Making Peace Visible

 Ali Abu Awwad is hard to summarize. He grew up with a mother in the PLO, and served jail time for his role in the resistance during the First Palestinian Intifada. In an Israeli prison, Ali learned the power of nonviolence when he and his mother went on hunger strike to see each other. After his brother was killed by Israeli soldiers, his family met with a group of bereaved Jewish parents. Awwad...

Most people feel that peacebuilding – resolving conflicts and decreasing violence –  is a positive thing. But as we've said many times on this podcast, peacebuilding is virtually invisible in the world.  Today’s guest, veteran mediator and peacebuilder Mark Gerzon, says to strengthen peace and reconciliation efforts, we need to make peacebuilding mainstream. And to do that, the reasons behind the...

Social entrepreneurs are a unique breed of people, capable of conjuring up a vision, a new way of doing something, a solution to a problem; but they also have the skill and the determination to overcome all the obstacles to implement their vision. John Marks is a remarkable social entrepreneur who, with his wife Susan Collins Marks, built the largest peace building organization in the world, Searc...

Imagine living next door to a person who murdered your father, raped your sister, or even killed your child. This was the case for many people in Sierra Leone who endured a  brutal civil war from 1991 to 2002: the majority of the 50,000 who died were those killed by their own neighbors.  While working with a program that facilitates ritual reconciliation processes in Sierra Leone, a process known...

On July 28, 2024, a teenage boy carried out a fatal stabbing attack on a dance class in Southport, England. Three little girls were killed, and eight other children and two adults were injured. Police arrested and detained the assailant. They didn't release his name, because he was under 18.  A user on X posted that the suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker named Ali Al-Shakati. A prominent YouTuber...

Gloria Laker Aciro was a teenager when war upended her family’s life in Northern Uganda. The Lord's Resistance Army, led by the infamous Joseph Kony, were known for their brutality, and for kidnapping children and making them child soldiers or child brides.  As a young displaced person, Aciro became a journalist so the world would know about the suffering in Northern Uganda: The abductions, killin...

Close your eyes and think of the word “war” or “gun violence.” What’s the first image that comes up? Maybe it’s news footage of the wars in Gaza or Ukraine. Or maybe it’s a scene from a movie like Hotel Rwanda or Bridge on the River Kwai, or a shoutout in any number of crime and cop dramas.   Scripted storytelling, with its ability to get up close and personal with human emotions and struggles, al...

“The United Nations was not created in order to deliver us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell.” - Dag Hammarskjöld. “ To Save Us From Hell ” is a new weekly news and analysis podcast about the UN. Mark Leon Goldberg, a veteran global affairs journalist and editor of the news outlets UN Dispatch and Global Dispatches, and Anjali Dayal, a political science professor and author at Fordham U...

On February 14, 2018, a former student opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, with an assault rifle he’d purchased legally.  Hiding in a janitor’s closet, David Hogg recorded his classmates on his phone.  "I interviewed my classmates so that if we didn't make it out of there, hopefully our voices would carry on,” Hogg told NPR.” And it wouldn't be possible for th...

How do you measure peace in a country? Do you look at the rates of violent crime? Assess the justice system? What about freedom of the press, the health of the economy, or general happiness?   Today's guest, Steve Killelea, is the founder and Executive Chairman of the Institute for Economics and Peace , an internationally renowned think tank. Each year, IEP publishes the Global Peace Index and the...

Vanessa Bassil is the founder and president of the Media Association for Peace, and has personally trained journalists and journalism students in Lebanon and other countries in the Middle East. She is currently in graduate school at the University of Bonn in Germany, working towards a PhD in Peace Journalism.  Peace Journalism, the guiding practice behind Media Association for Peace, (MAP) is when...

William Ury is one of the world’s most influential peacebuilders and experts on negotiation. He advised Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos in the lead up to that country's historic 2016 peace agreement with the FARC, and played a key role in de-escalating nuclear tensions between the U.S. and North Korea in 2017. Getting to Yes, which Ury co-wrote with Roger Fisher back in 1981, is the world’s...

