Short Abstract

It explores how African communities affected by conflict mobilise cultural heritage, ritual, performance, and indigenous knowledge to foster, heal social relationship, preserve collective memory and reconstruct identities, livelihoods and peaceful futures beyond formal peacebuilding frameworks

Long Abstract

Post-conflict recovery in Africa is commonly approached through institutional reconstruction, political settlements, humanitarian intervention, and economic rehabilitation. While important, these frameworks can overlook the cultural and performative practices through which communities themselves negotiate loss, trauma, fractured relationships, and disrupted identities. This panel approaches recovery through an African prism, foregrounding cultural heritage, performance, and indigenous knowledge as active resources for resilience, healing, and social reconstruction. it examines how conflict-affected communities mobilise ritual , music, dance, story telling, theatre, memory, spirituality, and other cultural expressions to restore social relationships, sustain collective identities, and negotiate changing realities. Performance is understood not simply artistic representation but a mode of knowledge production nd social action through which communities remember violence, interpret suffering, transmit intergenerational knowledge, negotiate belonging, and imagine renewed futures. Particular attention is given to cultural custodians, elders, women, youth, artists, and community organisations as agents of heritage preservation and transformation. The panel interrogates the resilience of tangible and intangible heritage where conflict threatens cultural institutions, acred practices, languages, musical traditions, and community networks. It invites comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives on the intersections of heritage, gender, memory, spirituality, environment, digital technologies, and peacebuilding. Drawing on ethnography, performance studies, cultural studies musicology, anthropology, gender studies, development studies, digital humanities, and community-based research, the panel asks how culturally grounded practices contribute to recovery beyond formal peacebuilding frameworks. It argues that post-conflict recovery is also a cultural process through which communities perform resilience, reclaim heritage, heal relationships, and create possibilities for collective renewal and return to normalcy.

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