Photography and everyday peacebuilding. Examining the impact of photographing everyday peace in Colombia

ABSTRACT

Arts-based peacebuilding has gained attention, but evidence and research of its impact is fragmented and, in particular, the relationship between photography and peace is underexplored. This article examines photovoice as a tool for supporting everyday and community peace in conflict-affected communities. It identifies four ways that everyday peace indicator photovoice projects in Colombia bolstered community peace: by engendering healing, building territorial identity, enabling intergenerational dialogue, and catalysing action. These impacts emerged as photovoice built on enabling factors, extending existing community peacebuilding capacities, concerns and interventions. Reflecting on the constraints and tensions around working with photography in security-sensitive environments, we propose that participatory photography makes up a vital component of the peace photography genre. We argue that the careful, strategic harnessing of photovoice, and the visualisation of everyday peace, creates opportunities for raising the voices of conflict-affected communities, building shared imaginaries and nurturing dialogue, healing and action.

KEYWORDS:

• Photovoice
• visual methods
• everyday peace
• arts-based peacebuilding
• participatory photography
• community peacebuilding

The leading peace theorist, John Paul Lederach, insists that the creative process is ‘the wellspring that feeds the building of peace’¹ and recent years have seen a surge in interest in the role that the arts, visuality and creative media have to play in transitional justice and peacebuilding processes.² Participatory arts and media have long been employed as a tool during and after conflict, and research attests to their capacity to heal trauma, rebuild relationships, support reconciliation and imagine shared futures³; all elements understood to be key components of positive forms of peace. However, there is a still a fragmented evidence base as to their impact, questions about what works⁴ and issues with evaluation and funding.⁵ Scholars point to the limited reach of arts-based interventions (in terms of their small number of participants and scalability) and their failure to impact systemic or structural change.⁶ The lack of documentation of participatory arts and media projects has prevented the accurate assessment of these activities.⁷ In this sense, the value of media and arts-based peacebuilding is still to be fully understood and realised.⁸ Specifically, in relation to the visual image, recent scholarship has urged researchers to examine the neglected connections between photography and peace.⁹ The genre of peace photography is concerned with how photography can represent peace and how such representations can contribute to or anticipate peace.¹⁰ However, more research is required to elaborate what might meaningfully be constructed and designated as peace photography.¹¹

This article explores how photovoice, a participatory visual action research method, impacts community-level peace and resilience in communities dealing with ongoing violence. It critically considers the opportunities and constraints of participatory photography as an arts-based peacebuilding tool and how it qualifies as a form of ‘everyday’ peace photography. It discusses empirical research on two photovoice projects that are part of Everyday Peace Indicators’ (EPI) work in rural Antioquia, Colombia, where members of conflict-affected communities took photographs of signs and indicators of everyday peace and exhibited them on the buildings and homes around their communities. Building on existing research that highlights the peace potentialities of participatory arts and media, it identifies four areas in which photovoice worked as a catalyst to amplify community level and everyday peacebuilding processes: by engendering individual and collective healing; building territorial identity and pride; enabling intergenerational dialogue and catalysing community actions that contributed to positive forms of everyday peace.

This research contributes to the literature on peace photography and arts-based peacebuilding and further expands the interconnections between the ‘local-visual’ turns¹² in peace and conflict scholarship by critically examining how photovoice supports everyday and community peace within communities living with ongoing forms of violence. We argue that participatory forms of image-making and community-driven photography make up a vital component of the ‘profound re-imagining of photographic form’¹³ that peace photography requires. Photovoice is a participatory visual action research method first pioneered by the health researcher Caroline Wang, through which communities use photography to identify, document, reflect on and narrate issues of concern from their daily lives to different audiences.¹⁴ Everyday peace, those ‘bottom up peace and survival strategies’ employed by ordinary people living with conflict and violence in their daily lives, highlights agency and resilience within conflict-affected communities and is viewed as a key building block of peace formation.¹⁵ However, everyday peace is largely invisible.

Taking charge of the camera, the photovoice participants make visible the signs of everyday peace and the diverse elements of what matters to peace in their communities, driving conversations about peace and how it is and can be built. Their images honour day-to-day resistance and loss, document survival strategies, celebrate community values, voice ongoing issues and appeal for justice. They point to what peace is (what sustains peace) and to what it could be (what still needs to be realised). The images themselves provide valuable opportunities to learn about the substance and details of peace in Colombian communities. However, our focus is on the performative effects of the images and image-making process within those communities and their contributions to healing, dialogue and the building of a common identity and worldview which feeds resilience and inspires ‘moral imagination’, the critical capacity to imagine something rooted in the real world but that does not yet exist.¹⁶

After more than 50 years of successive waves of armed conflict, Colombia is in the process of implementing a historic peace accord, signed in 2016, between the Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC). However, despite a model of demobilisation and disarmament which is seeing former FARC combatants reintegrating into society and multiple national-level institutions and programmes geared towards peace and reconciliation goals, the gains of the peace process are advancing slowly. The implementation of the peace agreement has been impacted by significant budget cuts, widespread social discontent and a global pandemic. New illegal armed groups have taken control of the areas abandoned by the FARC and compete for territory and illicit business.¹⁷ Local actors involved in the reconciliation process face insecurity and threats related to criminal violence, rearmament, and drug trafficking, and there has been a steady increase in threats and deadly attacks against local social leaders, former combatants, and civilians.¹⁸ For many rural communities, like those involved in this research, who have been directly affected over generations by the conflict and continuing overlapping forms of chronic, historical and criminal violence, peace is still far from a day-to-day reality. As Colombians live through ‘multiple transitionalities’,¹⁹ they exist in a liminal space between peace and conflict as armed actors still exert a control over their lives and the peace agreement has yet to translate into any significant material transformations.

Building peace when levels of violence are still high is a challenge in a country like Colombia as it emerges from decades of protracted and complex social conflict.²⁰ In this context, there are limits to the capacity of arts-based initiatives to directly impact peace in terms of bringing an end to continuing forms of direct and structural violence.²¹ However, Colombian researchers such as Yolanda Sierra speak to the value of the arts in enabling communities to assert their rights in the midst of armed conflict, describing artistic interventions as forms of symbolic reparation or ‘aesthetic litigation’.²² Our findings demonstrate that the strategic and intentional use of a form of photovoice that builds on enabling factors can strengthen and contribute to everyday peace within conflict-affected communities through re-building relations and dialogue, fostering resilience and healing and catalysing community organising. These are small scale, emergent peace outcomes that concern impacts at the level of individual participants and within a small group and community. However, civil resistance in Colombia has been shown to transform the destructive violence of the internal conflict by developing civilian’s capacities to better resist the impacts of armed groups and to drive community-based change, healing and reconciliation.²³ Amplifying the capacities of community members to operate as peace agents and to drive peace from within communities moulds the ‘social imagination of the future’ that is key to the reconfiguration that needs to happen in Colombia as it transitions from decades of conflict and violence.²⁴

This article frames photovoice as a form of everyday peace photography that builds on existing peace interventions and community processes to strengthen and complement everyday peace by making it visible. We argue that photography can contribute to community peacebuilding but highlight the uncertain, negotiated and constrained character of these interventions especially when there are limits to what can be safely seen and shown. The positive effects of participatory arts are not a given, and challenges and blockages exist.²⁵ We are interested in ‘the conditions of possibility for peace photography’²⁶ and the constraints that exist around how photography can meaningfully contribute to peace. We argue that in communities living with ongoing violence, photography can carve out an in-between space where subtle forms of civil resistance can emerge which allow for citizens to challenge violence and pursue peace whilst also protecting themselves.²⁷

In what follows, we first discuss the concept of everyday peace before considering the existing literature on peace photography, the applied use of images in peacebuilding and sketching our framing of photovoice as a form of everyday peace photography. Next, we describe the design, methods and activities of the Everyday Peace Indicators Photovoice project and our impact research. We then offer a discussion of our findings on the community-level impact of the photovoice projects and in the final section we critically discuss the security constraints and tensions of working with photovoice in Colombia to reflect on the constraints and opportunities for everyday forms of peace photography.

