CF: You have written extensively about the role of the arts, particularly visual art, in conflict transformation and promoting peace. In Peacebuilding and the Arts, you, Giselle Vincett, Theodora Hawksley, and Hal Culbertson initiate a much broader investigation into the creative arts and peacebuilding by bringing together a wide range of peacebuilders to share their experiences working with the arts all over the world. How did such an ambitious project come about?
JM: It came about through a series of conversations in the UK and the USA with several different groups, including peacebuilders who’ve been working in complex situations all around the world, artists who’ve been involved in peacebuilding and academics who work on peacebuilding or the role of religion or theology in conflict. These conversations brought together scholars and practitioners to discuss their work. Between them, they covered filmmaking, poetry, theater, storytelling, music, visual arts, reflecting on the role of these different kinds of arts for building peace.
I remember, for example, hearing a fine presentation where storytelling was employed. Rather than simply presenting an academic piece, they went ahead and told stories that they’d been using in northern Uganda. Their aim was to get to the roots of the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency (one of the longest running conflicts in Africa, beginning in 1987), as well as to help heal the trauma that this longstanding conflict has brought about.
In many ways, this project emerged from a grassroots approach to the topic of peacebuilding and the arts. It developed out of these conversations – not from a single conference, but rather from a series of international and interdisciplinary discussions. This is among the reasons that the book has a genuine coherence and significance. Each section is in itself almost a conversation. There are five sections, each comprised of four chapters. The first chapter introduces the theme – music or film or literature or theater or dance. Then there are two case studies from around the world. These are followed in each chapter by an analytical reflection on the process. Each section has a very clear structure that gives a greater coherence to this book than you sometimes see in edited volumes. Overall, we were quite pleased with the result because it managed to bring together scholars and practitioners reflecting through a series of energetic and thought-provoking conversations.
The project itself was brought together and run by the Centre for Theology and Public Issues at the University of Edinburgh and the Kroc Institute for Peace at the University of Notre Dame. Both are leading centers with significant histories and areas that are relevant to the question of peacebuilding and the arts. What’s striking about it now, if you think about it, is that one of them emerges from one of the top Catholic universities in the world, while the other has its roots in Presbyterianism and is very much part of a secular Western university with roots in non-conformity. 500 years ago, these two traditions were not just shouting at each other, but actively fighting each other. Thus, it is noteworthy that these two universities – hailing from very different Catholic and Protestant perspectives – worked closely together on this project of peacebuilding and the arts.
This is especially noteworthy because post-Reformation Scotland had an ambivalent (some would say antagonistic) relationship to religion and the arts. If you walk around churches in Scotland, you will see gaps where icons or statues have been destroyed. Yet now, bursting out from that physical space is a celebration of the arts – arts used in many different ways. I think there’s something quite significant there both about the geography of the book – where it comes from – and about the book’s background history. Both are both vital for peacebuilding, thinking about geographies and histories of peace.
CF: What makes this book significant for contributing to peacebuilding processes and practices?
JM: The arts are absolutely vital for building peace. The arts have often been left out of that process. People say, ‘Oh well, it’s nothing more than making origami in the face of horrendous violence. How will the fragile arts ever help to sort out what’s happening in Ukraine and Russia at the moment or in Israel and Palestine?’ Of course, it’s right not to over claim the power of the arts to bring about peace. Nevertheless, peacebuilders and mediators all around the world are finding again and again that the arts can contribute in unexpected and diverse ways to building peace. They really can do it in ways that can be surprising.
One of the reasons for this, I think, is that art can touch people’s hearts, imaginations, minds, past hurts, and hopes in ways that rational discussion doesn’t necessarily do. People are finding that the arts can contribute to peacebuilding at all three levels of peacebuilding: in track one, or the kind of elite-level peacebuilding (e.g. senior political leaders); in track two, mid-range leaders (e.g. religious or educational leaders); and in track three, grassroots activists. It’s not surprising that the arts work at a grassroots level. We often see musicians, street poets, and theater street groups performing and enriching civil society. You can see how that works, for example, in the Mozambique Civil War. It’s perhaps less surprising that the arts can also work at the mid-range peacebuilding level. The mid-level can include local religious leaders, mayors, and so on, as local endeavors that can bring together people who may have been fighting. For example, in northern Nigeria, an imam and a pastor who once were enemies became friends and worked together partly because they visited each other’s sick parents. Their endeavors were recounted in a famous documentary called The Imam and the Pastor. It’s a formal artistic representation, which has significant impact on other conflicts – even at the elite or top level – through the celebration of people from two very different religious traditions working together. I think people are beginning to consider that the arts might contribute by allowing people – even at the elite level of prime ministers or presidents or generals – to arrive the ‘Aha! moment’. At that ‘Aha! moment’, people come to question whether what we’re doing now is just plain simple, silly or wrong, and that maybe we need to change and challenge that. I think that’s one of the reasons it works at these different levels.
