Arts and Peacebuilding

Michael Shank and Lisa Schirch highlight the potential of artistic processes to impact change within larger peacebuilding efforts. Art and peacebuilding often share a vital similarity--the desire to creatively engage with conflict. That engagement generates a central tension for both the peacebuilder and artist, as their vision or aesthetic sense of what they wish to make real in the world meets the limits of existing processes, existential realities and social arrangements.

Consider this excerpt from African-American poet CJ Suitt about racial inequality in the United States:

They forget this was never our movie…
We just wrote the soundtrack
A people with stolen Language
Lost in Trans Atlantic translation
like a piece of Santa Maria driftwood

As Schirch and Shank rightly point out, the arts can change the way people act, but those changes in attitudes, processes, and institutions are built while simultaneously embedded within patterns of violence and destructive conflict. Part of the transformative promise of the arts, then, is to more deeply expand analysis of underlying causes of conflicts, to excavate the depths of the impacts of violence on individuals and communities and to practice creative forms of resilience, healing and resistance. Further, the arts have the possibility to reach a larger audience, engaging the social imagination, breaking into the mundane, and experimenting with collective possibility for a more just world.

While the arts can have a transformative orientation, the focus on arts in the peacebuilding field has, however, often been instrumental, using art and artists as “tools” for achieving relatively narrow programmatic aims. While useful, many practitioners may not be amenable to these aims, instead pushing back and in so doing illuminating some of the limits of our assumptions about the nature of the conflicts we are engaging in and the possibilities for change over time.