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ABSTRACT
What began in 2004 as a peace education program anchored in the Ciwara community school in the town of Kati just outside the capitol city of Bamako has become a longer-term peacebuilding project now located in camps for internally displaced persons in Mali. This project has been led by students and faculty from the Institut Universitaire pour Technologie of the Université des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de Bamako, in partnership with students and faculty in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities of Michigan State University. Together they have created Cours Collaboratifs Éducation à la Paix whose primary activity thus far has been a peace building project through photovoice. The project in these camps for internally displaced persons is designed to empower Malian university student mentors and their young mentees. Mentors and mentees are assisted by professional Malian photographers, staff from several national and international non-governmental organizations, and Michigan State University students and faculty using a video conferencing software. This essay describes the evolution of the CCÉP photovoice project, some of the ethical and political challenges we have encountered, and its potential for future everyday peacebuilding dialogs.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 ‘On April 27, Mali’s Transitional President Assimi Goita met with Algeria’s Foreign Affairs minister Ahmed Attaf in hopes of getting the peace process back on track and to recommit to the 2015 Algiers Peace Agreement between Tuareg rebels and the state. A spokesman for the Coordination of the Azawad Movements (CMA), one of the leading groups who signed the agreement, criticized the meeting, and said that the CMA would not support what they considered a partial selection of the terms of the agreement. The CMA spokesperson described the situation in northern Mali as ‘spiraling out of control,’ and accused the government of refusing to recognize this fact. Since 2015, the peace agreement has only been partially implemented, and rebel groups announced the suspension of their participation in the agreement in 2022, citing the increasing number of attacks by jihadists and the government’s slow process in implementing reforms.’ Sahel Research Group, Weekly News Brief, 29 April–4 May 2023. [email protected].
2 See “Mali: Insecurity and lack of funding force over half a million children out of school.” Norwegian Refugee Coucil. 16 June 2022. https://www.nrc.no/news/2022/june/mali-insecurity-and-lack-of-funding-force-over-half-a-million-children-out-of-school/#:~:text=Since%20the%20beginning%20of%20the,of%20funds%20received%20in%202022. ‘As of 31 March 2022, 1,700 schools remained closed in Mali affecting access to education for more than half a million children.’
3 In Benin we are working on a similar photovoice project for young girls (https://threesisters.org and https://batongafoundation.org). In Senegal, we are working with colleagues at the Universite Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (http://ucad.sn) to institute a university-based community engagement program modeled on the ULSHB-MSU CCÉP collaboration.
4 12 April 2023, UN News https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/04/1135587
6 We use the word ‘everyday’ in this essay to modify a set of related terms (peace, power, peacebuilding, peace education) but do not discuss how they differ from the dominant notions of liberal peace, liberal peacebuilding, neo-liberal state building, and liberal education. For an overview of the ‘resurgence of the everyday as a concern for peacebuilding,’ see Richmond Citation2009, 580.
7 We have discussed these activities leading up to the current photovoice project in more detail elsewhere (Esquith and Tamboura Citation2019; Citation2023, Citationforthcoming).
8 Scientific Animations Without Borders (SAWBO). https://sawbo-animations.org/peace-and-justice.
9 For an informative interview with Seydou Camara, see ‘Bamako Revisited: A Yamarist’s Philosophy,’ People’s Stories Project. https://www.psp-culture.com/photography/bamako-revisited-a-yamarists-philosophy/.
10 For example, Malian Institute of Research Action for Peace – IMRAP (https://imrap-mali.org/) is part of a larger international non-governmental organization, Interpeace (https://interpeace.org). Among IMRAP’s many local initiatives, their ‘Mobile Dialogue Unit’ in Mali has been of greatest interest to the photovoice project.
11 The Ecole de Maintien de la Paix Alioune Bondin Beye located in Bamako, Mali provides courses for peacekeeping forces, police, military and civilian personnel from throughout West Africa. https://empbamako.org
12 See two articles in a longer series of in-depth interviews conducted by the reporters from the New Humanitarian published in May and August 2022 (Kleinfeld and Tapily Citation2022a; Citation2022b). In a zoom conversation with CCEP on 23 January 2023, Kleinfeld described how these obstacles to local dialogues in IDP camps in Mali were continuing.
13 See the Report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement, ‘Shining a Light on Displacement: A Vision for the Future,’ September 2021 https://internaldisplacement-panel.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/HLP-report-WEB.pdf. https://www.internal-displacement.org/global-report/grid2021/. https://www.internal-displacement.org/countries/mali
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Stephen L. Esquith
Stephen L. Esquith is a professor of political theory and ethics in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities and the Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University. He is the author of Intimacy and Spectacle (Cornell, 1994) and The Political Responsibilities of Everyday Bystanders (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010) on mass violence and democratic political education. He was a senior Fulbright scholar in Poland and in Mali, and he has written on children's human rights, peacebuilding, the role of film in democratic political education, human security, and philosophy for children. He is currently working with colleagues on several peace education projects in Mali in collaboration with the Université des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de Bamako and La Commission Vérité, Justice, et Réconciliation du Mali. He also is involved in peace education projects for refugee youth in Michigan.
Weloré Tamboura
Weloré Tamboura received her Ph.D. in Information and Communication Sciences – University Grenoble-Alpes (France), 2016. Since October 2018 she has been a Lecturer at Institute for Technology at the University of Letters and Human Sciences of Bamako (ULSHB), Mali. As a specialist in information and communication sciences, she uses information and communication technologies as means to bring out social change through interpersonal exchanges and community dialogs. She has also worked with the artists, local language experts, and animators in Mali to ensure quality and uniformity in the video animations. Her role in the proposed project will be to bring the technicians, artists, and content providers together to ensure a coherent and effective online version of our simulation game, the Mali Peace Game, originally developed as an in-person game for the Ciwara School and the Institute for Popular Education, Kati, Mali.