Everyday peace

There has been a long-standing sociological concern with the everyday²⁸ the actions and behaviours by which ordinary individuals and communities navigate the day-to-day and a focus on how, in these ways of operating, people reclaim autonomy from the pervasive forces of politics, culture and economics.²⁹ Within peace and conflict studies, the concept of everyday peace has risen to prominence as an extension of the local turn that challenges dominant modes of thinking and acting about peace³⁰ and calls for local capacity and ownership to be essential parts of more effective and emancipatory forms of peacebuilding.³¹ Peace scholars highlight that populations directly affected by conflict play a key role in the building and sustaining of peace.³² Everyday peace refers to the routine practices and norms, which are continually negotiated, adapted and employed by people in conflict affected and deeply divided societies to minimise and avoid violence and conflict. They encompass ordinary people’s coping strategies, survival mechanisms and stances and modes of thinking are part of day-to-day forms of sociality, reciprocity and solidarity.³³

The everyday peace literature puts the onus on ordinary people’s agency, resilience and resistance in conflict and post-conflict settings. Scholars argue it represents a new theorisation of peacebuilding in which victims are viewed as agents in social transformation.³⁴ Mac Ginty points to the transformative potential of everyday peace as a form of ‘everyday peace power’. He argues that under certain circumstances, ordinary people and small acts of everyday peace can be cumulative and develop into something more significant that disrupts the logic of conflict and provides alternatives to dominant narratives around the inevitability of violence.³⁵ This disruptive potential of everyday peace can create spaces in which other forms of peace can take root.³⁶

We are interested in the role that photography can play to complement and catalyse this transformative potential of everyday peace. However, Millar questions how everyday peace should be understood in relation to overt forms of peacebuilding. He argues that the ‘everyday’ be reserved to describe ‘pre-political’ forms of action that are not the result of a conscious will to power but that may contribute to peace in unintended, organic or emergent fashions. In our research, everyday peace is best understood as a dynamic space that consists of varying hybrid modes of emergent or ‘pre-political’ and explicit or politically driven actions. Elsewhere, we have argued that reconciliation can be an implicit by-product, rather than explicit outcome, of arts-based work in post-conflict settings.³⁷ The capacity of photography, and other creative interventions, to impact everyday and community-level peace lies in their ability to catalyse participation and engage people at multiple levels, both consciously and unconsciously. For this reason, understanding how photography impacts peace requires us to consider how it operates both explicitly and implicitly or, to use Millar’s terms, as both pre-political and political forms of engagement and influence.

Images and peacebuilding: peace photography and photovoice

Alongside the ‘local’ turn, a ‘visual’ turn in global politics and peace studies has focused attention on the political significance of the visual in our image-driven world and the fundamental role images now play in mediating our understandings of and responses to all aspects of peace and conflict.³⁸ Images do not only depict but they ‘do things’, shaping politics and how we see each other.³⁹ Möller has driven the conceptualisation of a new photographic genre: peace photography. He notes photojournalism’s fascination with conflict and atrocity, and points out that peace is rarely represented or when it is, it is predominantly referenced negatively, as an absence of violence.⁴⁰ This is problematic because quite apart from bolstering the impression that the world is violent and that those subject to violence are passive victims, it renders forms of positive and everyday peace invisible. Peace photography is a pluralistic concept that is as culturally specific and historically contingent as is peace itself but that requires practitioners to push the previous limits of the medium to enable the documentation of the complex lived realities of war and violence while engendering opportunities to visualise alternatives.⁴¹ What is key is that peace photography refers to the past but also points to a potentially peaceful future of what will or might be where ‘expectations of peace replace experiences of violence as the single most important aspect of life from which people, individually and collectively derive their identities’.⁴²

We propose that participatory and community-driven image-making are viewed as a significant component of the peace potentialities of photography. This is because photography taken by those communities directly affected by conflict and violence makes everyday peace, in all its complexities, visible and the performative effects of ‘doing’ photography can actively contribute to peacebuilding and the building of peace imaginaries. Möller asserts that different kinds of peace need different kinds of peace photography⁴³ and we would add different ways of doing peace photography. When everyday and community-driven peace is understood as essential to building durable peace, it requires us to conceptualise a specific form of ‘everyday’ participatory peace photography, ‘photography as an everyday practice of and for peace’,⁴⁴ that works to strengthen and catalyst community-level peace.

Möller, Ritchin and Allen point to participatory, community and citizen photography projects as forms of peaceful photography,⁴⁵ but their research primarily considers professionally produced photography by journalists and artists. This is in part because community and participatory photography initiatives can be challenging to research. They often involve small-scale initiatives that are not adequately documented. However, some peace and conflict researchers have harnessed participatory visual methods and attest to their potential as tools for conflict transformation. Britton Lykes worked with indigenous women affected by the internal conflict in Guatemala who used photography to develop a shared story of the violence that had taken place in their communities.⁴⁶ She notes that participants repeatedly described the positive effects of the photovoice project on their local community, self-understanding and self-esteem but warns against overly romantic accounts of how photography ‘gives voice’ to conflict-affected communities. Lykes notes that the participants' agendas evolved over time and what emerged through their photography was not a particular ‘voice’ but an unfolding process of becoming active players in the mediated world of self-representational politics and social struggle.⁴⁷ Smith, in her research with Bosnian women, stresses the transformative potential of photovoice as it designates participants who are ordinarily subjects with agency to own their stories.⁴⁸ In Colombia, the participatory photography project, Disparando Cámeras para La Paz, found that photography fostered ties between displaced youth (the participants) with their community and helped them process traumatic experiences.⁴⁹

Valentina Baú considers the impact of both participatory photography and video projects with youth affected by post-election violence in Kenya.⁵⁰ She emphasises the impact of image-making with participatory visual media on re-establishing relationships in divided communities by creating a shared understanding of conflict and building a view of an interconnected future. Baú draws on conflict transformation theory, to propose a framework for how participatory media interventions act as a catalyst for community dialogue that impacts personal and social changes. Baú’s framework provides a helpful ‘point of departure’⁵¹ to further elaborate the impact of participatory communication strategies on peace in other conflict and post-conflict contexts.

