Making Peace Visible

Western media has often referred to India as the world’s largest democracy. But during the last decade, the world has witnessed the decline of many democratic institutions in India. In a recent Time Magazine article our guest Suchitra Vijayan questions whether India can still be called a democracy. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government have been especially harsh towards critics of the re...

On Making Peace Visible we usually focus on stories -- narratives about peace and conflict that are told in the news, on social media, and shared in our collective zeitgeist. We’ve seen examples of how storytelling can both stoke the fire of war and encourage peaceful dialogue. In this episode, we look at a different, but related way of creating space for peace: design.  Our guest Cynthia Smith is...

One way to cover war is to follow the road offered by the dominant army. In Afghanistan, that often meant journalists were embedded with U.S. or NATO troops, and saw the war and the world around it through their eyes.  Guest Bette Dam is a Dutch journalist who covered the war in Afghanistan for 15 years. She began her coverage in 2006, embedded with the Dutch troops fighting there. She’s the autho...

We talk a lot on this show about the reasons why peace and conflict resolution aren’t more visible in the news media and our public conversation. Our past guests have presented a variety of explanations: TV news segments are too short to talk about much beyond dramatic events, like battles and coups. For-profit media doesn't cover peace efforts because there's not enough interest in peace to attra...

If you're interested in learning about how peace gets made and unmade and then remade, Colombia is an amazing laboratory. Guest Elizabeth Dickinson is a senior analyst with the Crisis Group in Colombia. Dickinson spends her days in discussion with communities most affected by the civil war, as well as former FARC members. She and her colleagues use information gathered in the field to make policy...

After the peace agreement their leaders signed with the Colombian government in September 2016, members of the FARC guerilla group began turning in their weapons to the UN. In exchange, rank-and-file members received amnesty for acts of violence they committed during the country’s long civil war. They could leave their jungle encampments and rejoin society – go to work or school like any other cit...

A main premise of our podcast is that peace efforts are invisible in the mainstream media, or certainly not visible enough. But one place that has grabbed at least some of the world’s attention, is the peace process in Colombia. In 2016, after repeated failed negotiations, the FARC guerilla organization finally signed a peace deal with the government. After fifty years of war, militants turned in...

“The one embedded bias that we definitely have when we get up every day to cover the news anew is that we're biased for democracy. Let's just admit that. So if you're biased for democracy, then you have to be biased for racial justice, because racial justice is embedded in the democratic promise.” - Deborah Douglas Some of the most polarized debates in the United States today stem from issues of r...

Our guest this episode, Daniel Estrin, is an international correspondent for NPR based in Jerusalem. There is a human element present throughout Daniel Estrin’s body of work that places listeners in the shoes of ordinary Palestinians and Israelis. Fluent in both Hebrew and Arabic and having lived in the region for over fifteen years, Daniel has a keen ear for both the suffering and the tenacity th...

In the mainstream news, we might not hear much about a political movement in America, or in another country, unless it “turns violent.” Building an effective protest movement takes planning, a shared commitment and coordination, and most movements are explicitly nonviolent. In fact, it’s often people unaffiliated with movements who are responsible for violence at protests.  The situation frustrate...

“Weapons and war do not keep us safe. Instead, we should put our money and time into programs that ensure real safety and security for everyone, like affordable health care, a just judicial system, and economic opportunities.” Americans were asked if they agree or disagree with the above statement in a 2022 poll conducted by the American Friends Service Committee , an advocacy organization that pr...

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...

The right to peaceful protest is considered fundamental in democracies around the world.  Nonviolent protest movements, like the Gandhian movement for independence in India or The Civil Rights Movement in the United States are celebrated in history books. Yet if you go looking for coverage of nonviolent protest in the news media, most of the time you’ll come up short.  Guest Maria Stephan is a pol...

It’s no secret that digital technology, in particular social media, stokes division in society and sometimes provokes violent conflict. Toxic polarization prevents us from solving problems, from making decisions together, from being constructive in our approach.  In In this episode, we’ll explore the dangers of social media, but we’ll also talk about ways technology can be used to build bridges an...

Today, most agree that the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the war that followed was a major misstep. But in the leadup to the invasion and early months of the conflict, a majority of Americans, as well as our media and political leaders, stood in favor. What happened?  Guest Babak Bahador is a scholar who studies the relationship between peace, conflict, and the media – kind of like the academic versio...

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...

This episode gets to the heart of what our project, War Stories Peace Stories, is all about: How do you talk about peacebuilding in a way where people will pay attention and feel compelled to take action? Our guest Elizabeth Hume is Executive Director of the Alliance for Peacebuilding , the umbrella organization for NGOs working on conflict resolution, bridge-building, and reconciliation in the US...

What does it mean to be Ukrainian? What is Ukraine’s significance to Europe? What is the war with Russia really about? Why should the world pay attention?  These are the kind of big-picture questions journalists Anastasiia Lapatina and Jakub Parusinksi tackle on their podcast, Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World. Jakub and Anastasiia (aka Nastya) founded the Kyiv Independent in 2021 as part of...

Photographer Anastasia Taylor-Lind and writer Alisa Sopova create intimate, accessible portraits of Ukrainian civilians living close to the frontlines of the Russian invasion. Sometimes their subjects are picnicking in a park or tending a garden. Other times, they’re repairing a ceiling damaged by shelling or waiting for departure on an evacuation train. Anastasia and Alisa have been working toget...

Whether you get your news from social media, read an email digest from a trusted website, turn on the TV, or open up a newspaper, the world through the lens of the news media can feel like a pretty depressing place. But according to our guest, Solutions Journalism Network co-founder David Bornstein, that’s a distorted view of reality. Solutions Journalism provides an alternative model, actively se...

Paul Solman, a business, economics, and occasional arts reporter for the PBS NewsHour since 1985, is passionate about bridging the political and cultural divides that Americans face – between right and left, rich and poor, rural and urban, and others. He channels some of that passion into helping run a nonprofit called the American Exchange Project – a domestic exchange program where high school s...

If you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably concerned by the level of polarization we’re seeing in societies around the world.   We can point fingers at social media, the news media, political parties, fear mongering leaders, poor education, broken political systems… the list is long. The divides can seem so vast, the problems so huge. It’s easy to retreat into a huddle with people who se...

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...

Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel is on a mission to bring about social change through food. A Palestinian Israeli citizen who operates in both Arab and Jewish cultures, she says “being stuck in the middle is the best place to be.” After winning the Israeli cooking competition show MasterChef– the first Muslim Arab to do so– she founded an annual food festival in the city of Haifa to showcase dishes with roo...

In the news media, war receives more attention than peace. But some wars get more attention than others. From November 2020 to November 2022, a civil war bloodier than Russia's war in Ukraine was fought in Tigray, a region in northern Ethiopia. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost, and millions were displaced. Yet depending on where you get your news, you may have heard very little about it. ...