A plethora of initiatives has been and is underway worldwide in using artistic means of addressing conflicts – through music, murals, painting, theatre, and so on. What lacks though is the cooperation between artists and peacebuilders to build a strategic and concrete arts-based framework for peacebuilding initiatives. Michael Shank and Lisa Schirch in Strategic Arts-Based Peacebuilding [Peace and Change. 33 (2): 217-24] has explained why:
“The arts remain marginalized within the peacebuilding field, perhaps because they are seen as “soft” approaches (within an already “soft” field) to the “hard” issues of conflict and violence, or because peacebuilding practitioners frequently originate from social and political sciences rather than the arts and humanities fields, or because the methodologies are not readily available. Conversely, within the artistic community, many artists feel that their art needs no socio-political or sociocultural explanation, no explicit reason for existence. Art is for art’s sake, the saying goes, and any attempt to make it political and/or transformative for the community betrays the self-expressive nature of art.” (Pg. 217-218)In the rest of their article, Shank and Schirch offer inspiring insight into how the above gap can be addressed by formulating arts-based peacebuilding strategies.
