Beyond Rehabilitation: Transforming Instigators into Peacebuilders, Preventing Violence Recurrence

Project Summary

In Tripoli, Lebanon, not far from the Syrian border, MARCH has spent over a decade transforming former fighters and ex-convicts into active agents of change through a holistic program that goes beyond disengagement from violence combining economic reintegration, psychosocial support, community service, and trust-building with public institutions. Notably, the program sustained its successes in Tripoli despite the eruption of the Syrian war, where sectarian conflict between Alawites and Sunnis directly mirrored and inflamed local fault lines. Now this proven program is being digitized with an AI-multilayered tool that informs the model and customizes its assessment. The long-term objective is to enable organisations worldwide to adapt and replicate a sustainable peacebuilding model; context-driven and locally owned; creating ecosystems for prevention, rehabilitation, and peace.

Presentation of the Organization

MARCH is a Lebanese NGO dedicated to peacebuilding and deradicalization, working directly with ex-fighters, ex-convicts and women from conflict hotspot areas. Through holistic, ground-level peacebuilding model, MARCH works beyond rehabilitation to transforming victims and instigators of conflict, who once contributed to cycles of violence, into community peacebuilders, mediators, guides, community service actors, and positive role models, becoming active skilled contributors to peace.