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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.