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Against instrumental, consensus-obsessed peacebuilding, this paper insists that theatre education—grounded in the Nāṭyaśāstra—cultivates peace through shared affect (rasa) and ethical witnessing (sahridaya), exposing the limits of colonial pedagogy under India’s NEP 2020.

Paper long abstract

In contexts of increasing social polarisation, misinformation, and uncertainty, peacebuilding is increasingly understood as a relational and affective process rather than a purely institutional or policy-driven one. This paper explores theatre education as a site of everyday peacebuilding, drawing on the Nāṭyaśāstra, a foundational Indian text that theorises art as a mediator of social life. Despite its significance, the Nāṭyaśāstra remained largely absent from formal educational curricula in India due to colonial pedagogical frameworks that privileged Western aesthetic theory, marginalising indigenous knowledge systems.

Central to the Nāṭyaśāstra are concepts such as rasa, a collectively experienced aesthetic-affective state, bhāva, structured emotional expression, and sahridaya, the attuned spectator. Together, these frame performance as a shared experiential space where complex or conflicting emotions can be engaged without antagonism or the demand for consensus. Such an approach enables empathy, emotional regulation, and ethical distance—capacities vital to peacebuilding in divided contexts.

The paper situates these ideas within contemporary higher education through reflections from the author’s teaching practice in theatre and performing arts at the University of Delhi, particularly in the context of India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which explicitly calls for the integration of indigenous knowledge systems and challenges colonial epistemologies.

The paper argues that Nāṭyaśāstra offers a culturally grounded yet globally relevant framework for understanding how art education contributes to peacebuilding by reshaping modes of attention, feeling, and relation, while also highlighting the challenges of translating such affective outcomes into dominant development and policy-oriented evidence frameworks.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Majuli, worlds largest river islands are affected by erosion. The neo vaishnavite monasteries, satras have reduced from 65 to 35 threatening the communities. The communities approach on environmental conflicts is through performative art. Satras act as institutions promoting art and culture.

Paper long abstract

Majuli, the world's largest river island situated in Assam, India has lost 78% of its landmass. First recorded in 1892, 1,250 sq km to 352 sq km by 2018 due to Brahmaputra erosion. In the face of escalating environmental crises, the neo-Vaishnava cultural monasteries known as Satras emerge as important arts and culture institutions.

This paper examines how performative arts like bhaona, which is theatre, satriya a dance form, and borgeet music within these satras nurture trust, communication, and resilience amidst Brahmaputra erosion induced "conflicts" with nature. ​

Satras host performances retelling Srimanta Sankardev's epics, uniting the different communities in shared rituals that surpass ethnic divides and mitigate displacement tensions, which is evident by sustained participation despite annual floods. Along with this the efforts of Jadev Payeng in planting 1,400 acre Molai forest since 1979, integrates with the satra-hosted plantation ceremonies. It has enabled the creation of wildlife habitats with community-driven initiatives, resulting in delayed land erosion and ecological and cultural cohesion. UNESCO recognised satra training for climate resilience, demonstrating the power of art and culture in building community ties and adaptive policies.

There are challenges that remain, due to limited empirical studies on art and culture on environmental peacebuilding in countries like India. Satra's role in preventing youth migration and performance space loss. Systematically biased government policies distort outcomes over satra’s conservation and preservation. This paper aims to address art and culture's strength in intra community bonds, development and sustainability.

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This paper proposes a "Cultural Security Doctrine," arguing that cultural rights are binding security obligations, not soft power. It outlines legal mechanisms to operationalise arts and heritage protection within defence mandates, shifting culture from discretionary to essential.

Paper long abstract

This paper proposes a Cultural Security Doctrine (CSD), a framework that positions cultural rights not as instruments of soft power but as elements of hard security infrastructure. It argues that the protection and restoration of cultural life are core components of international stability, requiring formal integration into peacekeeping, defence, and reconstruction policy.

Current peacebuilding often separates security from culture, treating the former as the domain of soldiers and the latter as the realm of artists and educators. This divide is both legally and strategically flawed. International Humanitarian Law, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and United Nations Security Council Resolution 2347 establish a legal foundation for recognising that the deliberate destruction of cultural life constitutes a breach of international peace and security obligations. Neglecting culture in post-conflict settings, therefore, represents not a policy omission but a failure of law.

Through comparative analysis of conflicts, the paper shows that the erasure of cultural expression often precedes social fragmentation and the collapse of governance. Where creative practices endure, they foster resilience, trust, and identity, proving that cultural continuity is as vital to reconstruction as physical infrastructure.

The paper concludes with practical legal and policy measures to operationalise the Cultural Security Doctrine, including the appointment of Cultural Security Advisors within United Nations peacekeeping missions and the use of Cultural Rights Impact Assessments in post-conflict reconstruction. By codifying culture as a security obligation, the Cultural Security Doctrine redefines the arts and heritage sectors as essential actors in sustainable peacebuilding.

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'Return to Tenderness' is a collaboration between the volunteer-led organisation Qisetna and a group of young people from the cities of Raqqa and Kobane in north-eastern Syria. The project aims to document their music and living heritage.