Extending the literature, our research considers how photovoice works as a form of everyday peace photography that strengthens and amplifies community-level peace by making the plural and specific dimensions of everyday peace visible and driving peace imaginaries. Photography, a medium whose roots lie in the vernacular, is the medium par excellence for exploring and holding the diverse fragments of the everyday. These consist of the mundane aspects of daily life as well as the significant points of issue. Research into everyday imagery captured in camera phones highlights how people use photography to order the day-to-day and to privilege moments that generally relate to ‘positive’ emotions, evince strong social bonds and encompass a future-oriented perspective.⁵² With cameras in their hands, ordinary people whose lives are directly affected by conflict and violence can decide what is important and where to focus attention. Different people have different priorities and concerns and their images speak to the diverse and complex ingredients of peace. In their search and exposition of images of everyday peace, the community photographers actively undermine the appearance of violence as entrenched, totalising and inevitable, and in so doing, they build imaginaries that inspire that peace is possible and configure new political subjectivities.⁵³

Methods: everyday peace indicators and photovoice

In this research, photovoice was integrated into the everyday peace indicators process as part of Everyday Justice, an EPI project working with rural Colombian communities in areas with experience of intense armed conflict. The project identifies patterns in how Colombians are experiencing the country’s varied transitional justice processes according to their own locally rooted notions of success.⁵⁴ The concept of everyday peace has come to prominence alongside calls for conflict-affected communities to be given a more central role in informing and determining peacebuilding policy and programming.⁵⁵ To date, the beneficiaries of peacebuilding programmes have been largely excluded from programme monitoring and evaluation, with donors relying heavily on indicators and measures set by external experts. Donors are particularly enthusiastic about universally applicable indicators despite the consensus that indicators need to be contextually derived⁵⁶ and that local beneficiaries define peace and peacebuilding effectiveness differently from national and international actors.⁵⁷ Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI), both a participatory research method and project,⁵⁸ was conceptualised ‘to demonstrate everyday peace in action’⁵⁹ and to measure the effectiveness of peacebuilding interventions according to the priorities and needs of local populations. EPI works with communities, using a participatory numbers approach,⁶⁰ to identify everyday peace indicators defined as the signals or signs ‘we look to in our daily lives to determine whether we are more or less at peace’.⁶¹

In Everyday Justice, photovoice has been integrated with the EPI processes to create opportunities for community-level dialogue around the everyday peace indicators and to amplify community voices by making their peace indicators visible and more communicable to policy audiences.⁶² Rooted in feminist theories and the Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire’s emancipatory pedagogies, photovoice is celebrated as an accessible method that enables community members to drive knowledge, social justice and action.⁶³ However, reviewers warn of tokenism, noting it has been applied with varying forms of impact and interpretation.⁶⁴ Photovoice is a flexible, open-ended method in contrast to EPI which adheres to fixed research protocols and remains researcher controlled. Bricolaging these two participatory methods, Everyday Justice aims to generate multiple forms of knowing for action to build inclusive rigour⁶⁵ and attend to the varying agendas of researchers, policymakers and community members.⁶⁶

This article reports on the dynamics and impact of the first two EPI photovoice projects that took place in two communities in the municipality of Dabeiba, in the north-western region of Antioquia: San José de Urama and Las Cruces. The photovoice process is described in detail elsewhere⁶⁷ but for the context of this article we will provide a brief overview. Led by two photovoice facilitators who worked in conjunction with a community facilitator in each place, the photovoice projects started after the EPI process had taken place in each community with the formation of self-selecting, inter-generational, mixed gender photovoice groups.⁶⁸ Photovoice participants engaged in photography and visual storytelling workshops before selecting individual and group everyday peace indicators to make photo stories from a reduced list of indicators generated by their community.⁶⁹ Each participant chose an indicator that most resonated with them and the group collectively agreed on one that was critical to the community as a whole. This combining of individual and group projects was intentional to facilitate simultaneous personal and collective dialogical processes. Between San Jośe de Urama and Las Cruces, there were 45 participants and a total 44 Indicator Photo Stories were produced, 41 individual and 3 collective projects. For the final community exhibition, giant vinyl prints of the images and their written captions were hung throughout the community, on buildings, houses and walls, with community members ‘adopting’ images to look after and keep clean.

Both photovoice projects took place in the midst of the global COVID pandemic and it is impossible to discuss them without acknowledging its impact. With many people at home, there was extensive interest and engagement with the projects. Photovoice was designed as a 6-week process in each community.⁷⁰ However, the photovoice facilitators, due to travel restrictions, became temporarily stuck in San Jośe de Urama during the first Colombian lockdown and ended up living there for an extended period. This meant that the photovoice team built extensive networks and a strong trust which helped them to adapt the research activities.

This article draws on data collected as part of integrated evaluative research that was undertaken during and after the photovoice process and exhibition. We conducted participatory monitoring and evaluation exercises with participants during the workshops, individual and focus group interviews with participants and community members and combined this data with photovoice workshop group discussion recordings and facilitator field notes and reflective sessions. A grounded theory approach⁷¹ was used to iteratively collect and analyse data with the impact themes identified through the thematic categorisation of the qualitative data. As authors conducting action research, we were directly involved in the design and delivery of the photovoice projects and are conscious that we have actively influenced the outcomes of the project. We have sought to triangulate data, enabled anonymous feedback and engage in critical reflexivity through regular review and reflection sessions to mitigate against our own biases and assumptions.

Part of our argument about the potentiality and impact of photovoice as a form of everyday peace photography is a methodological one. We do not assume that photovoice in and of itself is a guarantee of community peacebuilding but rather that potential impacts are achieved through a considered and strategic implementation of and reflexive engagement with the method⁷² and the presence and cultivation of enabling factors. It is important to note that we take a critical, reflexive and careful approach to photovoice. We view photovoice not as a fixed methodological protocol but as an adaptive, emergent, and negotiated process that is contextually constrained and enabled. We undertook a continual assessment of our own roles and impacts as researchers on the project, the contextual dynamics and reception of the project by the community and participants and made ongoing adjustments to the activities and process to ensure they best served the community needs.

Impact analysis

Our research has identified four impacts of photovoice that worked implicitly and explicitly to amplify and strengthen community peacebuilding. Establishing direct, casual links when it comes to photography and peace is difficult. Images never operate on people in isolation, and they act differently on different people at different times.⁷³ The challenge for researchers is finding systematic ways to account for all the processes involved. The relationship between photography and peace is episodic rather than causal.⁷⁴ It is key that we recognise that impacts happen as a result of a complex interaction of enabling factors not associated with the photographic intervention. Existing photovoice studies note impacts are often due to a combination of opportunities and wider factors, rather than being solely attributable to photovoice.⁷⁵ Our findings demonstrate how photovoice as a form of peace photography influences change in multi-dimensional and non-linear, rather than directly causal, ways, with different impacts layering and feeding each other to support community-level peace. Crucially, these impacts were not solely the direct outcomes of photography activities but rather of a responsive and strategic form of photovoice that creatively complimented and intentionally built on and the everyday peace priorities highlighted by the EPI process and existing community concerns. Our research demonstrates that when participatory arts and media initiatives accompany and build on existing community priorities, they hold a greater capacity to extend the transformative potential of everyday peace.

Healing effects

Whilst primarily conceived as a form of social action rather than a therapeutic intervention, photovoice has been used with many groups who have survived different kinds of trauma and adverse experiences. Studies demonstrate its positive impacts on reducing anxiety,⁷⁶ emotional processing,⁷⁷ building confidence, communication and leadership skills, constructing critical consciousness,⁷⁸ resilience⁷⁹ and processing trauma, building hope in uncertainty⁸⁰ and sitting with the pain paradox.⁸¹ Such effects take on a particular significance in conflict and post-conflict settings where individuals and communities have experienced many different forms of physical, emotional and psychological violence and trauma. Whilst it was not an explicit aim of the photovoice projects, its healing effects were a notable by-product and our experience concurs with a growing body of evidence that attests to the healing impacts of participatory arts for post-conflict communities.⁸² In the Colombian context, these impacts converged around three dimensions: meaning making, relationship building and validation.

