The Commission invited Delsy Ronnie, the Principal Investigator of the Creating Safer Space project and the Nonviolent Peaceforce Regional Representative for Asia, to hold a presentation on Human Security Aspects in Military Operations. He shared Nonviolent Peaceforce experiences in the Philippines, Myanmar, South Sudan, and Ukraine, and insights from the Creating Safer Space project in Papua. About 20 Indonesian middle-rank military officers from the Navy, Air Force and Army participated in the event.
The officers suggested that Nonviolent Peaceforce bring its experience to Papua, and recommended that it carry out work there to help the government reduce violence. This recommendation requires follow-up, since military decisions have to be made by officers of higher rank. Through this engagement activity, Nonviolent Peaceforce and its partner ICAIOS has influenced actors’ perspectives about violence and the importance of civilian protection in the armed conflict in Papua.
The policy brief offers recommendations to UCP organisations, policymakers, the international community, and to religious leaders.
Creating Safer Space Exhibition in Brazil
The Creating Safer Space Exhibition was hosted by the Institute of International Relations at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (IRI/PUC-Rio) between 12 and 23 August 2024. The exhibition was on display at the Department of Art and Design Hall.
Victória Monteiro da Silva Santos and Christian Cantuária from IRI/PUC-Rio report on the exhibition:
IRI/PUC-Rio hosted the exhibition as part of a series of activities that marked 10 years of its project Global South Unit for Mediation (GSUM), which was supported by two Brazilian research foundations (CAPES and FAPERJ). During the period, IRI also held several activities led by Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (Creating Safer Space Principal Investigator), Laura Jimenez (Creating Safer Space Research Assistant), Amaya Querejazu and Christine Andrä, many of which were associated with the exhibition itself.
The exhibition explores the unexpected power of nonviolence in the protection of civilians living in the midst of violence, featuring experiences from Cameroon, Colombia, Indonesia, Kenya, Myanmar, Nigeria, Palestine, the Philippines, South Sudan, and Thailand. More information about the exhibition is available here. In Rio, it was accompanied by descriptions in English and Portuguese.
The exhibition was officially launched on 14 August 2024, including an inaugural talk and an exhibition tour dedicated to IRI/PUC-Rio’s undergraduate students that are part of its Research Initiation Program. At the launch, Berit, Laura, and Amaya led various groups around parts of the exhibition, prompting reflections on the diversity of culturally-specific relations to nonviolence and peace.
A series of other guided tours and associated debates were also held with different undergraduate and post-graduate student cohorts in the exhibition space. On 15 August 2024, Berit and Christine welcomed IRI/PUC-Rio’s Graduate students from an International Security class. Three questions were offered as prompts for the group’s reflection: 1) What are conflict-affected communities’ vulnerabilities beyond physical violence, and what does that tell us about security perceptions? 2) Which forms or actors of protection caught your attention and why? Can you think of similar examples from Brazil? 3) What are the specific qualities of creative methods in studying security-related topics; what are their possibilities and limits?
Over about two and a half hours, the group explored the space and discussed various strategies of resistance, ambivalence, and the role of nonviolence in the context of armed conflicts and situations of extreme violence, reflecting on how the three questions could be tackled through the exhibited strategies and beyond. For instance, IRI’s professor Maira Siman and master’s student Eduarda Lopes inquired about the strategy of not wearing school uniforms by students in West Africa. This interest stemmed from the contrast with dangerous communities in Rio de Janeiro, where school uniforms can mean the difference between life and death during a police operation. Professor Berit explained that, in those conflicts in West Africa, school uniforms would allow for the tracking and personal identification of students, especially girls. Therefore, it was wiser not to be identifiable.
Another master’s student, Christian Cantuária, asked about the illustrations of men wearing blue helmets and whether they symbolized the UN “blue helmets” or peacekeepers. Given the distrust and scepticism of IR critical theory towards UN operations, Christian inquired whether those communities worked in partnership with international peacekeepers. Professors Amaya and Berit explained that the illustrations were created in the context of the Creating Safer Space project, and our other project colour, yellow, is the colour of the King in Thailand and could carry a different meaning for Thai society. Despite its association with the UN, they chose blue in that specific context to represent local peacebuilding efforts.