Paper long abstract

Central to this work is trans-community research and the documentation of musical heritage at risk of disappearing due to conflict, displacement, and generational rupture. Using participatory methodologies, young researchers actively documented traditional musical practices, oral histories and performance traditions from both the Arab and Kurdish communities that have been under threat for years due to war and social upheaval. This grassroots documentation process served not only as a means of cultural preservation, but also as a mechanism for intergenerational dialogue, community healing, and the reclamation of collective identity in post-conflict settings.

We focused on the action-oriented insights that led to our participation in the first international conference on the preservation of intangible cultural heritage, organised by Al-Sharq University in Raqqa, north-eastern Syria, in November 2023.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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This paper examines how participatory filmmaking empowers post-conflict communities to rebuild trust and agency. Drawing from practice-based work in the Balkans, it shows how creative visual storytelling contributes to peacebuilding beyond conventional development frameworks.

Paper long abstract

Arts-based peacebuilding is gaining renewed relevance as conflicts intensify and traditional development approaches struggle to address mistrust, trauma, and social fragmentation. This paper draws on my practice as a filmmaker working with post-conflict communities in Kosovo and the wider Balkans to explore how participatory and community-driven filmmaking can strengthen agency, dialogue, and collective imagination.

The paper demonstrates how collaborative film processes—co-writing testimonies, producing visual narratives with participants, and screening films within divided communities—create spaces where individuals can articulate lived experiences often excluded from institutional peacebuilding agendas. These creative encounters humanise former “others,” surface silenced emotions and memories, and establish new grounds for trust-building.

While highlighting the transformative potential of cinema as both method and intervention, the paper also critically reflects on its limitations: ethical challenges in representation, power dynamics between filmmaker and participant, risks of retraumatisation, and the tension between artistic expression and community expectations.

By situating these practice-based insights within broader debates on arts, culture, conflict, and development futures, the paper argues that filmmaking offers an alternative mode of evidence and engagement—one that repositions affected communities as co-authors of their own post-conflict futures. In doing so, it contributes to reimagining development through creative agency, emotional understanding, and shared storytelling in an uncertain world.

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Explores how arts, oral histories and textile traditions support healing, memory and social cohesion in post-conflict communities. Argues that creative, community-led cultural practices are essential to reimagining peacebuilding and future development.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the role of oral histories and creative cultural practices as vital, community-driven tools of peacebuilding in post-conflict societies. While conventional peacebuilding frameworks frequently emphasise policy, security, and institutional interventions, lived experiences of conflict reveal that emotional repair, cultural continuity and community trust are equally essential. Drawing on interdisciplinary work across South Asia, particularly oral histories of the Partition of India, phulkari embroidery in Punjab, and Indigenous craft knowledge in the Himalayan region, this paper argues that oral testimony and material practice together produce forms of cultural memory that support social healing.

Through case studies of curatorial projects, intergenerational storytelling workshops and collaborative craft-based initiatives, the paper examines how communities utilize oral narratives and embodied creative practice to process trauma, reclaim agency and challenge erasures inherent in colonial and postcolonial histories. These practices facilitate dialogue, strengthen local identity and preserve intangible heritage at risk of disappearance.

The paper advances three key insights:

(1) Oral histories act as relational infrastructure, building trust and enabling communities to narrate conflict on their own terms.

(2) Creative practices, including textiles, ritual forms and everyday making, translate memory into tangible, shareable expressions that support cohesion and resilience.

(3) Integrating arts-based methodologies into peacebuilding shifts the field towards more ethical, participatory and culturally grounded approaches.

Ultimately, this paper positions oral history and creative practice not as supplementary cultural activities but as central, transformative components of sustainable peacebuilding and post-conflict development.

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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.

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Interdisciplinary, sound-based work can challenge polarised narratives and build solidarity across divides. Drawing on projects in the Balkans, Ireland, and online, this paper explores listening, testimony, and art as tools for connection in fractured societies.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how sound-based and interdisciplinary artistic practices generate affective encounters that challenge dominant narratives, complicate identity categories, and build solidarity across political and cultural divides. Rooted in composition but extending into performance, visual art, and community engagement, my practice investigates the ethical and political dimensions of listening, testimony, and collaborative creation.

I outline the foundations of my doctoral research, which proposed cross-artform collaboration as a means of fostering socially engaged, emotionally resonant artworks. This framework shaped my involvement in a research project in Serbia and Bosnia centred on women’s accounts of the Yugoslav Wars. The resulting sound work, Not A Victim, foregrounded the coexistence of multiple and conflicting truths, raising questions about artistic positionality, responsibility, and the complexities of working as an outsider to a conflict.

The paper then turns to Bridge, a participatory youth project in Northern Ireland developed in response to rising polarisation and the online spread of extremist narratives. Combining testimonies, electronic sound, and public graffiti, the work explored how listening and creative action can cultivate dialogue among young people from opposing communities. Alongside this, my contribution to the Europe-wide research group Conditions of Peace further examined how identity, economic shifts, and media influence shape perceptions of peace and belonging in contemporary Ireland.

Drawing on thinkers such as Elif Shafak, I argue that in an era dominated by echo chambers and reductive binaries, sound-based art offers a powerful medium for holding contradiction, fostering empathy, and creating spaces where complex political realities can be collectively explored.