Firstly, photovoice created a safe and reflective space for participants who wanted to reflect on their conflict-related losses and give meaning to their experiences. Photographs play a central role in keeping us connected to our past and in projecting a new future. One participant, Beatriz, described how the different photo exercises mediated her losses and created something new as they pointed to what had changed and to a different future. She commented that while the pain will never go away, it now feels ‘calmer’ and that the process ‘helped to assimilate everything’.⁸³ Workshops foregrounded a conflict-sensitive Do No Harm approach⁸⁴ and the ethical principles of therapeutic photography.⁸⁵ Participants found symbols, articulated narratives and re-framed their experiences which allowed for the deep processing of experience that integrated their loss and constructed a more complex picture of themselves as both victims and survivors.⁸⁶

Secondly, a sense of community and much-valued friendship was built through the photovoice process. In Las Cruces, where the majority of the participants were female, a strong support network developed. One participant joked that the best thing she got out of the project was ‘the phone numbers of a whole load of woman that I had not previously known’⁸⁷ and whom she now counts as friends. Finally, photovoice played an important role in validating people’s experiences and contributions. Taking pictures engaged participants in active listening and reflection. Feedback validated people’s individual experiences and led to the formulation of collective stances on issues of significance. This sense of validation was amplified by the exhibition as audiences’ responses confirmed to participants that their stories and perspectives were important and of value as captured in one villager’s comment;

It has made such an impact on me seeing all the people looking at the photos, they remember what has happened to them … but they do it with a tranquillity and confidence that the future is going to be better. In some ways constructing historical memory is to transition towards peace … this (project) confirms the magic of this village, we needed that.⁸⁸

Intergenerational dialogue and exchange

In both Urama and Las Cruces, the self-selecting photovoice groups were made up of a range of ages and generations, from children to grandparents, including, in Las Cruces, three generations from the same family. While the younger members quickly embraced the technical side of working with photography, easily navigating the cameras, it was the older members of the group, with direct and deeper lived experience and knowledge of their region and of the conflict, who contributed to the discussions generated around the everyday peace indicators. This complementary mix of skills and knowledge meant that the different generations could support each other’s learning and collaboratively build community and territorial history and memory that strengthened generational bonds and the social fabric (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Indicator: Families have more time to spend with each other.

Spending more time with your family is born out of the desire to share enriching experiences with those that you love. Those kinds of moments are the ideal way of forming the kind of lasting bonds that help you overcome adversity, and it is how you learn the principles and values needed to be a proper part of society. Photo by Yenifer Yuliana Higuita Bedoya.

Daily life in rural Colombia is already intergenerational with families living, working and celebrating together. As such, the photovoice process nurtured multi-generational interactions that are a central tenant of community life. However, the images made new kinds of critical conversations possible. These were conversations that enriched and deepened more complex community dialogues about peace, memory and community resilience across time and generations. Within workshops, photographs were seen as the starting point for conversations⁸⁹ that created connections and led to ‘deep and interesting talk’.⁹⁰ Lykes et al. describe how in Guatemala the photograph became ‘a stimulus for the group’s reflections, discussions, analyses and representations’, promoting an ever-widening discussion of differing realities.⁹¹ The different generations came to understand each other’s perspectives and see beyond their own personal experiences, developing mutual respect and trust and activating inter-generational solidarities and shared priorities. This was illustrated in Urama when the groups chose two group indicators photo stories – one focusing on rubbish collection and recycling and the other on the cemetery – that reflected the different concerns of the young and older generations in the community.

Territorial pride and identity

The photovoice process worked to strengthen territorial identity and re-enforce a sense of belonging. Through outshoots, participants explored their surroundings and engaged with them anew. The camera became a means through which they could explore their sense of place and the images became ‘entry points’ to celebrate and critically discuss their connections to their environment and the extent to which their territory informed their identities.⁹² Mouly & Hernandez note that the building of a common identity and worldview which celebrates shared culture and traditions inspires community resilience in the face of ongoing violence as well as inspiring tactical innovation for dealing with new challenges and building peace.⁹³

The community exhibition generated and fortified a sense of pride in their villages as it made them visible and attracted visitors, media and positive attention. Images honoured aspects of resilient campesino culture and customs that survived the conflict and are crucial to peaceful co-existence and community life (Figure 2). Visitors posted photographs of the giant images hanging all over the village, generating a buzz on social media. The exhibitions transformed public spaces, creating a renewed vigour for community life. Images adorned buildings, houses and walls throughout the village, creating a physical and lasting presence that marked the streets with symbols and dialogues around peace and justice and improving security perceptions. Residents spoke of taking strolls to look at the photographs, having conversations on street corners about the images and the history of the village, visiting parts of the village that they do not normally go to. This re-claiming and re-purposing of public space has been noted in other Colombian participatory photography projects⁹⁴ and has a particular symbolic significance in Colombia where during the long-running conflict, graffiti on houses and walls was used by different armed actors as ‘geographies of terror’ to mark territory and to threaten, intimidate and control the local populations.⁹⁵ Responding to the exhibition, one Urama resident remarked that previously the walls were ‘full of death threats’ and now it was ‘so different and beautiful’ because the walls ‘have been converted into a demonstration of art, happiness and hope. What there is now on these walls is a tribute to life’.⁹⁶ Another visitor described the exhibition as a ‘re-birth of Urama as a community’ as it showed them taking action, thinking of a collective future and teaching their children about the village’s history.⁹⁷

Figure 2. Indicator: There are collective work groups among members of the community.

‘You need one hand to wash the other, and both to wash the face’ is a saying that grandparents say. That’s what a minga is. When people don’t have the money to pay day labourers, they ask others to help them, and then the favour is repaid. In this way, a lot of farms and businesses have been saved from bankruptcy. A minga – or collective work group – saves lives and land, and protects democracy, justice and peace. Mingas are resistance. Photo by Paula Andrea Pino Sarrazola.

These comments allude to the wider, indirect or rippling out impact of the exhibition on the community, as it sparked conversations, inspired pride and built historical memory.⁹⁸ This mirrors findings of studies that document the wider peacebuilding impact of photovoice initiatives on communities and audiences.⁹⁹ A Urama participant, Rigoberto, noted that ‘the project arrived at the time that we needed it’, as they emerged from the hard times of violence and wanted to celebrate and share the beauty of their territory with the world.¹⁰⁰ Photovoice provided community members with a means to disrupt and transform the pervasive conflict narratives that have long defined their region and to forge more positive ways of representing and talking about their community.¹⁰¹

Catalysing community action

In both communities, the photovoice process catalysed concrete community actions around everyday peace indicators that grew directly out of the group photovoice projects: one involved the clean-up of the village cemetery, another the revival of a community recycling project and the other, an organised exchange and dialogue with an ex-combatant community.

In Urama, one photovoice group chose an indicator that spoke to the care and upkeep of the village cemetery (Figure 3). Its dilapidated state had been a long-running concern within the village. The images generated a critical discussion around the importance of the burial ground and where the responsibility for its upkeep lay. A decision was made to call a communal work party and over 2 days more than 80 members of the community came together to clear and restore the cemetery. One villager described the communal work as ‘something that was very important, it brings us together to leave all our differences behind … it helped us to be more united’.¹⁰² It also contributed to wider transitional justice efforts by helping the work of the JEP¹⁰³ when they arrived in Urama a couple of months later, accelerating their search processes as they worked to exhume and identify graves.

