Street Art and Peace

Ioannis Tellidis

College of International Studies, Kyung Hee University, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea.

The turn of the century has seen the establishment of the Critical Peace Research agenda, whose approach to the study and practice of peace is diametrically antithetical to the problem-solving approaches of earlier times. Peace is not (and should not be) merely the victor’s dominance and the absence of violence that comes with it, as implied in realist frameworks, nor is it only the product of international collaboration facilitated by institutions, norms and ethical prerogatives, as argued by liberal theories. Instead, peace should be looked at and understood for what it is: a messy (Perera 2017) and cacophonic (Shinko 2008) process precisely because it involves a plethora of actors, active at multiple levels, and with diverse interests, agendas and needs. This plurality has led scholars to shift their focus from governmental and/or international contexts that constitute the privileged status quo and to begin examining the role and agency of the ‘everyday’,1 often through interdisciplinary frameworks such as the aesthetics (Bleiker 2001, 2009; Rancière 2010; Frost 2010).

Due to its character (unsolicited; public, thus accessible; in many cases illegal, thus ephemeral), street art is one form of aesthetics that acts as a vehicle for the voices of those marginalised. Although ‘graffiti’ is but one type of street art, the two terms have been conflated in the past decades and are now used interchangeably (see McAuliffe 2012) – this chapter will also follow this path. What is interesting with all street art in general, and graffiti in particular, is that the space(s) and place(s) where it occurs, as its name suggests, are at the core of everyday life (the streets). It is also true that macro-level issues (such as peace, economic inequality, social justice) and micro-level concerns (demands to free political prisoners, or prosecute corrupt officials) often co-exist in street artworks (Majid 2018: 211). During the Arab Spring protests in Egypt, for example, ‘choices of location, symbolism, and artistic form constitute[d] particular responses to general economic, political, and social configurations of the Egyptian state’ (ibid.).

Examining street art as an integral part of the everyday allows us to evaluate the ways in which it is used and utilised in order to vocalise marginalised actors and promote alternative, non-traditional ways of thinking and doing peace and security. The following section looks at four cases of communities and individuals affected by war and violence and how they have utilised street art to make their view(s) (or situation, more broadly) known to the rest of the world. These cases are not offered here as examples of successful conflict transformation or even peacebuilding. Instead, they serve to demonstrate that the ‘everyday’ is not as voiceless or, indeed, as weak as dominant theories assume it to be, and that street art interventions do have the potential to alter policies and decisions at the macro-level. As such, the below may offer some insights for the methodological, ontological and epistemological agenda of Critical Peace Research. Using these cases as a vehicle, the chapter will then contextualise the concept of the everyday and examine the ways in which it carries its agency and its potential to affect international situations. Finally, this will then be followed by an analysis of the street as the space and the place where art happens, and the implications that this has for critical approaches to peace research.

Street art and peace

Yemen

In September 2012, Yemeni graffiti artist Murad Subay began painting stencils of the faces of the people who were forcibly disappeared by the country’s security agencies since the 1970s (Hammond 2012; Alviso-Marino 2017) – a campaign he called ‘The Walls Remember Their Faces’. The portraits were accompanied by the person’s name and the date it happened, with some of them also containing the words “enforced disappearance”. This is perhaps the most impactful case of street art as it led to ‘[t]he creation of a special committee to investigate cases of enforced disappearance, the discussion over the elaboration of a transitional justice law, and the attention of the Human Rights Minister to promote debate at the institutional level’ (Alviso-Marino 2017: 127). More importantly, thanks to the massive participation it generated, it resulted in locating alive some of those individuals that were forcibly disappeared.