Paper short abstract

Drawing on the author’s UNESCO-commissioned consultancy, this paper analyses Sudanese artists displaced to Egypt after the 2023 conflict, using mixed-method data to examine how legal frameworks, livelihoods, and institutional access shape artistic practice, cultural rights,and policy implementation.

Paper long abstract

This paper is based on a consultancy study with UNESCO on Sudanese artists displaced to Egypt following the 2023 conflict. The researcher used a mixed-method approach combining a survey of 70 Sudanese artists in Egypt with Key Informant Interviews (KIIs) with a range of stakeholders, including Sudanese artists, local and international cultural institutions, protection NGOs and officials from the Ministry of Culture, providing evidence on how displacement reshapes artistic practice, livelihoods, and career paths.

Drawing on cultural rights and inclusive policy frameworks, the paper analyses the interaction between artistic freedom, legal statutes, livelihood, and access to cultural institutions and education. Although displacement has provided a better degree of artistic freedom compared to Sudan, the findings show that this freedom remains constrained by a lack of work permits, limited educational and professional development opportunities, and unsustainable institutional integration. These structural obstacles undermine artists' ability to continue their artistic practices and contribute effectively to cultural life.

This paper highlights the differential impact on women ( 61% of participants) facing stalled careers, family caregiving responsibilities, disrupted education, and coping with PTSD. By positioning Sudanese artists as actors in the cultural scene within regulatory, economic and governance systems, the paper connects micro-level artistic experience to macro-level policy implementation gaps.

This paper contributes to the ongoing debates on culture in times of conflict, demonstrating how the cultural polices in host countries shape the post-conflict future. It argues for supporting displaced artists through rights-based approaches that sustain cultural life, social cohesion, and long-term peace-oriented development.

Paper short abstract

This paper critically examines participatory music as cultural infrastructure for everyday peace and social integration. The case of a UK choir for refugees and asylum-seekers reveals how such practices foster belonging, trust, and coexistence, while assessing the limits of music interventions.

Paper long abstract

Participatory music initiatives are increasingly mobilised in contexts of displacement as responses to the social fragmentation and vulnerability experienced by conflict-affected displaced populations. Yet, debates remain unresolved as to whether such initiatives function as instruments of integration, psychosocial intervention, or more fragile spaces of social repair. This paper examines participatory music not as a policy-led integration mechanism, but as a cultural infrastructure for everyday peace through which displaced individuals negotiate belonging, trust, and coexistence in host societies.

Drawing on a qualitative case study of a long-standing refugee choir in the UK, the study explores how participatory music-making creates informal, affective spaces that support social integration and relational safety among refugees and asylum seekers, many of whom have experienced war, persecution, and displacement.

The paper argues that participatory music may contribute to processes of social repair and inclusion for conflict-affected populations, not by resolving conflict or inducing integration, but by enabling long-term forms of everyday coexistence that are often absent from institutional responses to displacement. At the same time, it critically reflects on the limits of music-based interventions, highlighting their fragility, non-scalability, and dependence on precarious civil society infrastructures.

By situating participatory music within broader debates on arts-based peace-building beyond formal post-conflict settings, this paper contributes to Panel P50 by challenging narratives of culture as a “tool” for social integration, and by offering a case study, grounded account of what participatory musical practices can, and cannot, do in contexts shaped by conflict, displacement, and ongoing uncertainty.

Paper short abstract

This paper unpacks how arts and culture-based non-formal education programming can contribute to youth-led peacebuilding through affective and embodied pedagogies. However, it also argues that the logic of programming needs to be reshaped for this peacebuilding potential to be sustainable.

Paper long abstract

This paper unpacks the role that arts and culture-based non-formal education programming can play in enabling embodied learning and affective recognition; both of which, I argue contribute to youth-led peacebuilding. Scholars have highlighted that one of the crises in peacebuilding today is the failure to understand and harness the role of the transrational and the affective. In this presentation, I will bring together feminist theories of social justice and affective economies to analyse arts and cultural education programmes with young people in Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Kosovo. I demonstrate the centrality of embodied learning and affective recognition in contributing to peacebuilding. At the same time, I demonstrate that the existing logic of development programming with young people is often short-term and depoliticised. This limits the potential for arts and cultural programmes to have sustainable impacts on building peace. I argue, therefore, that this logic must be critically unpacked and reshaped in order for arts and cultural programmes to have meaningful, lasting impact.

Paper short abstract

Cultural policy can play a role in peace building by preventing violence, fostering dialogue, and supporting conflict resolution through the arts. Stronger national and international policies are needed to link culture with peace and sustainable development.

Paper long abstract

The paper will explore the role of cultural policy as a strategic tool for peace building showing that culture should be more clearly integrated into national and international peace frameworks. While artists and cultural initiatives have long contributed to social cohesion and dialogue, cultural policy has rarely been systematically discussed as a mechanism for preventing violence and peace building.

The paper will situate peace building within a continuum that moves from violence prevention to peace building, peacekeeping, conflict resolution and ultimately a culture of peace. Cultural activities, such as community arts programs, music education initiatives and grassroots artistic practices, demonstrate how the arts can reduce vulnerability and increase dialogue. Despite this evidence, cultural professionals are often excluded from peace and security policy discussions, and cultural ministries rarely prioritise initiatives in contexts of violence.

