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ABSTRACT∞
Scholars and practitioners of transitional justice have begun to seek alternative approaches in the arts and culture as a means to pursue core goals of peace and reconciliation. This Special Issue asks what creative approaches can do that conventional transitional justice mechanisms cannot, and invites us to reflect on the possibilities, and the potential challenges, risks and constraints. In response, this article discusses two arts-based initiatives in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one involving a national museum, the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and one with a Bosnian peacebuilding organization, the Post Conflict Research Centre, that provided opportunities for plural, dialogical and localized forms of transitional justice. Analyzing the question of what worked in these two distinct initiatives, we highlight four common qualities and offer them as non-prescriptive ‘good-practice principles’ in strategic arts-based peacebuilding practice: iterative working over time; carving space for plural, locally driven narratives; amplifying the capacities and networks of local actors; and context-driven project design.
Participatory methods seek to counter the extractive nature of mainstream research methods by putting control into the hands of research subjects. But participation itself does not guarantee against extraction. There is a tension between the desire for researcher-control and the prerogative of community action in participatory methods. How can researchers committed to participation manage this tension? In this paper, we draw on the concepts of “collaborative” and “action-oriented” participatory research to describe how integrating mixed-methodologies can help different research stakeholders attain desirable, fruitful and meaningful levels of ownership and build inclusive rigour. Drawing on our work with participatory indicators and photovoice with conflict affected communities in rural Colombia, we demonstrate how combining different kinds of participatory research methods—in this case, non-visual and visual research—creates opportunities to attend to the sometimes conflicting goals of robust research, policy change and community action. Under the broad umbrella of participatory research, collaborative approaches like participatory indicators and action-oriented approaches like photovoice complement and amplify each other in such settings, embracing complexity and catalyzing multiple ways of ‘knowing-for-action’. The result is participatory research that is attuned to the complexities of conflict-affected settings, inclusively rigorous and potentially transformative.
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