Making Peace Visible

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. ...

“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...