Art and culture are becoming increasingly important in peacebuilding. When conventional forms of diplomacy or economic aid reach their limits, artistic approaches as well as methods from pop culture can offer constructive complements - but also exacerbate conflicts.
According to the Global Peace Index 2021, global peacefulness has declined over the past fifteen years. As conflicts have become more hybrid, hybrid approaches are playing an increasingly important role in peace research and peacebuilding. Artists and entertainers are responding to the conflicts of their time through diverse and unconventional means. Eastern Europe in particular, as a region often overlooked and marginalized in the West, offers promising and little explored examples for investigation in this regard.
In three subprojects, the research project explores how art and popular culture in Eastern Europe (Poland, Republic of Moldova, Armenia) react to three different types of conflicts ("culture wars", frozen conflicts, war). Especially in activism, art and popular culture are often closely intertwined. And it is only in popular culture that peacebuilding can have a broad impact. Together with local partners, we will investigate in an open-ended way which forms of art and popular culture contribute to peaceful conflict transformation and which, on the contrary, exacerbate conflicts. Using a variety of methods from art, cultural and visual studies as well as artistic research, the researchers address the site-specific conditions and the respective types of conflict. The results will be compiled by the project partner Artas Foundation in a practice-oriented manual.