By Oliver P. Richmond
In conflict-affected societies, peace is rarely born at the negotiating table alone. Discussions in the halls of statecraft tended to reflect geopolitical struggles, seen through the eyes of powerful political and economic elites. This type of peacemaking leads to narrow agreements that often excludes people, particularly their rights and understandings of the world.
For example, for an artistic depiction that may (or may not) be critical of violence and elite power and its failures, see the painting of the peace talks at Somerset House in London in 1604 in the National Gallery. It depicts all male elites surrounded by privilege, and a peace agreement they have forged on a tiny document in the foreground. This exclusion leads to limited agreements, or even worse, basic ceasefires, a lack of social and political legitimacy as well as any long-term sustainability. Yet such unaccountable, elite processes of peacemaking dominate the headlines and the historical representations of peace (more often they are an example of ‘peace-washing’).
Radical thinking about peace is not to be found in such conservative and securitized settings. Peace innovations tend to emerge from critical and radical stances outside of such parochial and provincial, elitist settings. Hence, I suggest we think about ‘artpeace’ and its fragmented — violently erased — archives, which teach us about how peace was made in the past, and how future innovations in peacemaking have been — and may be — shaped. The artpeace concept has evolved through distant and recent history, including recently wide-ranging work with artists and social movements in places like Syria, Ukraine, Colombia, Lebanon, Myanmar, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Palestine and beyond. These grassroots networks use music, theatre, digital storytelling, satire, and visual media not only to survive and resist — but to innovate, archive, and curate visions of an accountable, non-violent, just and sustainable world.
Artpeace also helps us understand how sophisticated notions of peace have been disseminated, and what pluralistic, empathetic, inter-generational values and related tools of peacemaking they transmitted, and their impact. See for example, Lorenzetti’s very early painting from 1538-9 linking peace, prosperity, and the city with good government, and war, pestilence, and famine with bad government.
Historically, social movements, artists, radical thinkers, and other radical critiques have emerged from below, where the failings of power (and diplomacy — see Holbein’s The Ambassadors from 1533, where a death skull figures in an anamorphism in the foreground) can be more easily identified.
Then commentaries may emerge about how to stop violence and improve political order from the ‘underground’ (ie via global social movements interested in non-violence, rights, justice, accountability, and sustainability, in their various iterations). This sort of ‘peace formation’ from below of reformed or new political orders, means creative and innovative thinking about a just peace is created across arts and cultures. Yet it tends to be rejected by political elites who see peacemaking as a source of their own often problematic legitimacy (often based upon warmaking), until such time as their conservative approaches fail and collapse into large scale violence. Sometimes the radical scripts of peacemaking are prepared decades or even centuries before they become common practice.
Thus, it is important to understand artpeace because it carries the hints of future innovations in peacemaking as violence evolves and political orders fail. These innovations may well help humanity move towards non-violent and more just forms of political order in the future. Artpeace often seems to emerge in alleyways splashed with mural art (think of Belfast in Northern Ireland), in plays staged in bombed-out theatres (think of Sarajevo), or in poetry shared in secret. Over time, this wide range of arts and culture-oriented phenomena have evolved — a creative force that challenges power and systems of violence, mobilises non-violent resistance, and disseminates the values of just peace and peacemaking. These include intergenerational and global empathy, solidarity, and cooperation, as a basis for reconciliation and reform. It helps imagine and disseminate the conditions for emancipation as seen from below by the victims of violence.
This isn’t just about artists protesting war, as you can see in Lorenzetti’s early mural in Siena (linked above). Artpeace offers a layered, evolving relationship between arts and cultures about the politics and systems of peace, disseminated across complex networks, building empathy and solidarity to replace often violent interactions with common, innovative understandings. From ancient imperial statues to Banksy’s radical graffiti on walls in the West Bank, the arts have always help shape how we understand and evaluate conflict — and how we dare to imagine its alternatives.
The arts have long been underestimated in the politics of peace in my view. But they have always been there — quietly, provocatively — giving voice to those silenced by power and imagining new paths for reconciliation and justice.
From Sarajevo’s cathartic U2 concert in 1997 to the ‘pink line’ once painted as a protest across the buffer zone in divided Nicosia (where a ‘green line’ on an imperial map once divided it) in 2005, from post-colonial literature to Dadaist anti-war absurdity, these expressions go far beyond symbolism. They question the legitimacy of violence. They challenge conservative political narratives and they propose alternatives if you watch carefully and listen (which, fortunately, many people across time and space have done, and still do — even in the face of ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, if you look for it).
The problem is, however, that this work is often ephemeral. It vanishes amidst repression, war, or the next crisis. That’s why the next step for artpeace is critical. To move beyond the sovereign museum or gallery that seeks to depicts war, violence, and injustice as connected to the history and survival of the state and its elites, we need to think about how to archive and curate the history of peace and peacemaking, to form peace from below, and to disseminate knowledge about peacemaking more widely.
We could try to develop ways to digitally archive and co-curate this work — creating transnational platforms for peace formation from below, which could be preserved, disseminated, and shared, as a counter to the old, entrenched systems that depend on violence.
This approach is built on three key ideas. Firstly, peace is both pluriversal and contested. It isn’t defined only by state documents and their glorification of historical struggle, nationalism, regional domination, and extractivism, but also by people’s struggles, hopes, and expressions for solidarity, empathy, reconciliation, and cooperation.
Secondly, arts and cultures provide the political imagination necessary for non-violent innovations, plurilogues, and peaceful reforms. Art doesn’t just reflect the world; it can build new ones, as with Matoba’s imaginative and innovative map of Pearl Harbour and Hiroshima (from 1998, linked above).
Thirdly, globally networked, open, digital, and possibly underground collaboration and self-curation are crucial (to avoid replicating state archives that lend themselves to power politics). The power of networks lies not only in solidarity but also in how they share and preserve, as well as add to artpeace critiques and innovations.
The goal isn’t just to store artpeace (there is a growing archive already, apparent even if one only scans through a basic google search) — but to expand and activate it. The point is simple, but powerful: peace isn’t just a victor’s peace, ceasefire or a stalemate. It doesn’t only happen via treaties and high-level summits. It also emerges in consciousness on walls, in poems, on screens, and in movements capable of imagining non-violent politics. Artpeace offers the potential to reimagine, expand, and disseminate knowledge about just peace and practices of peacemaking in this current era of often violent transition.