Artesanos de Paz: Promoting everyday peacebuilding among children and youth through a participatory theatre-based intervention in Colombia

Peace can be built from the ground up. Moreover, peacebuilding is future-orientated and thus calls for a focus on children and youth. This approach involves a need to adapt methods respond to the needs and abilities young people, building their agency and capacities. Qualitative, participatory, arts-based methods offer such an approach, allowing for creativity, hope, and change for the future. This paper will present qualitative data from 75 children and young people between the ages of 7 and 18 across three urban settings in Colombia, and qualitative interviews with the adult stakeholders involved in the intervention such as theatre teachers and auxiliary researchers. A thematic analysis identified three major themes relating to peace: educating for peace, everyday peacebuilding, and building sustainable peace. From these categories, a textual data analysis was conducted using KH-Coder software to find co-occurrence networks. The implications for this paper serve to further reinforce United Nations Resolution 2250 (2015), Resolution 2419 (2018), and Resolution 2535 (2020) recognising the essential role of children and youth in peacebuilding processes.