'Theatre for peacebuilding', new VoP article available on Peacebuilding

What is the role of art in peacebuilding? In her newly-published article for Peacebuilding journal, Varieties of Peace founding member Nilanjana Premaratna argues that theatre arts amplify, resist and transform structural violence.

Drawing on an empirical study in West Bengal in India, this article focuses on two under-explored domains in peacebuilding: structural violence and art. These two domains come together to explore the potential of sustained engagement through theatre in building peace within violent structural narratives at community level. Theatre has the potential to bring prevalent but less-heard narratives of structural violence into communal discourse, inasmuch as it offers a space where onstage resistance to structural violence is performed, and the performed resistance leads to triggering transformation within the violent structural narratives.

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