Moreover, on 22 August 2024, Berit and Laura worked with two groups of undergraduate students of the modules Methodology I and Methodology II, who were brought by the courses’ lecturer Victória Santos and their teaching assistants Luisa Mercedes, Eduarda Lopes, and Raíssa Caliano. The students were invited to identify the various research methods that could be identified in the exhibition, notably those that are creative or arts-based (such as participatory drawings, textile-making, the production of podcasts, and others) but also traditional ones, such as interviews. They reflected on how these various methods could be situated within different stages of the research, from project design, to the data generation and analysis, to the dissemination and impact stages, with different implications.
As students from both courses will be developing research over the course of the semester in collaboration with civil society activists in the field of Climate Justice, leading to the production of an encyclopaedia and a podcast season, this was an opportunity for students to reflect on the possibilities entailed by producing scientific knowledge that aims for impact in a way that does not isolate the university from society; and also to consider the possibilities posed by other forms of results dissemination beyond written articles and reports. Moreover, especially in the case of Methodology II students, the group discussed the politics of knowledge production in these kinds of projects, with an attention to how equitable relations can be maintained in North-South research collaborations.
Another guided visit was led on 19 August 2024 by IRI’s lecturer Luisa Lobato, who took her undergraduate students from the Security and International Relations course to the exhibition. Professor Luisa requested the students to study and reflect on the exhibition. Then, based on the image that captured their attention the most, each student had to answer three questions: 1) What conceptions of security does the selected work present, and in what way? 2) What ideas of threat, implicitly or explicitly, can be identified in the work? 3) How does the artist communicate these ideas of security and threat?
Overall, the exhibition was a rich opportunity not only for International Relations students but also for visitors from various other disciplines and fields, who were continuously prompted to reflect on the possibilities of nonviolent action and the resonances with Brazilian contexts marked not only by various forms of violence but by a wealth of resistance practices.
New journal article on artistic-cultural organisations in Colombia
The article is openly accessible in Spanish, and explores the risks that women, children and young people face who live in contexts of urban conflict in Medellín (Colombia) and who are involved in grassroots artistic-cultural organisations.
UCP/A Community of Practice Consultation with Creating Safer Space
In 2024, Creating Safer Space held three regional conferences, which brought together researchers, practitioners, artists, journalists, and policy-makers to share unique research methodologies, findings, and their implications for violence prevention, protection, and peacebuilding initiatives. The conferences were held in Nairobi (Kenya), Bangkok (Thailand) and Medellin (Colombia).
The Creating Safer Space Principal Investigator will share key takeaways and insights from the three conferences, and will be able to answer questions and share recommendations for an ever more inclusive practice of UCP/A.
Creating Safer Space Co-Investigator Beatriz Elena Arias-López and Research Assistant Laura Jiménez-Ospina will be publishing a chapter on Community Self-Protection in Colombia in the second edition of the Routledge Handbook of Peacebuilding, which is edited by Creating Safer Space Co-Investigator Roger Mac Ginty.
The chapter draws on Creating Safer Space research in Colombia. It examines unarmed civilian protection in Colombia whereby communities, human rights defenders, and others have come together to try to create safe spaces for non-combatants. The chapter looks at the mechanisms and processes involved in community self-protection, as well as a series of practical, and sometimes ethical, challenges that face such efforts. The lack of a clear demarcation between combatants and non-combatants poses a challenge, as does the issue of where unarmed civilian protectors fit in terms of legality and legitimacy. The chapter makes clear the multiple forms of agency and ingenuity that communities and activists engage in when faced with chronic conflict situations. The chapter is based on a close observation of the situation in Colombia but has resonance in other contexts.
