The Intercultural Cities Programme is happy to publish the Anti-Rumours Handbook in Arabic. The handbook, which was originally launched in 2018, has been widely received across Europe and beyond and is now available in one more language, in addition to the versions in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese.

Successful intercultural strategies require change in the mind-set, attitudes and behaviour of both migrants and receiving communities. Building trust and a feeling of belonging to a pluralistic community with shared fundamental principles is key to achieving cohesion. The difficulty of gaining access to reliable information on the real impact of migration on communities is a major obstacle in achieving this goal, and thus people often tend to form their views based on unfounded “myths” or stereotypes.

The “Anti-rumour methodology” has been developed precisely to counter diversity-related prejudices and rumours that hamper positive interaction and social cohesion and that lay the foundations of discriminatory and racists attitudes. Following a first pilot action launched and tested by the ICC programme in some cities back in 2014, the demand of local authorities for both anti-rumours training and for assistance in designing anti-rumours strategies has constantly grown.

For this reason, the ICC has developed an Anti-rumours Manual as a tool that cities and other stakeholders can use to ensure the proper and harmonised implementation of the standardised/certified Anti-rumours methodology. The Manual includes an evaluation guide, as well as a set of examples of best and innovative practices, chosen after the mapping of the anti-rumours projects run so far.

The unofficial translation and production of this handbook was carried out within the framework of the Council of Europe Neighbourhood Partnership with Morocco 2018-2021, with the support of Liechtenstein, Norway and Spain.