Reclaiming Civic Sovereignty for Peace and Collective Freedom: Germany and Europe at a Crossroads
Reflections from Berlin Roundtable
Conducive Space for Peace and Robert Bosch Stiftung convened an informal Chatham House roundtable in Berlin on 7 May 2026, bringing together civil society practitioners and thinkers working across Germany and Europe on peace, democracy, and civic space. The conversation used CSP’s essay “Civil Society as the Possibility for Collective Freedom” as a reference point, but moved quickly into a broader inquiry: what becomes possible for peace and democratic resilience when civil society itself is losing autonomy, legitimacy, and organising power?
This reflection, while not a summary of the discussion draws out several tensions that surfaced in the room and the questions they open for civil society, funders, and institutional partners. For CSP, these questions are part of a wider effort to connect European debates on peace and democracy with lessons from civil societies navigating democratic erosion, political capture, and constrained civic space globally.
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This reflection begins from a simple observation: the pressures facing peacebuilding and democratic work today are not only institutional. They are lived.
Across the discussion, exhaustion, isolation, and the growing difficulty of sustaining conviction have become defining features of the current moment. As the public language around peace and democracy narrows, these conditions increasingly shape what civil society can imagine, organise and sustain.
Key Shifts and Dynamics Shaping the Current Moment
German civil society’s reliance on state and public funding is long-standing. Too often, responses to defunding focus on finding replacement public funding rather than exploring the possibility of a different economic basis. Dependency also runs deeper than organisational budgets. As real wages stagnate, social support is restructured – Bürgergeld[i] (citizens’ allowance) being replaced by the more punitive Neue Grundsicherung (new basic security) – and people are placed in direct competition with one another, the time, resources and solidarity bonds that an autonomous civil society would have to rest on are themselves being subtracted from below.
In this sense, dependency is not only an organisational problem. It is also a social and political condition: when people are exhausted, economically insecure, and increasingly isolated from one another, the everyday basis for collective civic action weakens. It also shapes organisational behaviour, from adapting language to fit funding calls to spending more energy on institutional survival than on building long-term civic power.
The question, then, is not only how civil society organisations replace lost funding, but how the conditions for an autonomous civil society can be rebuilt.
‘Peace’ as Contested Terrain.
The word has largely been captured in German public debate, often marked as ideologically suspect and pulled in competing directions by different actors. Peace-focused organisations have found themselves on the defensive in media and public forums given the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine and Germany’s shifting security debate; calls for peace are often met with suspicion: as naivety, appeasement, ideological positioning, or withdrawal from responsibility.
The discussion also highlighted a resource that is often overlooked: international peacebuilding has long experi-ence operating in contexts where “peace” is taboo, contested, or read as encroaching on state turf. In many contexts where international peacebuilding has worked, the language of peace is politically constrained, associated with opposition agendas, or treated as illegitimate by the state. That experience may offer important lessons for European actors.
The Gap between Public Unease and Organised Power.
There is broad public feeling in Germany that something is going wrong, but that unease is not translating into organised civic power. People feel a sense of responsibility to act but lack a sense of agency, as they may often not experience themselves as part of something capable of effecting change.
For civil society, a key question is how to bridge that gap between the concern over democratic backsliding and civic power rather than assume it will close on its own.
Militarisation is Mission Creep.
Rearmament and militarisation are not just a general context; they are actively reshaping what is fundable and what kinds of organisational positions are viable. There is pressure on organisations to take on an increased defence and security framing to stay relevant or funded.
Civil society has a legitimate stake in the security debate. This requires concrete proposals rather than only critique, while keeping visible an older democratic principle: that sovereignty ultimately rests with the citizenry rather than the state, a principle that has receded from current debates on deterrence and security.
A key question arising here is how civil society can engage security debates without allowing civic autonomy, democratic participation, and peace to be absorbed into a narrow defence logic and being dovetailed into the interests of the state or government.
Directions Worth Pursuing
If these dynamics are reshaping the terrain for peacebuilding and democratic work, they also require different strategic responses. The reflections below identify several directions worth pursuing.
- Strategic Allyship across Sectors. Breaking out of organisational and sectoral silos remains an important strategic challenge. The urge to overcome silos came up early and returned throughout. The culture sector was named as an underused ally that can offer different languages and forms of imagination on shared civic challenges – facing its own political interference pressures, but with audiences and platforms peace-building organisations often lack.
The question of what shared framing could make this real rather than rhetorical was left open, but the direction was clear.
- Reclaiming the Peace Narrative, but Differently. Reclaiming the meaning of peace in Germany requires grounding it in people’s lived experiences of insecurity, east-west tensions, economic pressure, democratic erosion and social fragmentation.Among the concrete ideas raised in the discussion were an annual public poll or deliberative process on peace-related questions, intended to build recurring civic engagement outside moments of crisis. Another suggestion was to begin from statements by mainstream politicians about what peace means, as a way of engaging broader audiences across the political spectrum.
