Practical Transformations and practice of peace work in three case studies.

Ginestet explains an evolution of peace-work between 1986 and 2023 in terms of tacit knowledge & experience. Peace depends of critical masses. Experience tells that peace notions within the arts are most welcome if addressed as utopian thought and not as ideologies. In 37 years of intellectual evolution, artistic production & peace mediation we acquired valuable experiences for future investments. Starting 1986 we sketched peace and art symbiosis. Between 1998 and 2009, we conducted empirical research primarily in the field of sexual violence. In 2003 we started several political peace processes on request by military representatives (SACEUR). In 2007 Ginestet became a member of the VDW e.V. integrating political and scientific work. Since 2009 we regularly assist peace negotiations, talks, and lectures. We integrate science, politics, the arts and social transformation.

In 2012, the book PAX is published and used in negotiations. Negotiations multiply and show varying degrees of success. Since 2020 the building of a strategic group of silent diplomats begins. In August 2023 a plan for social transformation to a less violent society will be published. The constant work on peace occurs in the alternating and mutually enriching activity in art and science. Few irreversible processes systemically trigger social transformation.

Burcu Eke-Schneider explains experiences in practice (Peace Garden in Wuppertal) and how these experiences lead to future paths of transformation. The transformative power of cities is key to delivering a just and sustainable future. Cities are shared spaces with people from variety of cultures. Burcu Eke Schneider started a local and transformative peacebuilding in Wuppertal. It conveys new meanings of collective struggle for a common future in different languages, cultures, and sacred places. The process started in 2019 with peace science on a micro (individual) level leading to original solutions for urban transformation. The study became an empirical example for the scientific community in transformation of cities and communities for a just and sustainable future. It inspired actors to use nature for intercultural and interreligious dialogue. Peace building efforts contribute positively to social innovation and ecological transformation, allowing a positive change in the behaviours of participants. Dialogue implemented among citizens from Bosnia, the Czech Republic, Syria, and local representatives in a marginalized community. All communities experienced war, violence, or the destructive effects of Communism. The creation of a Peace Garden helped healing the traumas passed down from generation to generation. A “nature-based approach” substantiates a dialogue method for a sustainable and just urban future. All actors meet at eye level – a prerequisite for any transformation. Over time, the Peace Garden became an educational platform for out-of-school methods. Intercultural and interreligious dialogue, growing organic vegetables, fruit, and herbs, learning about local biodiversity, strengthening women, and changing consumption behaviours were seen.

Asli Telli explains a transformative approach of shifting power, decolonization and world-making.

Asli is involved in few initiatives that inquire the challenges of social transformation and work in a transdisciplinary manner to arrive at theory of change (TOC). This theory aims to embrace intersectional thought and practice through artistic design and non-violent communication. Such TOC help emancipating rigidities of western thought and south-south cooperation provides a canon of learning and experience. The new transformative, peaceful canon builds on a legacy of Black feminist thought and praxis of Afro-futurism, anti-colonial processes of visioning, knowledge production from the global south, abolitionist concepts of dismantling and reimagining, ethics of trauma-informed organising, critical reflections on funding and philanthropy, and contestations of capitalist extractivism. It is a project of world-making; decolonization that does not go unnoticed (Shay-Akil, 2022)

Shifting power takes many forms; we focus on three elements, to substantiate our understanding:

1. Healing and reparations: We direct material & symbolic reparations towards communities exploited by colonial dynamics. Colonialism and coloniality produce trauma and untimely death. Anticolonial practices center healing to transgress the violent framework.

2. Imagining, transforming, changing: Colonisation killed entire worlds. Decolonising means imagining entry points into new worlds outside of the current status quo, by testing and failing and daring again and re-adjusting.

3. Redistribution of resources: A structural unequal access to vital resources and a destructive relationship to sentient and inanimate beings creating the condition to life-affirming and fair access to resources for all, changing drastically how resources get accessed and who decides.