It’s also important because the arts can contribute to thinking differently about the past. This book on peacebuilding and the arts contains a number of essays that focus on histories of violence and histories of peacebuilding, revealing how the arts can point the spotlight on histories of conflict. One example is the massacre of the Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica. It might also be happening in South Africa, where it highlights the terrible effect of apartheid, or in Rwanda, where it is bearing witness to the genocide there. In these cases, the arts can be used not only to simply remember wisely, but also to bear witness to things that have gone horribly wrong.
Another reason that has always felt very close to my heart is to think about how the arts can be used to transform violence. One of the examples discussed in this book is a well-known project in Mozambique. There were something like 6 million unused weapons at the end of the Civil War (1977-1992), creating a real danger that people might decide to use them again, even though the war was over. A local bishop, Bishop Sengulane, realized they couldn’t have all those weapons under the floorboards. So, with the help of Christian Aid, he set up a scheme by which arms were turned into art. People would bring in a gun in exchange for a hoe or something else for farming. One village got a tractor. Children who turned in bullets were given pencils in return. One person who gave an AK47 got a bicycle back. There is a sense of exchange here. This actually turned swords into ploughshares, bringing Isaiah’s prophecy to life. It was an example of the arts literally transforming weapons of violence into weapons of peace. Famously, the British Museum in London houses ‘The Tree of Life’, composed of weapons from the conflict that were all made outside Mozambique, but gathered together to make this Tree of Life. There is also a ‘Throne of Weapons’, in which the guns are used subtly to tell the story of the Mozambique Civil War that claimed some million lives. When you look at that the Throne of Weapons, it’s shaped these weapons into a very different kind of object – something that doesn’t destroy people’s arms and legs, but rather serves as a throne with arms and legs and a seat that you can sit on. So I do think there’s a sense that the arts can remember, bear witness, and transform.
Furthermore, the arts potentially envisage hopeful futures. This may be the painting of the lion and the lamb lying down together. It may be simply envisaging what it would be like if we weren’t at war with our neighbor or with the other side. What would happen? What would it be like? These hopeful images might prompt such questions. The book does explore from different perspectives this type of categories as well as other categories and issues related to the role of the arts in building peace.
CF: One aim of the book is to tease out the ‘ambivalence of the arts’ in different communicative and artistic contexts. Can you explain what this means and how it relates to peacebuilding?
JM: Yes, one way of thinking about that would be to travel an hour outside Moscow to a huge, relatively new cathedral: the Cathedral of the Resurrection. It is in effect the cathedral for the armed forces in Russia. Both inside and out, there is a great deal of art that celebrates violent conquest and violence as a means to peace, celebrating recent and not so recent Russian victories. There are icons and frescos commemorating Russian victories. There are even weapons taken from the opposing German forces, for example, laid in the ground around the cathedral. This is an example of the various uses of the arts to celebrate and even promote certain kinds of violence. We can think of other examples where the arts are used to go beyond promoting violence to even incite it. For instance, a drummer at Waterloo drumming people towards firing and shooting; bagpipers at D-Day marching up and down the beaches playing the bagpipes as soldiers were landing, shooting and dying; films inciting violence by characterizing the ‘other’ (such as Tutsis in Rwanda or Jews in the Shoah) as cockroaches, as vermin, as unhuman creatures to be destroyed. Here we can see the arts not just promoting but inciting violence.
Then there’s the counterpoint, thinking about how the arts can actually say stop, stop. This violence will not bring the peace and the healing that you hope for. It must stop now. The arts can do that, and this book explores that in various ways through the contributions of more than 20 authors. Let’s take music as an example, because I’ve already talked a bit about visual arts. There’s a whole section on music by John Paul Lederach, who wrote an entire book on peacebuilding and music. This is a good encapsulation of his argument: music can allow people to say stuff, to articulate stuff, to sing stuff that they can’t communicate in words. The cries of the heart can be articulated through music in a way that they cannot be in written and spoken word. There is another section that celebrates, in many ways, the Israeli Palestinian Orchestra that brings together Israelis and Palestinians. That’s a real model of peacebuilding.
But there is also an essay which actually critiques that and states that this is a very Western form of appropriation of a particular way of doing things. And maybe it wasn’t so helpful. So it looks at how the arts might be seen as being peace. Peacebuilding might be building peace. It might also be bearing witness, remembering, transforming and imagining hopeful futures. But there might actually be some ambivalence here. It might be both doing that, but also perhaps bringing real difficulties into a situation unintentionally. I suppose that’s partly what is meant by the ambivalence of the arts.
Of course, this ambivalence is related to R. Scott Appleby’s famous 2000 book, which explores ‘the ambivalence of the sacred’. In other words, the sacred can motivate a suicide bomber, but it can also motivate a peacebuilder. The implied argument is that the arts can actually do something similar. They can be deeply ambivalent – both inciting violence and promoting peace.
