Creativity for Peace Festival: Creative Methodologies for Unearthing Hidden War Stories

Our Peace Festival project (PF) identified outstanding groups and initiatives that amplify the voices of marginalized peoples that challenge official histories in Peru and Colombia. It successfully facilitated the gathering of peace activists from these groups in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, to discuss and produce art about the ways they use creative methodologies to tell stories about conflict and violence, their methodological challenges and possibilities, and the alternative narratives that subvert established accounts. Such creative spaces for dialogue and reflection contribute effectively to inclusive democracy and sustainable peace.

We produced a multi-authored article on the theoretical and methodological lessons of this novel approach to working with peace activists, currently under review for publication. A second paper, examining the achievements of creative methodologies, was presented at the Latin American Studies Association congress in Barcelona, May 2018.

In the follow-up Creativity for Peace Festival, we plan to expand the creative spaces further across academia and activist communities, building on three key insights of the original PF for other co-production initiatives across academic disciplines and with community based organisations:
1) That sharing and co-producing knowledge is enhanced by the embodiment created by active engagement with emotions.
2) There is a creative force inherent in embracing participants' own goals and strategies.
3) Tensions between participants around process and goals, once acknowledged, can be productive; these tensions can serve as a common act producing a collective focus on creating an affective community.

The Creativity for Peace Festival responds to participants' calls in the original PF to explicitly incorporate these lessons and bring in new participants with distinctive experiences of conflict and peacebuilding. Thus, participants working to effect change expressed the necessity of broader spaces for dialogue, exchange, and reflection to produce actionable knowledge and creative know-how that reinvigorates their practices given the complex realities in which they operate. They also stressed the need to find ways to connect with other actors in networks of solidarity and knowledge that create synergies to increase their impact. Thus, the follow-on Festival consolidates what was produced and opens new spaces for knowledge transfer and wider impact.

This project involves new participants from Cuba and Nicaragua to generate new pathways for collaborative engagement that greatly widen the impact of the original project. Including these two countries will further strengthen previous collaborative links with partner organisations, and build capacity for incorporating them into a research network for future projects.

The Creativity for Peace Festival builds on the findings of the first PF in order to achieve new and expanded impact with existing and new partners involved in peacebuilding efforts in Latin America. For this, we will:
a) Organise and facilitate the Creativity for Peace Festival as a four-day event with activists from the four countries, apply the fine-tuned methodology and create a space for exchange in-situ with community-based experiences in Cuba.
b) Re-connect with existing groups and initiatives (Peru/Colombia) and accompany their process of reflection on lessons and changes to produce materials to be shared in the Festival. Connect with new initiatives invited to the Festival (Nicaragua/Cuba).
c) Facilitate the building of a trans-national network of knowledge production, exchange and transfer between participants, non-academic and academic actors.
d) Design publicly accessible material detailing how to use the lessons and findings from the original project.
e) Co-produce artefacts and a short-film with participants during the Festival that will be made available in a public exhibition in UK and deposited in an open-access archive.

Impact will be achieved in three areas: first, capacity-building amongst participant groups; second, network-building across national boundaries within the Latin American region; and third, knowledge exchange which raises the level of public discourse about post-conflict societies and the cultural and political legacies of armed conflict.

1. Capacity-building: The Creativity for Peace Festival aims to improve the capacities of actors to be better equipped to deal with the complex realities of the legacies of war and ongoing violence in the Latin American region and seek to create space for a more inclusive democracy with social justice. Participants in the original Peace Festival told us that they returned to their work reinvigorated and with new ideas to apply to their projects. The Creativity for Peace Festival will contribute to the specific countries' evolving situations by enhancing this process in Colombia and Peru, and expanding its impact to two new countries:

In Peru, participant activists are currently confronted with the backlash from conservative groups in power that are challenging the achievements of grass-root work for the country's institutional building and democratic transition. In Colombia, participants are closely involved with ongoing efforts to implement the peace process brought about by the Peace Accord, and with the transitional justice mechanisms, such as the Truth Commission, that are challenged by the recently-elected government.

In Nicaragua, the developing political crisis and the risks that the escalation of violence has created at the moment presents itself as a threat. There is therefore a pressing need for the invited participants, who are working to transform the crisis into an opportunity for sustainable change, to build their capacity through engagement with new methodologies and networks. In Cuba, our partner organisation is a key actor in the peacebuilding efforts as mediators of peace processes in the region through their networks with social movements. They also work closely with other community-based networks to enhance participatory democracy in their country. Their capacity will be strongly enhanced through involvement with the work of the Colombian, Peruvian and Nicaraguan participants.

2. Network-building: This is an important line of work, which we recognized was not achieved in the original project because we presumed these networks already existed. We learned that it would be an important contribution to strengthen the horizontal connections between groups and initiatives throughout the Latin American region, and between participants and their own networks with social movements. Furthermore, we became aware of the great, hitherto unrealised potential for networks between non-academic and academic actors for research in order to enhance solidarity and put to work actionable knowledge produced by the initiatives participating in this project which will enhance their impact to transform conflict and the understanding of its complex legacies.

3. Knowledge exchange: The project and its network of collaboration will strengthen its connection and contribution to national peacebuilding efforts through partnership with other ongoing projects (Bringing Memories from the Margins in Colombia, MEMPAZ with Newton Fund/Colciencias, and Digital platform for memory-work in Peru with ESRC Impact Acceleration Account) and key allies (Ruta Pacifica as part of the Colombian Truth Commission, Biblioteca Nacional Colombia holding the Truth Commission archive, and the Gender Justice Memory transnational network project AHRC/GCRF led by Jelke Boesten) raising the level of public and academic debate around this line of work. Projects like this raise awareness of innovative work going on away from traditional media sources, promoting cross-fertilization of knowledge within Latin America, and between Latin America and the rest of the world through academic and related networks.