Figure 3. Indicator: The community with the support of the church and JAC maintain the cemetery.

A woman in the late stages of a serious illness was resisting dying to avoid being taken to that neglected place: the cemetery. The deterioration of the cemetery is a testament to how much the dead are disregarded. Weeds devour the tombs just as our minds eat away at our memories. Would it not be the right thing for us to come together to maintain it, and honour the memory of the dead by keeping this place of transit to the afterlife beautiful? Photo by The Urama Photography Collective.

In Las Cruces, the photovoice group chose an indicator that stated campesinos (villagers or farmers) and ex-combatants should have equal rights (Figure 4). Las Cruces is a roadside community that has received no state-led post-conflict programme funding and there is tension around what villagers, many of whom were victims of the conflict, see by comparison as a disproportional amount of state support being provided to new government-established ex-combatant communities.¹⁰⁴ This tension generates distrust which they viewed as a significant obstacle to sustainable co-existence.

Figure 4. Indicator: Campesinos and ex-combatants have equal opportunities.

If we think about it properly, it’s not a bad thing that they have opportunities, because in reality all human beings make mistakes and this life gives us the privilege of being able to redeem ourselves. What is truly complex and degrading is that they have more privileges than the victims. Look at how our roads are, the lack of university opportunities for our teenagers, the lack of jobs. They get the benefits of productive projects. We are the victims and we don’t see any state support, but with the ex-combatants it’s like photos here, photos there, help here, jobs there, good prospects all around. We deserve the same! Photo by The Las Cruces Photography Collective.

The photovoice group documented the state's failure to provide basic services, including the bad condition of the roads and inadequate housing in Las Cruces (Figure 4). The group acknowledged they needed to visit an ex-combatant community to better understand their perspectives and an exchange trip was organised by the photovoice facilitators. The photovoice participants toured the community taking photographs with the camera serving as an ice-breaker and mediator, facilitating conversations and exchanges. On their return, the photovoice participants revised their opinions about the ex-combatants, recognising that they were working hard to reform and embed peace. The participants said the exchange confirmed that the ex-combatant community did have much better state support but it also allowed them to deconstruct their negative assumptions about the ex-combatants, reducing tensions between the groups and establishing a direct link that they hope to sustain with further exchanges.

In each of these examples, community actions emerged out of the photovoice group projects and the conversations they instigated. Participants photographed and analysed the issues around the everyday peace indicator, reflected on their causes and dimensions, the actors involved and where responsibilities for change lay. The decisions and calls for action were taken with community leaders, which meant the initiatives expanded beyond the photovoice groups and became community affairs. Photography, and specifically the visual investigation of collective indicators of everyday peace, became a means to find solutions to community problems, transcending the photography itself to support community organising and shift attitudes. The photovoice participants became community representatives, instigators, and documentarians. These roles were recognised and valued by the wider community. One community leader applauded the photovoice participants, saying their photographs were ‘symbols of what this group and the dynamic they have created in the community have achieved’.¹⁰⁵

Constraints, tensions and opportunities: security dynamics of working with photovoice in insecure settings

Cameras, often used as surveillance tools by purveyors of conflict, have a particularly charged and contested presence in conflict and post-conflict settings. They can arouse mistrust and suspicion¹⁰⁶ and can create security risks for participants.¹⁰⁷ Such factors have important implications for community-based peace photography initiatives especially in contexts like Colombia where armed actors continue to exert influence and threaten violence. The EPI photovoice projects incorporated various safeguarding and security measures, and activities were adjusted in each location to cater for different security priorities.¹⁰⁸ Participants and the photovoice facilitators engaged in active iterative review processes for their photo projects so that participants had multiple opportunities to change or withdraw their images and texts if they felt they raised matters that could expose them to danger when shared publicly. A number of participants initially chose indicators relating to the armed conflict and justice that they subsequently changed when they reflected on the risks to themselves and their families. Some participants also decided that they were happy to publish their images and stories online or in national or international exhibitions, but they did not want them displayed in the community exhibition.

Such constraints placed limits on what could be documented and the kinds of public conversations around peace, justice and co-existence that were possible. Conceptions of everyday peace directly acknowledge the agency, practices and strategies that ordinary people employ to navigate the day-to-day constraints in environments wrought with potential dangers of violence. People work as ‘skilled diplomats’ reading social situations, judging whether it is safe or not to engage, employing a fluid mode of reasoning that becomes naturalised in everyday life as both coping mechanism and survival strategy.¹⁰⁹ Everyday peace practices and behaviours actively set the parameters as to what the photographers chose to capture (and not to capture) in their photographs. Such constraints create inherent tensions that counter emancipatory claims as to the potential of photovoice to ‘give’ voice. They draw attention to the gap between the ideals and practice. Photovoice, and all participatory visual practice, is best viewed as a ‘negotiated pathway between tensions towards possibilities’.¹¹⁰ As a result, researchers working with photovoice should pay attention not only to what is contained in the images but to what is left out.

Photovoice created an opportunity for participants living with the ongoing threat of violence to carve out an in-between space to talk about and nurture peace within their own negotiated parameters. In Las Cruces, there is no police or army presence, which has allowed paramilitary groups to take control, replacing the guerillas who used to operate in the area. These armed groups co-exist with the community, cultivating ties and loyalty (through free will, coercion and force) and acting as a pseudo state, resolving daily issues (such as road repairs, neighbourhood disputes and debt collection). Matters are discussed at regular ‘mandatory’ meetings where the community keeps the paramilitaries informed of community activities. Externally instigated activities are generally viewed well by the armed groups as long as they do not interfere with their economic activities tied to drugs and arms trafficking.

In this context, community leaders informed the local armed actors about plans for the photovoice project and community exhibition. As the project team, we had concerns that some of the photo stories made critical points about the harm done to villagers by armed actors and alluded to the negative social controls still exerted. However, we were interested when the local commander not only supported the exhibition, considering it to be a beneficial cultural and recreational activity for the village, but publicly instructed that no one should damage the photographs. He noted that the exhibition made the village beautiful and was a result of collective effort that should be respected.

Photography provided an opportunity for participants to foster everyday peace and resilience whilst avoiding confrontation. The images became negotiated, tactical resources creating openings to quietly denounce violence, to resist and build cohesion and identity but within safe boundaries. Recent research highlights that civil resistance consists not only of overt and visible campaigns but also of more subtle and oblique forms of resistance that avoid direct confrontation and which are especially useful in sensitive contexts, such as in Colombia, where open and direct opposition to armed actors is risky.¹¹¹ In this case, the multiplicity of the images, or even their duplicity, allowed them to be viewed by the armed actors as a non-threatening cultural initiative while for others in the community they served as acts of resistance, solidarity and peacebuilding.

Conclusion

In the last 25 years, photovoice has expanded beyond Wang’s original conceptualisation of the method, and has been continually re-invented to serve different purposes. Our version of photovoice as a form of everyday peace photography was designed to actively build on the Everyday Peace Indicator and existing community peacebuilding processes to catalyse and extend community dialogue, action and impact. We recognise the limits of photography as a distinct activity to directly impact change but highlight its potential as a catalyst within a systemic and adaptive approach that works with and complements existing strategic and community peacebuilding processes. The contribution of images and participatory image-making, such as photovoice, to the building of peace and dialogue is not a given. This is a pragmatic and strategic form of peace photography constrained by contextual and security factors. However, we argue that it holds opportunities to catalyse and amplify bottom-up peace.

