Making Peace Visible

“Understanding Dignity means understanding a profound aspect of what it means to be human.” - Dr. Donna Hicks Guest Donna Hicks has worked in conflict resolution around the world, including Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka, and Northern Ireland. A few years back, she realized that all conflicts shared an essential commonality:  someone’s dignity had been violated. This episode explores where dignity vi...

On Making Peace Visible, we cover national peace processes like the one unfolding in Colombia. But we also interview journalists who’ve made their careers covering violent conflict. So what’s the connecting thread? This episode gets at that question– looking through the lens of the practice of Peace Journalism. Guest Steven Youngblood is a professor of communications and peace studies at Park Univ...

On September 16, 2022, a twenty-two year old Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini died in police custody. The Tehran police said she was arrested for not wearing her headscarf properly. A few days after the arrest, a photo surfaced of Amini in a hospital bed. The police claim she died suddenly of a heart problem, but many Iranians believe she was beaten or killed. In the weeks following, a protest move...

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...

Five years ago, the government of Colombia signed a historic peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, putting an end to a fifty-year civil war. The agreement allowed FARC members to turn in their weapons and begin to live as civilians. The Colombian Truth Commission was established to shed light on decades of atrocities and human rights violations that were...

Our guest this episode has some advice for international journalists working abroad: "If you work with local journalists, give them a byline - they're not your free fixers. The security of locals is more important than any story. And  YOU, international journalist, you are not the story."  And she would know. Award-winning journalist and communications consultant Zaina Erhaim comes from Idlib in n...

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 ABC, CNN, and Al Jazeera. In those roles, he’s had to explain complicated conflicts - in the form o...

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,...

Herds of goats, pomegranate trees in bloom, and ancient architecture are just some of the things you might witness while walking The Abraham Path, a collection of walking trails established in the past fifteen years through parts of Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, and Iraq. But the trail is also engineered for human experiences. Connecting cities and villages, it offers the opportunity t...

When Colombian filmmaker Juan Carlos Borerro worked on films or TV shows in the countryside as a young man, the crew would have to stop shooting and run from the FARC when the guerillas came near. Everyone he knew had a family member who had been kidnapped or killed, and he never thought he would live to see an end to the war in his country. So when the government and the FARC forged a peace accor...

This is an interview with Nina Streich, the Director and Founder of the Global Peace Film Festival, which operates out of Orlando, Florida. Nina and her partner, Kelly DeVine have probably seen more films on peace than any two people on the planet. Nina talks about the nature of films on peace and what motivates filmmakers to make them. This year, the festival will be celebrating its 20th annivers...

Mari Fitzduff , is a peacebuilder and the author of a fascinating new book, Our Brains at War: The Neuroscience of Conflict and Peacebuilding . Mari’s book is deeply relevant to the polarization and violence that is happening right now in America. Our Brains at War explains a lot about the brain chemistry that’s driving the anger and violence we are seeing, almost every day in the U.S. Making Peac...

This is an interview with Julia Roig, Chairman of the Board of The Alliance for Peacebuilding and Founder of The Horizons Project. The Horizons Project is dedicated to developing new narratives to help make the peacebuilding process more accessible to the public.  Making Peace Visible is brought to you by the War Stories, Peace Stories Project , working to connect journalists and peace-builders to...