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

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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.