How can peace be built if we do not know what peace looks like? In their images, conflict-affected communities make visible what they see as the diverse and vital ingredients of peace within the constraints of what is safe for them to show and publicly display. In this sense, everyday peace photography provides a partial but vital view of what kinds of peace are possible within restricted, dynamic and complex post-conflict settings. Our focus extends beyond the representative and communicative function of photography and highlights its performative significance. Berger talks of the crucial role that photography plays in ideological struggle as ‘every photograph is, in fact, a means of testing, confirming and constructing a total view of reality’.¹¹² Through the process of creating and sharing images, these community photographers enhance everyday peace in their communities by catalysing conversations, nurturing resilience, making peace visible and instigating small peace actions. In fragile conflict contexts, every photograph of peace subverts the perception of violence as pervasive and inevitable.

On various occasions, the photovoice participants described how their photographs ‘speak for me’. Their comment highlights how in conflict-sensitive contexts, communities are constrained as to how they can participate. Photography acts as a mediator and provides a means for people to speak to each other, within their communities, and more publicly to people outside their communities without directly exposing themselves. It works as a form ‘of being together’¹¹³ that, in the case of our research in Colombia, impacts healing, perceptions of territorial identity and pride, intergenerational dialogue and instigates community-level peacebuilding actions. Further research needs to be done to more adequately investigate the contribution that images and image-making might make to peace. In this project, research into the gendered dimensions and longevity of the identified impacts would further enhance our understandings. However, our findings affirm the peace potentialities of photovoice and extend the existing evidence base for arts-based peacebuilding.

Relevant links

Humanity United blog: Photography as a Tool for Peace: What comes from picturing everyday peace for communities in Colombia?

https://humanityunited.org/photography-as-a-tool-for-peace-what-comes-from-picturing-everyday-peace-for-communities-in-colombia/

The Conversation: How photography can build peace and justice in war-torn communities

https://theconversation.com/how-photography-can-build-peace-and-justice-in-war-torn-communities-166143

Project webpages on EPI website:

https://www.everydaypeaceindicators.org/photovoice-in-colombia

Peace Science Digest: Photography as a tool for Peace?

https://peacesciencedigest.org/photography-in-war-torn-communities-as-a-tool-for-peace-a-project-by-everyday-peace-indicators/

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an Early Career Fellowship from The Leverhulme Trust (Dr Tiffany Fairey) and funding from Humanity United.

Notes on contributors

Tiffany Fairey

Tiffany Fairey is a visual sociologist and Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow based in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Her current research focuses on the role of images and image-making in building peace and dialogue. Founder of PhotoVoice, she has over 25 years experience of working with photovoice and participatory photography methods.

Edwin Cubillos

Edwin Cubillos is the photovoice co-ordinator of EPI’s Everyday Justice project. He is a human rights activist, photographer and cultural manager who has worked with the Colombian Ministry of Culture and the National Museum of Memory.

Manuela Muñoz

Manuela Muñoz is an actress who graduated from the Escuela de Formación de Actores del Pequeño Teatro de Medellín with expertise in Art Therapy and Theater of the Oppressed.

Notes

¹ J.P. Lederach, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford University Press, 2005), 5.

² The literature is extensive, but this Special Issue introduction provides a good overview: C. Cohen, ‘Special Issue: Creative Approaches to Transitional Justice: Contributions of Arts and Culture’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 14, no. 1 (2020); See also Mitchell, J. et al., eds., Peacebuilding and the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); and M. Shank, and L. Schirch, ‘Strategic Arts-Based Peacebuilding’, Peace and Change: A Journal of Peace Research 33, no. 2 (2008).

³ C. Zelizer, ‘The Role of Artistic Processes in Peacebuilding in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Peace and Conflict Studies 10, no. 2 (2003): 62–76; and F. Mkwananzi and F. Melis Cin, Post Conflict Participatory Arts (Routledge, 2022).

⁴ T. Fairey and R. Kerr, ‘What Works? Creative approaches to transitional justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 14, no. 1 (2020): 142–64.

⁵ M.-A. Hunter and L. Page, ‘What is “the good” of arts-based peacebuilding? Questions of value and evaluation in current practice’, Peace and Conflict Studies 21, no. 2 (2014): 117–34.

⁶ P. D. Rush and O. Simić, The Arts of Transitional Justice: Culture, Activism, and Memory after Atrocity (Springer: Springer Series in Transitional Justice, 2014).

⁷ V. Baú, ‘Building peace through social change communication: participatory video in conflict affected communities’, Community Development Journal 50, no. 1 (2015): 123.

⁸ Hunter & Page, What is ‘The Good’ of Arts-Based Peacebuilding?, 117.

⁹ R. Bleiker, ed., Visual Global Politics (London: Routledge, 2018).

¹⁰ Frank Möller, Peace Photography (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

¹¹ F. Ritchin, Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary and the Citizen (Aperture, 2013); and F. Möller, ‘Peace’, in Visual Global Politics, ed. Roland Bleiker (Routledge, 2018), 220–4.

¹² S. Clark, ‘The “local-visual turn”: understanding peacebuilding in post conflict societies using photo-elicitation’, Peacebuilding (2022).

¹³ S. Allan, ‘Documenting war, visualising peace: Towards peace photography’, in Expanding Peace Journalism, ed. I. Shaw, R. Hackett and J. Lynch (University of Sydney Press, 2011), 163.

¹⁴ C. Wang and M.A. Burris, ‘Photovoice: Concept, Methodology, and Use for Participatory Needs Assessment’, Health Education & Behavior 24, no. 3 (1997): 369–87.

¹⁵ R. Mac Ginty, Everyday Peace: How So Called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2021), 549.

¹⁶ Lederach, Moral Imagination, ix.

¹⁷ ‘Personas defensoras de derechos humanos y líderes sociales en Colombia’, Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, 2019, https://www.oas.org/es/cidh/informes/pdfs/DefensoresColombia.pdf (accessed December 19, 2022).

¹⁸ ‘Five Years After the Signing of the Colombian Final Agreement: Reflections from Implementation Monitoring. Dec 2020-Nov 2021’, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, 2022, https://curate.nd.edu/downloads/41687h17b57. Published in June 2022, The Colombian Truth Commission’s final report recommended the creation of a territorial peace strategy that confronted the impacts of drug trafficking and other elements and worked to promote a culture of peace throughout the country.

¹⁹ A. Castillejo-Cuellar, ‘La paz en pequeña escala: fracturas de la vida cotidiana y las políticas de la transición en Colombia’, Revista de Estudios Colombianos [Preprint] no. 53 (2019).

²⁰ M. Nilsson, ‘Building Peace Amidst Violence: An Analysis of Colombia’s Policies to Address Security and Development Challenges’, Iberoamericana – Nordic Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 47, no. 1 (2018): 34–44.

²¹ O. Simić, Arts and Transitional Justice, 243.

²² Yolanda Sierra-León, ‘Relaciones Entre El Arte y Los Derechos Humanos’. Revista Derecho Del Estado 32 (2014): 77–100.