At the international level, culture remains weakly connected to SDG 16, despite advocacy efforts to recognise culture as a transversal pillar of sustainable development or as an SDG in its own right. This paper will argue that clearer national cultural policies focused on a culture of peace are essential to strengthening local action and influencing global discussions. In a context of rising extremism and democratic erosion worldwide, integrating cultural policy into peace building is no longer a regional concern but a global necessity.

Paper short abstract

Arts-based approaches to social cohesion are gaining attention, but evidence remains fragmented. Drawing on a multi-country British Council evaluation, this paper shows how cultural relations and arts practices build trust, dialogue, and inclusive collaboration across societies.

Paper long abstract

As global insecurities intensify, arts-based approaches to peacebuilding and social cohesion are receiving renewed attention. However, the evidence base explaining how arts and culture contribute to social cohesion across diverse contexts remains fragmented. This paper draws on an ongoing multi-country evaluation commissioned by the British Council, which aims to strengthen evidence on how arts and cultural relations practice contribute to social cohesion at individual, community, and institutional levels.

Anchored in global debates on trust, social contracts, and culture’s role in cohesion (e.g. Eriksson, 2023; Justino & Samarin, 2025), the evaluation adopts a mixed-methods approach grounded in a cultural relations lens. It integrates contribution analysis, participatory and arts-based methods, and Wenger-Trayner’s (2020) Value Creation Framework to capture relational, iterative, and multi-layered forms of change that are often overlooked in conventional MEL systems.

The paper presents insights from cross-programme evidence synthesis and selected case studies, illustrating how arts practices enable dialogue and facilitate more inclusive forms of institutional collaboration. It also identifies persistent gaps in the global evidence base, including limited attention to process-level mechanisms, insufficient integration of local knowledge, and a lack of indicators capable of capturing relational change.

Situating arts-based social cohesion interventions within broader debates on reimagining development, the paper argues that cultural relations approaches offer critical pathways for rebuilding trust in contexts of uncertainty and fragmentation. It proposes a set of transferable principles and methodological innovations for future research and policy, inviting scholars and practitioners to rethink how social cohesion is conceptualised, evidenced, and supported through the arts.

Paper short abstract

INTIQAL mobilises Gaza’s youth to preserve heritage, using arts and creative practice to reclaim memory, build psychosocial resilience and foster grassroots agency, illustrating the potential and limits of culture-driven peacebuilding.

Paper long abstract

Since the Nakba, Palestinians have faced dispossession and systematic erasure of history and memory. In Gaza, where blockade and destruction threaten life and legacy, arts, heritage and creative practices become political and psychosocial tools for peacebuilding. This paper explores INTIQAL (“transmission” in Arabic), a programme by Première Urgence Internationale (PUI) and local partners, as an example of heritage-based arts practice fostering resilience, agency and social cohesion.

INTIQAL engages youth in restoring archaeological sites such as Saint Hilarion Monastery, digitising them through 3D photogrammetry and connecting with peers and experts across borders. These practices create a counter-archive that reclaims memory, asserts continuity and transforms grief into creative agency.

Grounded in field experience, the paper examines the strengths of cultural peacebuilding; identity reclamation, psychosocial resilience and nonviolent empowerment alongside its limits and challenges, including vulnerability to conflict, scalability and difficulties in measurement. It also identifies evidence gaps and discusses ways to strengthen research through participatory, mixed-method approaches that capture both social and political impacts.

INTIQAL illustrates how arts and culture can integrate with development, humanitarian and diplomatic sectors, providing a model for cross-sectoral peacebuilding. By transforming threatened heritage into living archives, INTIQAL shows how culture can be a site of resistance, dialogue and alternative futures in contexts of systemic inequality.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines Imagining Peace, an online toolkit mapping global arts-based peacebuilding. It assesses its methods, impact limits, and value for practitioners, highlighting how creative practices foster dialogue while noting gaps in long-term evidence.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on Imagining Peace, a knowledge-sharing platform that documents and analyses how arts and cultural practices contribute to peacebuilding in contexts affected by conflict and its aftermath. The platform features an interactive toolkit built on global case studies of grassroots initiatives that advance key phases of peacebuilding, including conflict prevention, post-war reconciliation, awareness-raising, trauma healing, interethnic dialogue, and accountability.

By analysing the toolkit and its methodology, which is based on exchange and sharing of knowledge, the paper will assess its strengths and challenges. Some of the core questions it will address are: How can qualitative data collection risk misinterpretation? What are the limits of assessing the impact of artistic practices? Whom does the toolkit serve, and how? How might it be made more useful to organisations working in the field, and how could it also function as an advocacy tool?

On the other hand, the paper will highlight the distinctive capacities of creative practice to foster dialogue, agency, and community-led transformation by analysing a few relevant case studies from the toolkit. In this way, we will reveal persistent gaps in the evidence base, particularly regarding long-term impact and variations linked to the stage of conflict, historical background, and local context.

By positioning the toolkit as a bridge between practitioners, researchers, and policy actors, the paper outlines how creative methodologies can be more systematically integrated into future peacebuilding ecosystems. It further proposes ways in which culture and arts-oriented projects can serve as instruments for strengthening cross-sector engagement.