Peacebuilding through the Arts and Humanities in Mali
Stephen L. Esquith; Professor, Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University
Welore Tamboura; Professor, Universite des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de Bamako, Mali
Which of the Radical Reciprocity themes does this project align with?
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Pluriversality
Conscious ontological engagement with and building of “worlds” through devaluation of “expert” knowledge in favor of co-generation of multiple knowledge (or worlds). University seeks to become a “world in which many worlds fit.”
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Co-construction
Projects, programs and relationships are intentionally co-generated from inception.
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Reciprocity
Relationships co-create and sustain clear benefits for all involved.
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Multidirectional
Knowledge, including lived experience, flows both ways between university and community.
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Autonomy
Parties seek to understand and disrupt relational systems of power and privilege so that collaborations ensure community autonomy in relationship to the university.
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Radical
University-Community relationships include a process that intentionally seeks to uproot, trace, understand, engage and address root causes and legacies of exclusionary practices, inequity, oppression and other systemic causes of harm to communities and to the democratic purpose of public universities.
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Inclusivity
Community enfranchisement is intentionally sought by the re-construction of university-community borders as permeable. Communities see the university as both university and community space. Community partners have decision-making power in the university-community projects. (See Eisenstein’s notion of the ability to set the table and co-create the menu vs. a place at the table).
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Expansive
Seeks to expand the public responsibility of land-grant and other public-serving institutions their relationship to communities. Does not seek to limit public interest, non-profit, fiduciary, commercialization and other university-community relationship forms as all forms can be expansively re-aligned to be pluriversal, autonomous, co-construction, radical reciprocal and inclusive.
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Decentering:
The university is removed from center of university-community relationships, thus delegitimizing elitism in the university in it’s relationships with communities.
In one sense we are a small group of Malian teachers, students, community activists, artists, and public officials who are working with faculty and students from the U.S. We have worked together since 2004 on a variety of development ethics and peace education projects. But in another sense, we are also community members who have participated in these projects and many of us have endured the violence that we hope to address creatively through democratic political education. Together, we have done this by raising questions at town meetings about accountability, by negotiating simulated peace accords in school classrooms and assemblies, and by exploring new forms of democratic dialogue online and in-person. Our hybrid peacebuilding social practice operates on three interconnected levels.
At the national level we work with the Commission for Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation (CVJR) to interpret and disseminate video animations based on public testimonies given before the Commission during the last two years.
At an intermediate level we work with students from the Malian University Institute for Technology (IUT), the Michigan State University Residential College in the Arts and Humanities (RCAH), and Scientific Animations Without Borders (SAWBO) to produce these video animations in local languages to introduce a new community engagement practice into public education.
At the local level we work with Malian community organizations to produce and use picture books, interactive games, and these video animations to prompt democratic peacebuilding dialogues that will empower the youth to take greater ownership of peacebuilding in their own communities.
The dynamics of peacebuilding as democratic political education are cyclical. They begin with (1) an inventory of what other scholars have called everyday peace indicators (EPI), for example, open schools, small and affordable land holdings, functioning local marketplaces, and the availability of clean water and medical care. This is followed by (2) an analysis of the operations and constitution of power that undermines everyday peace, and (3) the retelling and reenactment of stories based upon this inventory and analysis to engage participants in dialogue on the means of prevention. This cycle generates new questions about what counts as everyday peace, the causes for its absence, and the pre-conditions for transformation – questions that lead to a new round of inventory, analysis, and reenactment. This is what democratic political education looks like on the ground.
Through ‘transformative’, not merely ‘instrumental’ and ‘transactional’ forms of collaboration in Mali, our team of artists, teachers, students, and local community activists working with a variety of public and private organizations have begun to cultivate the skills of ‘problem solving, empathy, creativity, adaptability, and resilience’ needed to build such a shared understanding of the dynamics of power from the bottom up. In a very modest sense, the result has been the formation of a demos of ordinary citizens and professionals who are generating new forms of political power to contest the inequality and exploitation at the root of mass violence.
We are not alone in turning to the arts and humanities for this purpose. A hybrid peacebuilding process as democratic political education is the subject of a wider conversation on Mali among scholars, writers, and artists whose goal is also an education in the constitution and distribution of political power and the absence of everyday peace. Our work is consistent with, not duplicative of theirs. However, like other humanitarian development and assistance projects, there is a danger that inequalities and hierarchies will arise within our own peacebuilding practice. And as a humanitarian hybrid program there is the risk of top-down state-centrism.