The Creating Safer Space exhibition will be travelling to Brazil in August. It will be on show in the Arts and Design Department of the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) from 12 – 23 August 2024.
An exhibition launch will be held on 14 August from 3-5 pm, and there will be activities with students on 15 and 22 August. The workshops will focus unarmed civilian protection and community self-protection as an alternative protection and security mechanism that does not build on the use or threat of violence, and on the most appropriate – creative and participatory – methodologies to study such protection from below. They will also draw links with Brazil and see in how far Creating Safer Space learnings can be transferred to this setting.
The Creating Safer Space exhibition explores the unexpected power of nonviolence in the protection of civilians living in the midst of violence.
The objects, images, and voices originate from a selection of 26 research projects funded by the Creating Safer Space network, which have been conducted in collaboration between academics, self-protecting communities and nonviolent civilian accompaniers. The exhibition draws on experiences from Cameroon, Colombia, Indonesia, Kenya, Myanmar, Nigeria, Palestine, the Philippines, South Sudan, and Thailand, where civilians are harnessing the power of nonviolence to create safer spaces and work towards alternative presents and futures.
The exhibition is also available online in the form of a navigable 360° virtual tour, and it has previously been on show in Nairobi (Kenya), Bangkok (Thailand), Aberystwyth (UK), New York (USA) and Medellín (Colombia).
Creating Safer Space Exhibition in Colombia
The Creating Safer Space Exhibition was on show at the Carlos Gaviria Díaz Library of the University of Antioquia, Colombia, from 4 June – 30 July 2024. The exhibition was part of the Creating Safer Spaceregional workshop for Latin America, hosted by the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Antioquia.
Approximately fifty people participated in the tours and the forum, including twenty children from a school in Medellin who were visiting the University of Antioquia, students, and representatives of organizations such as the UNHCR and the Corporación Arlequín y los Juglares.
These were the reflections of some of the attendees:
“We are not only violated by the presence of armed actors, whether legal or illegal, but also by economies that do not care about our territories and those of us who inhabit them. To protect civilians, we must also change the conditions in which the communities live.” (Zenú indigenous woman from Antioquia)
“The creation of safer spaces does not depend on the state or the government, it depends on all of us.” (Nursing student, University of Antioquia)
“To protect yourself or others, you don’t need weapons.” (Nursing student, University of Antioquia)
“The exhibition moved me and somehow took me back in time. As I saw in the exhibition, Colombia has not been unrelated to wars and violence. I grew up in the Santo Domingo Savio, a neighborhood in Medellin, between 1990 and 2000, a time marked by violence. Although I was four years old, I clearly remember the shootings that took place. My parents could only leave the house to work or buy food. I still remember several dead bodies lying on the street, face up and bloodied. Perhaps I did not live through conflicts of the magnitude of some of the countries in the exhibition. However, it is challenging to remember these experiences and acknowledge that many lives have been profoundly affected by war”. (Nursing student, University of Antioquia)
The travelling exhibition, which has also been on show in Nairobi (Kenya), Bangkok (Thailand), Aberystwyth (Wales) and New York (USA) explores the unexpected power of nonviolence in the protection of civilians living in the midst of violence. The objects, images, and voices originate from a selection of 26 research projects funded by the Creating Safer Space network, which have been conducted in collaboration between academics, self-protecting communities and nonviolent civilian accompaniers. The exhibition draws on experiences from Cameroon, Colombia, Indonesia, Kenya, Myanmar, Nigeria, Palestine, the Philippines, South Sudan, and Thailand, where civilians are harnessing the power of nonviolence to create safer spaces and work towards alternative presents and futures. The exhibition is available online here.
“Weaponising Sheep”: New article about Israeli Settler Colonialism in Palestine
While media attention has focused on devastating Israeli military raids on Jenin and Nablus and land expropriations in East Jerusalem, the article shows how a slower burning form of violence is being perpetrated by settlers against Palestinian herders in the West Bank, seeking to gain control of their land and livelihoods.
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