Behind these suggestions lies a wider question: how can peace become speakable again in ways that are politically serious, socially grounded and not confined to already convinced audiences?
- Constituency over Networks. Who is civil society accountable to? A central challenge is the distinction between professional networks and genuine social constituencies. The climate movement came up as a compelling reference point: what it looks like when legitimacy is rooted in constituency rather than project funding. A constituency can connect work to people who recognise themselves in it, are willing to stand behind it, and can give it social legitimacy beyond project cycles.
Building constituency in the peace field requires working out who would actually show up, and why. It also raises a harder accountability question: who is peace work for, and who would mobilise to defend it?
- Building New Economic Models. The sector’s reliance on single or narrow funding sources leaves it exposed. Examples from other contexts, including organisations that weathered US aid cuts because they had diversified funding streams, and partners operating through structures closer to companies than NGOs, point to a direction worth taking seriously.
This could include membership models, earned income, civic funds, solidarity contributions, or hybrid organisational forms that reduce reliance on a single public funding stream. The experience, confidence and appetite for this, however, are not yet widespread in the German peacebuilding sector.
- Vision and Concrete Proposals Together. A new narrative matters, but it is not enough on its own. Civil society needs compelling perspectives on the hard questions people are actually asking, including on Russia, Ukraine and Gaza. Vision without strategy is not convincing.
The challenge is to hold a broader vision of peace and democratic agency while still engaging the concrete questions that shape public debate: security, war, economic insecurity, social cohesion, and Europe’s role in the world.
Questions to Carry Forward
For German Civil Society
These questions point to the challenge of moving from professional networks toward a more rooted civic constituency.
- What would it actually take to build a genuine constituency for peace and democratic deepening in Germany, and what would need to change about how organisations work and who they are accountable to?
- Where is the hard conversation about dependency and autonomy being avoided, and what would it take to have it?
- When ‘peace’ closes doors, what opens them, and is there readiness to follow that through?
- How do organisations hold urgency and a longer view at the same time?
For Translocal European Connections
These questions ask how Germany’s current debates can connect to wider European civic struggles without becoming inward-looking.
- What would it actually take to build a genuine constituency for peace and democratic deepening in Germany, and what would need to change about how organisations work and who they are accountable to?
- Where are the concrete points of connection between Germany-based civil society and European-level actors, and where is there real mutual interest rather than parallel activity?
- How might Germany’s political weight and specific pressures connect, complement and uplift the work of civic actors in other European contexts?
- What can European peace and democracy actors learn from civil societies elsewhere that have long navigated constrained civic space and contested political language?
For Funders and Institutional Partners
These questions invite funders to consider how their support can strengthen autonomy, legitimacy, and long-term civic capacity rather than only programme delivery.
- What would it actually take to build a genuine constituency for peace and democratic deepening in Germany, and what would need to change about how organisations work and who they are accountable to?
- What would it mean in practice to resource constituency-building and long-term movement cohesion and strength rather than discrete programmes?
- What indications of legitimacy beyond legal status and project track records are funders prepared to act on?
- How can philanthropic support help civil society build economic autonomy rather than reinforcing dependency and NGOisation
- What kinds of risk, patience, and flexibility are required if funders are serious about supporting civic autonomy rather than only funding deliverables?
Underneath these threads runs a question worth articulating clearly. Peace understood as justice, participation, and the capacity of people to shape shared futures is not possible in a world where civil societies have been hollowed out and democracies are in retreat globally. If democratic regimes lose the civic capacity to collectively shape political life, peace becomes reduced to state management, crisis response, or military containment. Reconstituting autonomous civic capacity is, in this sense, itself peace work – perhaps the most fundamental peace work there is.
CSP will continue to support spaces to explore these questions and welcome anyone who wants to think and work on them together. Reach us at contact@conducivespace.org.
[i] Bürgergeld (citizens’ allowance) is Germany’s means-tested basic subsistence benefit for people who are unemployed or on low incomes. It was introduced in 2023 by the then SPD-Green-FDP coalition and replaced the earlier Hartz IV system. Under the Neue Grundsicherung (new basic security), passed by the Bundestag in March 2026 and taking effect from 1 July 2026, the cash benefit is renamed Grundsicherungsgeld and standard rates are held at their existing level, while the conditions attached to it are tightened: placement into work takes priority, asset and housing-cost rules become stricter, and sanctions for missed appointments or refused work are applied faster and can extend to full withdrawal of the standard payment. Social associations such as the SoVD have warned of severe consequences for the long-term unemployed and those with few reserves.