic, and political freedoms. It works to build a public space in which everyone has the right and ability to participate.
As such, The Twiza Project attempts to speak back to the sectarian divisions, often coupled with polarized debate, that have radicalized a politics premised on bigotry and hate. Such politics have led to an increase of hate crimes in local communities and a rise in global intolerance towards political/economic refugees. The Twiza Project offers a platform through which individuals, groups, and communities effected by this political dynamic can engage in productive discussions about the meaning of tolerance, diversity, peace, and human rights. It then enables participants to move their dialogues into pragmatic actions, actual steps toward change.
The Twiza Project is premised on the belief such work is particularly important for global youth, whose actions as a generation will either solve or exacerbate the radicalized and hate-based politics in which they are moving toward adulthood. Indeed, the project emerged from dialogues among citizen-based and refugee youth from Algeria, the United States, and United Kingdom who were enrolled in a series of university courses over the past two years. These young adults used their personal insights, emerging from distinct geographic locations, to develop a common space to discuss the meaning of concepts, such as democracy, human rights, and civil society. The dialogues then became a means to consider how they might help actively create and support inclusive societies. Collective actions then followed.
The term “Twiza,” was chosen to frame the work of this project since it speaks to the communal act of individuals coming together to build a material structure to support a neighbor, such as barn or house. This project intends the term to speak to the collective work of these youth – and those that follow – who actively work to build their societies and to build a the material structures which can support human rights for everyone in their community.
And it is within that collaborative spirit that we will undertake our work together.
The Twiza Project/تويزة 