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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.