²³ E. Hernández Delgado and C.P. Roa Mendoza, ‘Civil Resistance and Peacebuilding: The Experience of the Peasant Worker Association of the Carare River’, in Civil Resistance and violent conflict in Latin America, eds. C. Mouly and E. Hernández Delgado (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 137–56; and M. Hallward, J. Masullo and Cécile Mouly, ‘Civil Resistance in Armed Conflict: Leveraging Nonviolent Action to Navigate War, Oppose Violence and Confront Oppression’, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 12, no. 3 (2017): 1–9.

²⁴ Castillejo-Cuellar, La paz en pequeña escala, 2.

²⁵ H. Redwood, T. Fairey and J. Hasić, ‘Hybrid Peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Participatory Arts and Youth Activism as Vehicles of Social Change’, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 1, no. 16 (2022).

²⁶ F. Möller, ‘From Aftermath to Peace: Reflections on a Photography of Peace’, Global Society 31, no. 3 (2017): 331.

²⁷ J. Masullo, C. Mouly and M.B. Garrido, ‘Alternative Forms of Civilian Noncooperation with Armed Groups: The Case of Samaniego in Colombia’, in Civil Resistance and violent conflict in Latin America, eds. C. Mouly and E. Hernández Delgado (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 111–36.

²⁸ For a comprehensive review see D. Kalekin-Fishman, ‘Sociology of everyday life’, Current Sociological Review 61, no. 5–6 (2013): 714–32.:

²⁹ M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1984).

³⁰ R. Mac Ginty and O. Richmond, ‘The Local Turn in Peacebuilding: A critical Agenda for Peace’, Third World Quarterly 34, no. 5 (2013): 772.

³¹ Hanna Leonardsson and Rudd Gustav, ‘The “local Turn” in Peacebuilding: A Literature Review of Effective and Emancipatory Local Peace-Building’. Third World Quarterly 36, no. 5 (2015): 825–39.

³² Lederach, Building Peace; S. Autesserre, The Frontlines of Peace (Oxford University Press, 2021); and O. Richmond, ‘Critical Agency, Resistance and a Post-Colonial Civil Society’, Cooperation and Conflict 46, no. 4 (2011): 419–40.

³³ R. Mac Ginty, Everyday Peace: Bottom-Up and Local Agency in Conflict-Affected Societies.

³⁴ Brewer, The Sociology of Everyday Life Peacebuilding.

³⁵ R. Mac Ginty, Everyday Peace, 4.

³⁶ Ibid., 8.

³⁷ T. Fairey, Participatory Arts and Peace-building.

³⁸ R. Bleiker, ed., Visual Global Politics (London: Routledge, 2018); and E. Hutchison and R. Bleiker, ‘Visuality of Peace and Conflict’, in The Oxford Handbook of Peacebuilding, Statebuilding and Peace Formation, eds. Oliver P Richmond & Gëzim Visoka (Oxford University Press, 2021).

³⁹ Bleiker, Visual Politics, 3.

⁴⁰ F. Möller, Peace Photography, 14.

⁴¹ Möller, Peace Asesthetics; S. Allan, Documenting War, Visualising Peace: Towards Peace Photography, 163; and Fred Ritchin, Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary and the Citizen (Aperture, 2013), 122.

⁴² F. Möller, ‘Peace Aesthetics: A Patchwork’, Peace & Change: A Journal of Peace Research 45, no. 1 (2020): 32.

⁴³ F. Möller, Peace Aesthetics, 29.

⁴⁴ F. Möller and D. Shim, ‘Visions of Peace in International Relations’, International Studies Perspectives 20, no. 3 (2019): 245.

⁴⁵ See Ritchin’s description of TAFOS in Ritchin, Bending the Frame, 128 and Möller’s examination of a project in Brazil (Visual Peace, 122) and Rwanda (Peace Photography, 153).

⁴⁶ M. Brinton Lykes, Martin Terre Blanche and Brandon Hamber, ‘Narrating Survival and Change in Guatemala and South Africa: The Politics of Representation and a Liberatory Community Psychology’, American Journal of Community Psychology 31, no. 1–2 (2003): 79–90.

⁴⁷ Lykes et al., Narrating Survival and Change (2003), 79.

⁴⁸ Jessica M. Smith, ‘From Subjects of Stories to Agents of Change: Countering Dominant Discourses of Women and Peacebuilding’, in Healing and Peacebuilding after War. Transforming Trauma in Bosnia and Herzegovina, eds. J. Funk, N. Good and ME. Berry (Routledge, 2020).

⁴⁹ Cubillos Rodriguez, Edwin Alfredo, Voces Como Imágenes: Ciudadanías En El Limite, Fotografia y Agencia Cultural En Altos de Cazucá (Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, 2017); and Alexander L. Fattal, Shooting Cameras for Peace. Youth, Photography, and the Colombian Armed Conflict (Peabody Museum Press, 2020).

⁵⁰ Valentina Bau, ‘Participatory Photography for Peace: Using Images to Open Up Dialogue After Violence’, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 10, no. 3 (2015): 74–88; and V. Baú, Building peace through social change communication.

⁵¹ V. Baú, Building peace through social change communication, 134.

⁵² Chris Peters and S. Allan, ‘Everyday imagery: Users’reflections on smartphone cameras and communication’, Convergence 24, no. 4 (2018): 357–73.

⁵³ Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (Cambridge MA: Zone Books, 2008).

⁵⁴ For more information on and findings from Everyday Justice see P. Dixon and P. Firchow, ‘Collective Justice: Ex-Combatants and Community Reparations in Colombia’, Journal of Human Rights Practice 14, no. 2 (2022): 434–53.

⁵⁵ C. Church, ‘Evaluating Peace-Building: Not Yet All It Could Be’, in In Advancing Conflict Transformation: The Berghof Handbook II, eds. Austin Beatrix, Martina Fischer and HansJ. Giessmann (Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2011), 459–82.

⁵⁶ C. Scharbatke-Church, Peacebuilding Evaluation, 37.

⁵⁷ Pamina Firchow, Reclaiming Everyday Peace: Local Voices in Measurement and Evaluation After War (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 3.

⁵⁸ Devised by Pamina Firchow and Roger MacGinty, the EPI method is written about in detail by P. Firchow, Reclaiming Everyday Peace.

⁵⁹ R. Mac Ginty, Everyday Peace, 17.

⁶⁰ Robert Chambers, Who Counts? The Quiet Revolution of Participation and Numbers (UK: Institute of Development Studies, 2007).

⁶¹ P. Firchow, Reclaiming Everyday Peace, 3.

⁶² The research design and a discussion around the integration of the EPI and photovoice methods is discussed in detail here: T. Fairey, P. Firchow and P. Dixon, ‘Images and Indicators: Mixing Participatory Methods to Build Inclusive Rigour’, Action Research (2022).

⁶³ Camille A. Sutton-Brown, ‘Photovoice: A Methodological Guide’, Photography & Culture 7, no. 2 (2014): 169–85; and L. Liebenberg, ‘Thinking Critically About Photovoice: Achieving Empowerment and Social Change’, International Journal of Qualitative Methods 17 (2018): 1–9.

⁶⁴ C. Catalani, and M. Minkler, ‘Photovoice: A Review of the Literature in Health and Public Health’, Health Education & Behaviour 37, no. 3 (2010): 424–51.