CF: You’ve already talked a little bit about music, but what other art forms does the book consider and in what ways?
JM: The book covers six art forms in particular detail. The first section looks at visual arts and provides a number of examples both from the First World War and from South Africa and Korea, and from non-sectarian murals in Northern Ireland. So there’s a rich set of examples that looks at how the visual arts can be used and are used for building peace. The second section discusses music. There is also literature, thinking about how storytelling might actually bring about peace and how novel writing can contribute to building peace. A fourth section on film considers how cinema can re-humanize and be a catalyst for peace. In this section, there are case studies from Rwanda considering representations of cinema there as well as grassroots activism in other parts of Africa. Additionally, there’s a more theoretically critical question on film thinking about how cinema can be disarmed to not necessarily always promote myths of redemptive violence. The final section reflects on the role of theater and dance in peacebuilding. Again, this is fascinating as it reflects on both the theoretical and the practical. There are practical examples such as peacebuilding through dance in Colombian funerary rituals, and also reflections on more theoretical questions around time and theater.
The book also offers a truly thought provoking afterward by Scott Appleby, who looks at one very well-known singer/musician and asks: ‘Well, hang on a second. There’s this guy who is a brilliant singer, but he may be a bit grumpy and difficult to work with.’ What do we do with the discrepancy between the life of the artist and the message of the art? It’s a thought-provoking question. He pushes that quite a bit further to ask whether there might be something even deeper here that is well worth looking at. That’s an encapsulation of the book. There’s lots more, but I hope this gives you a sense, a map of the book as it stands and is still widely cited.
CF: Do particular art forms lend themselves to specific peacebuilding practices or processes? If so, can you give some examples?
JM: I think it varies because certain art forms rely on different kinds of technologies. For example, showing films may be harder in some contexts and listening to radio programs might be more effective in cultures that are not particularly literate. Text may be less useful than the spoken word, poetry or storytelling. It may be that visual arts can work very well in certain contexts, but the pictures discussed might be largely found in galleries or in churches or other public buildings, and it may be that more powerful visual arts can be found painted on murals or scrawled on graffiti or printed on posters. So a whole range of places exist where you might find visual arts and this can vary. If you’re being bombed in Ukraine, you might not really want to go to an art gallery. Yet, you might be delighted to watch a film in the underground. The films shown can remind people of the rich history of Ukraine, demonstrating that violence is not the only way of sorting out problems. Thus, I do think it’s contextually significant and relevant to think about the place where the art is both created and produced, and also, I suppose, consumed and received. For me, that’s worth reflecting on in greater depth.
CF: How does the book break new ground in exploring the relationship between peacebuilding and the arts?
JM: One of the things that is surprising about this book is that it was published in a book series on religion, peace and conflict of more than 90 separate volumes and, within just a year or so, it’s already the second most popular in terms of downloads. It has had more than 22,000 downloads. There is clearly as a real hunger for reflection on peacebuilding and the arts. I think it’s clear that the book breaks new ground because it’s probably the first major volume on peacebuilding and the arts from both major scholars and emerging, dynamic, younger scholars. It has been very exciting to see how it’s taken off.
Another thing that surprised me and the other editors is how popular the book has become and how it has clearly been used by students living other parts of the world. I think it breaks new ground by looking at the relationship from a number of different perspectives and different kinds of arts. It’s not meant to be comprehensive in any way. There are now several research projects and institutes around the world that are building, alongside this book, research on the arts and peace in different places. I do think there’s a growing interest and that this book contributes to that growing interest.
CF: What resources might this book provide for cultivating peace in our current geo-political context?
JM: Peacebuilding and the Arts provides practical insights, historical reflection, theoretical enrichment, and a combination of all three with both local and international examples. It thereby provides resources for thinking coherently and critically about what people are doing in complex situations.
One of the things that struck us as we were working on this book over nearly a decade was the way in which many practitioners who are involved in peacebuilding use the arts while perhaps having less time to reflect on how they use it: What works, what doesn’t work? I hope that his book contributes to that process and allows those practitioners and scholars of peacebuilding to think, ‘Oh, that works’, and ‘it will really enrich my work and, perhaps, allow me to become even better in my attempt to transform conflict’. Of course, that’s not to say that there are not many things that each of the authors can still learn from those who are working on a daily or weekly basis and in pre- post- or current conflict situations as they seek to build peace.
Caleb Froelich (CF) is a postdoctoral research associate in Understanding the Spiritual through the Creative Arts at the University of Edinburg’s School of Divinity.
Jolyon Mitchell (JM) is a professor specializing in religion, violence and peacebuilding. He is the author of many books, former BBC World producer and journalist, and the director of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues at the University of Edinburgh.
Peacebuilding and the Arts is available for purchase and download at Springer.
