Cultures of Sustainable Peace edited by Hyab Teklehaimanot Yohannes, Alison Phipps and Tawona Sitholé examines arts-based peacebuilding across the Global South, with an emphasis on the role of women and efforts to address gender-based violence. This timely, thoughtful collection highlights the importance of indigenous knowledge and intersectionality in peacebuilding, offering vital insights for Peace Studies and beyond, writes Lydia Ayame Hiraide.

Cultures of Sustainable Peace: Conflict Transformation, Gender-Based Violence, Decolonial Praxes. Hyab Teklehaimanot Yohannes, Alison Phipps and Tawona Sitholé (editors). Multilingual Matters. 2025.

It can be hard to feel hopeful in times like these. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is reaching into its third year, with thousands killed and many more displaced. The violent conflict between Israel and Iran has devastated the lives of civilians in the region in the past two weeks. Though the US has intervened to broker a fragile ceasefire agreement, we are yet to know whether it will hold and how events will evolve. And every day, we learn more horrifying news about the death, destruction and denigration faced by Palestinians in the ongoing Nakba (catastrophe) across Gaza and the West Bank. 

Of course, for many, these are not simply stories in the news. They are lived realities which mould and shape bodies, psyches, and whole communities – something which Cultures of Sustainable Peace does an excellent job of reminding us with a curation of thirteen chapters in an Open Access edited collection focused on arts-based and cultural approaches to peace and peacebuilding. These contributions build on and complement notable existing scholarship from peace-oriented thinker-practitioners such as John Paul Lederach and Paulo Freire.

The featured projects span a range of geographies […] affirming the “Global South” as a central, rather than marginal, site from which to theorise, know, and live peace

Cultures of Sustainable Peace stakes out the contributions that critical and interdisciplinary approaches to peace can offer to Peace Studies as an intellectual discipline and peacebuilding as a set of practices with and beyond academia. Many of the contributions narrate and analyse experiences and insights from a range of projects that formed part of the Culture for Inclusive and Sustainable Peace (CUSP) project. The projects written about span a range of geographies (including but not limited to Palestine, Zimbabwe, Colombia, and Mexico); affirming the “Global South” as a central, rather than marginal, site from which to theorise, know, and live peace – a desperately needed approach within a field that tends to discard and sideline Indigenous and Southern knowledge and practices of peacebuilding.

The origins of Peace Studies 

The field of Peace Studies emerged in the mid-20^th century and is strongly associated with the scholarship of Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) he established in 1959. A considerable amount of Galtung’s work – especially in his later years – focused on issues of justice and inequity. However, Cultures of Sustainable Peace rightly points out that, aside from some exceptions, the Peace Studies field often fails to fully consider the “intersectionality of gender” (1) as shaping the work and lives of peace practitioners, artists, and cultural workers. 

Many of the chapters foreground the precarious material conditions and institutional restrictions under which this work must take place – providing behind-the-scenes insight into peacebuilding research and praxis often obscured in the scholarship.

In this edited collection, Hyab Teklehaimanot Yohannes, Alison Phipps, and Tawona Sitholé draw together a series of compelling chapters which raise challenging, but deeply necessary, questions and affirmations on the kinds of contributions and capacities that cultural interventions are poised to make in response to violence in all its articulations. Violence, here, is understood not just as the manifestation of conflict on an international scale (i.e., between states) but also within societies – with a heavy focus on racialised, gender-based, and institutionally sanctioned violence as priorities within peacebuilding agendas. 

The work of peacebuilding 

Interestingly, many of the chapters also foreground the precarious material conditions and institutional restrictions under which this work must take place – providing behind-the-scenes insight into peacebuilding research and praxis often obscured in the scholarship. The chapters in Part 3 (drawn together under the title “Reflexivity, Dilemmas and Safeguarding with Grassroots Organisations”) bring together transparent insight and frank reflection on some of these conditions and restrictions which CUSP-funded projects faced. 

Chapter 12, “Between Success and Failure: Researching with Grassroots Organisations Involved in Conflict Transformation” by Julie E. McAdam, Cristina Amescua, and Evelyn Arizpe is a standout chapter here. It carefully reflects on processes of arts-based and cultural peacebuilding (and the scholarship which emerges from it) as work. Work is situated in relation to labour which “carries with it the potential to be alienating and oppressive” (252). The work, then, is deeply relational. It is “connected to building, making and maintaining a world fit for all” (252) – a world in which love, joy, and connection underpin our relationships with each other; where trust is important. 

And still, even in this work of cultural and intercultural peacebuilding, this trust and the good relationships it enables can be undermined. Even where researchers and practitioners seek to avoid this. Both Chapter 11 and the concluding chapter by Alison Phipps narrate the vulnerability of the kinds of trust, partnership, and ethical landscapes that we build in peacebuilding work. This work is contingent on hospitable material conditions. In other words, they need to be funded – and, as in the case of, CUSP they are/were. Yet, at any moment, such funding, contingent on states and institutions, can be withdrawn. 

Funding cuts and their impacts 

Cultural, arts, and “overseas” projects are especially vulnerable to such cuts. CUSP was no exception. Three days after launching its call for proposals and small grants in March 2021, CUSP’s funding from the UK government was frozen and cut by 80 per cent to “take money back from international development, renege on global commitments to overseas development assistance and spend this instead on prison-style detention facilities for those seeking asylum” (271). Such candid reflections from the authors and editors about how this affected their work is invaluable. It will raise interesting and urgent questions for Peace Studies scholars and students working across a wide range of contexts. The material conditions of peacebuilding work – especially in its cultural and arts-based iterations – are often made invisible, but for a short acknowledgement at the end of a journal article. But such cuts (threatened or actual) can and do threaten the foundations that uphold cultural peacebuilding work. McAdam, Amescua, and Arizpe’s chapter thus offers valuable and specific insight into what it means to navigate such circumstances and interpret the “failures” that they bring to the shape and nature of peace projects.

Even in the context of such deep loss, the authors and editors demonstrate a courageous commitment to ‘looking for spaces where peace might be possible’

The focus on peace in Cultures of Sustainable Peace is hopeful, but it is not naïve. The haunting words of Refaat Alareer’s poem, “I Am You” precede an “Un-Foreword”, grounding the concerns of the following chapters in the devastating reality in which peacebuilding work must and does take place. Alareer was an English literature scholar from Gaza who was the lead investigator on one of CUSP’s small grant awards. He was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on 6 December 2023. The “Un-Foreword” is written in place of a foreword that Alareer had invited Phipps to write for a volume of poetry which he never got to publish. Even in the context of such deep loss, the authors and editors demonstrate a courageous commitment to “looking for spaces where peace might be possible” (274). And in doing so, they light and fan the sparks of “a peace, bright with the sadness” that could sustain the ‘peace and the loss that was and is, and is to come’ (275).

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image: Comalapa mural artists in Guatemala via UN Women on Flickr. License: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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