⁶⁵ R. Chambers, ‘Inclusive rigour for complexity’, Journal of Development Effectivness 7, no. 3 (2015): 327–35.

⁶⁶ T. Fairey, P. Firchow and P. Dixon, Indicators and Images.

⁶⁷ Ibid.

⁶⁸ It was not a criteria that photovoice participants need to have actively participated in the EPI process; however, in both communities, there was some overlap with 40–50% of photovoice participants having participated in the EPI workshops.

⁶⁹ The EPI process generates anything from 100–130 indicators in each community. The photovoice group work with a reduced list of 30–40 of these indicators, selected by the EPI research team according to criteria that considered their popularity and the fair representation of different interests and groups in the community.

⁷⁰ See note 66 above.

⁷¹ A. Strauss, and J. Corbin, ‘Grounded Theory Methodology: An Overview’, in Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1994), 273–84.

⁷² L. Liebenberg, Thinking Critically About Photovoice.

⁷³ Möller, Peace Aesthetics, 29.

⁷⁴ Möller, Peace Photography.

⁷⁵ Foster-Fishman et al., Using Methods That Matter: The Impact of Reflection, Dialogue and Voice.

⁷⁶ Birthe C. Reimers, 108AD. ‘Peacebuilding in Refugee Resettlement Communities’, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 11, no. 3 (2016).

⁷⁷ Amy Werremeyer, Elizabeth Skoy, William Burns and Amber Batch-Gorman, ‘Photovoice as an Intervention for Students Living with Mental Illness: A Pilot Study’, Mental Health Clinician 10, no. 4 (2020): 237–43.

⁷⁸ Elizabeth D. Carlson, Joan Engebretson and Robert M. Chamberlain. ‘Photovoice as a Social Process of Critical Consciousness’, Qualitative Health Research 16 no. 6 (2006): 836–52.

⁷⁹ First, Jennifer, Toby Mills-Sandoval, Nathan L First, and J.Brian Houston, Picturing Resilience Intervention: Using Photovoice for Youth Resilience (Disaster and Community Crisis Center, University of Missouri, 2016); and Neil Gibson, Therapeutic Photography: Enhancing Self-Esteem, Self-Efficacy and Resilience (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2018).

⁸⁰ Nicola Gerada Power, Moss Edward Norman and Kathryne Dupré, ‘Rural Youth and Emotional Geographies: How Photovoice and Words alone Methods Tell Different Stories of Place’, Journal of Youth Studies 17, no. 8 (2014): 1114–29.

⁸¹ M Candace Christensen, ‘Using Photovoice to Treat Trauma Resulting from Gender-Based Violence’, Journal of Community Psychology (2018): 1–14.

⁸² See Fairey 2017 for a review of the literature in this area. Also see Shank & Schirch 2008, Zelizer 2003.

⁸³ Doris Manco (photovoice participant), Interview, November 13th, 2020.

⁸⁴ Mary B. Anderson, Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace – Or War (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999).

⁸⁵ N. Gibson, Therapeutic Photography.

⁸⁶ A. Rolbiecki, et al., ‘“Waiting for the Cold to End”: Using Photovoice as a Narrative Intervention for Survivors of Sexual Assault’, Traumatology 22, no. 4 (2016).

⁸⁷ See note 83 above.

⁸⁸ Carmen Marquez Bertel (Urama resident), interview, July 22nd, 2020.

⁸⁹ Tiffany Fairey and Liz Orton. ‘Photography As Dialogue’, Photography & Culture 12, no. 3 (2019).

⁹⁰ Douglas Harper, ‘Talking about Pictures: A Case for Photo Elicitation’, Visual Studies 17, no. 1 (2002): 13–19. 18.

⁹¹ Lykes el al., Narrating survival and change in Guatemala and South Africa, 84.

⁹² Alice McIntyre, ‘Through the Eyes of Women: Photovoice and Participatory Research as Tools for Reimaging Place’, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 10, no. 1 (2003): 47–66.

⁹³ C. Mouly, and E. Hernández Delgado, eds., Civil Resistance and Violent Conflict in Latin America. Mobilizing for Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

⁹⁴ E. Cubillos Rodriguez, Voces Como Imágens.

⁹⁵ Ulrich Oslender, ‘Another History of Violence: The Production of “Geographies of Terror” in Colombia’s Pacific Coast Region’, Latin American Perspectives 35 no. 5 (2008): 77–102.

⁹⁶ Oscar Botero (resident of Urama), Interview, October 8th, 2020.

⁹⁷ Ricardo Correa (Dabeiba Resident and teacher), Interview, July 22nd, 2020.

⁹⁸ P. Riaño-Alcalá, Encounters with Memory and mourning: Public Art as a collective pedagogy of reconciliation. Public Acts: Curriculum and Desires of Social Change, ed., Erica Meiners and Francisco.

⁹⁹ L.K. Taylor, et al., ‘YouthLEAD: Measuring the indirect impact of youth peacebuilding through PhotoVoice and community murals in Colombia’, in Post- Conflict Participatory Arts. Faith Mkwananzi and F. Melis Cin, eds. (Routledge, 2021), 264–288.

¹⁰⁰ Rigoberto Tuberquía (Community Action Board President), Interview, August 5th, 2020.

¹⁰¹ The capacity of photovoice to enable participants to forge more positive representations than words-alone methods has been noted by Power et al, Rural youth and emotional geographies.

¹⁰² Rigoberto Tuberquía (Community Action Board President), Interview, August 5th, 2020.

¹⁰³ The Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (JEP) or Special Justice for Peace is the justice component of Colombia’s government led transitional justice mechanisms that is responsible for investigating and bringing to trial armed actors who committed abuses during the conflict and satisfying victim’s rights to justice.

¹⁰⁴ Espacios Territoriales de Capacitación y Reincorporación (ETCRs) are government-built settlements, instigated as part of the 2016 Peace Accords, designed to demobilise and facilitate former combatant’s transition back to civilian life.

¹⁰⁵ Guillermo Berrio (Urama resident), Interview, July 22nd, 2020.

¹⁰⁶ E. Prins ‘Participatory photography: A tool for empowerment or surveillance?’, Action Research 8, no. 4 (2010): 426–43.

¹⁰⁷ L. Vastapuu, ‘Auto-Photographing (in)Securities’; and Denov et al., Engaging War Affected Youth through Photography.

¹⁰⁸ Measures included community organisers advised on specific local security concerns; the projects were well-advertised and gained authorisation from key parties including local political and religious leaders and police; photovoice participants wore project t-shirts so they could be easily identified; when necessary they were accompanied by community representatives while out photographing. Participants were supported to find visual alternatives or metaphors when they wanted to take photographs of indicators directly associated with armed conflict; the subjects of images gave informed consent for their contributions to the projects and identities were hidden when appropriate.

¹⁰⁹ R. MacGinty, Everyday Peace, 6.

¹¹⁰ J. Shaw, ‘Beyond Empowerment Inspiration: Interrogating the Gap between the Ideals and Practice Reality of Participatory Video’, in Handbook of Participatory Video, ed. EJ. Milne, C.Mitchell and N. de Lange (Altamira Press, 2012), 21.

¹¹¹ Masullo et al., Alternative Forms of Civilian Noncooperation.

¹¹² John Berger, ‘“Understanding A Photograph”’, in Selected Essays and Articles: The Look of Things (Pelican Books, 1972), 28.

¹¹³ Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (Cambridge MA: Zone Books, 2008), 166.