Community Partners
Recent Programs
Working on issues such as education for peace is long-term work whose results are not necessarily easily identifiable or quantifiable in the short term. Our photovoice project is part of work in peace education that has been going on for many years at different levels: institutional (state organizations, universities), community, etc.
The photovoice method provides a new tool for social and community dialogue in a very specific place which reproduces local tensions in places of origin by grouping different ethnic groups, sometimes enemies, together in a camp. We go further than most participatory action-research that uses photography and group dialogue to allow marginalized people to deepen their understanding of a community problem or concern. We want to prompt not only interpersonal dialogue (discussion between mentors and mentees), then intercommunity dialogue (within the same camp), but then extra-community dialogue (by exporting photo productions to other communities (e.g., camp neighbors, military families, and universities).
In this phase of our project, we have chosen to work with a group of 20 young people from 3 camps:
Mabilé (city of Bamako)
Faladié (city of Bamako)
Niamanan (outskirts of Bamako).
Action Plan:
The preparatory phase: About 12 months of training for volunteer student-Mentors on their role, on the conduct of social survey methods, issues related to peace, issues of transitional justice, issues of reparation, ethics development; the meeting of the actors involved and interview, the meetings with partners; Photography training in a studio of photographers committed to community development.
Phase 1: training and composition of the mentor and mentee teams, workshops on emotions and their place in everyday life in the camps, discussion groups and fun activities. Result: production of storyboards and creation of stories.
Phase II: Centered on sport and peace. Management and analysis of tensions and reactions. Drawings and illustrations.
Phase III: Training in photographs of the 20 young people and shots in the 3 selected camps.
Phase IV: exhibitions in the camps, in the communities and organization of the national day for peace education at the University of Bamako.
The process has unfolded gradually in several steps.
Recruitment and discussions between university instructors and peace activist team leaders. Using stories created by some of the team leaders earlier with the university instructors, the instructors and team leaders discussed how they might use these stories to prompt difficult conversations in schools and communities.
These early stories were then supplemented by a new set of video animations inspired by the testimony of persons appearing before the Malian Commissions for Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation. The team leaders and instructors reviewed early versions of these new video animations produced in partnership with Scientific Animations without Borders (SAWBO), again with a view toward using them to prompt democratic deliberation.
At the same time that these conversations between instructors and team leaders were taking place, the instructors were also sharing these stories with their US and Malian university students to gauge their responses to the stories and video animations as prompts for democratic deliberation. Using Zoom, Malian and US university students were able to compare their reactions to the videos and offer suggestions for revision.
At this stage the instructors decided to explore the possibility of using these video animations in the IDP camps in Mali. However, instead of simply showing the video animations, they decided to create a more active learning environment between the team leaders, the Malian university students, and young people in the camps. They chose photovoice as the tool for this, and the university students became mentors for their young mentees in the IDP camps.
This required partnering with the Yamarou Photo studio in Bamako, whose director had experience teaching photography to young people. But before we could put cameras in the hands of the mentors and mentees, we had to train the mentors to ‘see’ everyday life in a different way. Hybrid peacebuilding would have to become everyday hybrid peacebuilding. Regular meetings between the instructors and the Malian university students retraced some of the ground that we had previously covered with the team leaders, who eventually joined the mentors in these sessions.
Also, before starting the photovoice project in the camps, the mentors and mentees would have to establish a relationship of trust. We did this in several ways, including social gatherings in the Parc Zoologique in Bamako and more structured activities in the camps. The team leaders from the Institute for Popular Education in Kati led discussions about conflict and emotion in the camps and the team leaders from the International Sports Alliance in Bamako used games to raise similar questions about conflict and emotion. The university student mentors participated in all of these activities and discussions with their mentees.
Only after we had reached this point did we introduce formal photovoice instruction for the mentees and mentors. Yamarou staff worked with the team leaders, mentors, and mentees to develop a new visual literacy. The photos taken by the mentees are the subject of reflection sessions guided by questions from their mentors about their relationship to education and conflict in the camps. The mentors’ photos are taken from a wider frame of reference, showing the context in which the mentees’ photos exist. Together mentors and mentees are writing the captions for their photos.
The next step will be a series of photovoice exhibits, starting slowly in the Yamarou Photo studio so that mentees and mentors learn how to present their stories and respond to questions. Then the exhibit will travel to the university and to the camps for local community dialogues.
Depending upon the success of the Mali IDP Photovoice project, we have several spinoff activities in mind. These include the creation of a storybook using the photovoice images and a web site about the project, a political simulation game drawn from the photovoice stories, and collaboration with students in the US, South Africa, Colombia, Benin, and Senegal where we have been in contact with instructors doing similar work.