When India-based reporter Amy Yee got a call from her editor to cover a press conference with the Dalai Lama, she stopped what she was doing and booked the next flight. She was headed for Dharamsala, where the Buddhist leader and thousands of Tibetan refugees make their home. It was March 2008, and the Dalai Lama was responding to violence in Tibet, where demonstrations against Chinese rule led to...

“Humans are not rational beings with emotions. In fact, we're just the opposite. We're emotionally based beings who can only think rationally when we feel that our identities, as we see them, are understood and valued by others.” Those words from neuroscientist Bob Deutch triggered a lightbulb moment in the mind of Tim Phillips, a veteran peacebuilder and educator. This is what the field of confli...

Intergenerational trauma, also called historical trauma, is defined as cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma experiences. The brutal October 7th attacks by Hamas inside of Israel, and the IDF’s seemingly relentless assault on Gaza have captured the world’s attention for the past six months. In this episode, we...

In the news media, war gets more headlines than peace, conflict more airtime than reconciliation. And in our polarized world, reporting on conflict in a way that frames conflicts as us vs. them, good vs. evil often serves to dig us in deeper. On Making Peace Visible, we speak with journalists and peacebuilders who help us understand the human side of conflicts and peace efforts around the world. F...

After over two decades as a journalist, including ten years covering terrorism and disasters for TIME Magazine , Amanda Ripley thought she understood conflict. But when momentum started to build around the candidacy of Donald Trump, she questioned what she thought she knew. Ripley interviewed psychologists, mediators, and people who had made it out of seemingly intractable conflicts for her book,...

We want to learn more about our listeners. Take this 3-minute survey to help us improve the show!  Reza Sayah is an Iranian-American journalist, currently based in Tehran. He’s reported on major events around the world including the Ukrainian Revolution of 2004, the Second Iraq War, and the Egyptian Revolution.  Reza has spent much of his career working for major broadcast news networks including...

As of May 2023, there were an estimated 110 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees .  Many are escaping wars, gang violence or repressive regimes, others are fleeing climate change impacts. Some are leaving collapsed economies where they can’t feed their families. How journalists cover refugees and immigration has a major impact on public pe...

On Making Peace Visible, we are always questioning the mantra, if it bleeds, it leads. Boston’s Charles Stuart murder case is a classic example of what can go horribly wrong when you follow that mantra.     Charles Stuart was a father-to-be from the suburbs of Boston. Shortly after attending a birthing class in the city with his wife, Carol, Charles Stuart placed a 911 call. The couple had both be...

In this episode we’re featuring a recent interview with our host, documentary filmmaker and lifelong peace activist Jamil Simon on This is My Silver Lining, a podcast about ordinary people doing extraordinary things, with an emphasis on life’s unexpected twists. Jamil has certainly had plenty of those. In 1990 he took a job in Tunisia designing communication strategies to promote water conservatio...

Making Peace Visible is a show about how the media covers peace and conflict. One of the major reasons we make it is because peace gets so little coverage in the news media. When we do hear news about peace, it's usually focused on signing an agreement. When that’s done, the cameras, and the world's attention move on.   But that handshake moment is just a fragment in a peace process. It often take...

Between democracy and autocracy is an anocracy, defined by political scientists as a country that has elements of both forms of government — usually one that’s on the way up to becoming a full democracy or on the way down to full autocracy. This messy middle is the state when civil wars are most likely to start, and the one that requires the most diligence from that country’s citizens to prevent a...

In the United States, about one sixth of the federal budget goes to defense. This year the country spent more on the military than any year since 2001 – over $816 billion. Why does spending continue to rise in the wake of US withdrawal from Afghanistan?  Why are many Americans so passive in the face of the massive expenditures for defense that crowd out spending on human needs like education, heal...

Trey Kay knows both sides of America's partisan divide intimately. He was born and raised  in a conservative family in Charleston, West Virginia. As a young man he moved to New York City, where he later became a producer on the arts and culture program Studio 360, at WNYC.  These days, Trey splits his time between New York and West Virginia to make Us & Them, an award-winning  narrative podcast ab...