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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.