Beyond Ceasefires: Building Lasting Peace with Art

From Shatila to Menton, artist Maryam Samaan turns puppets and knitting into spaces for healing and dialogue.

128,349— that is the number of combatants and civilians that died in state-based conflicts in 2024. 20 years ago, it was only 19,646. In recent years, rising conflict has made peace a pressing concern. Peace, understood as the absence of war, can take many forms, from ceasefires to negotiated treaties. However, those mechanisms can be insufficient on their own. Building lasting peace necessitates creating an atmosphere of trust and understanding between former enemies. This difficult, essential work means confronting the painful past, learning from it, and rising above it to prevent repetition. Because the hardest part is relational — healing wounds, rebuilding trust, and restarting dialogue — art has a role. Art can offer safe expression, foster cooperation, encourage constructive engagement with conflict, help people cope with trauma, and preserve memory, which are the basic conditions for cooperation. Syrian-Palestinian artist Maryam Samaan’s workshops, One hand Puppet and Tricot d’âmes, offer a concrete example of these dynamics in practice.

Art and Peacebuilding  

Arts-based peace building is implemented through arts and art-therapy programs including drama, puppetry, music, dance and filmmaking. These practices can support “healing and reconciliation, promoting dialogue, preventing conflict, engaging marginalized communities, challenging injustices, and influencing policy,” as scholars Breed, Pells, and Elliott argue in their 2022 article on arts-based peace building. In this sense, art contributes to “positive peace”: not only the absence of violence but also the presence of social justice, as theorized by leading peace scholar Galtung. Translating that concept into practice starts with how art operates. By communicating beyond words, art affects both artists and audiences. In reality, its contributions fall into two strands: supporting internal healing, and facilitating understanding between adversaries, thus promoting reconciliation.

Artistic activities foster changes at the individual level. As a means of expression, artistic activity helps people process emotion and feel empowered, foundations for non-violence. In Art as Peacebuilding, Laurie Marshall, an artist and educator focused on arts-based peace work, describes “art transforming individual violence”. She explains how art can function therapeutically, providing a platform for feelings that words cannot carry. This internal work matters for peace building; without healing, cooperation falters because unprocessed pain keeps resurfacing in talks and everyday coexistence. Laurie Marshall builds her theory on one of her student, a survivor of child abuse that used drawing to release trauma. The arts educator writes that  “By healing herself, Josie was then able to help heal the world.” This rests on a common idea in arts-based peace building: personal healing usually comes first and makes collective peace work possible. Artistic activities develop confidence and useful skills, such as public speaking, teamwork, creativity, which in turns empower the participants. 

Furthemore, art can build capacities for more constructive engagement with conflict and ultimately, more cooperative relationships, often through transformative learning. As peace education research April Bang  notes, art places people in situations that challenge assumptions and invite self-reflection and critique. For victims and former combatants alike, participation can help shift anger, resentment and fear toward understanding and willingness to cooperate. In Colombia, for example, the ‘Art for Reconstruction’ program brought victims, army veterans, and former members of illegal armed groups together to co-create art; its evaluation found reduced intergroup hostility and increased willingness to cooperate and reconcile among participants.

To ground these dynamics, artist Maryam Samaan shared her experience in artistic workshops. Invited to the Menton Campus for World Peace Day (September 21) by MEDMUN, she discussed how her puppetry sessions in Shatila and her knitting initiative, Tricot d’âmes, opened spaces for expression and connection, which are small steps toward peace in participants’ daily lives.

Puppetry in Shatila : Maryam Samaan’s Workshop

From 2017 to 2019, Maryam lived in Shatila, a camp set up for Palestinian refugees in 1949, in South Beirut. After the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, Shatila welcomed Syrian refugees that fled the country. However, UNRWA’s mandate only serves Palestinians in Shatila, leaving Syrians with little support. Syrians rather benefit from all services provided by UNHCR, but using the UN Refugee Agency’s facilities from Shatila can be challenging. With the Lebanese state’s presence historically limited in the camp and services split among agencies and NGOs, access to schooling and basic services is difficult for Syrians in the camp. 

Coming to Shatila was, for Maryam, a way to channel her energy into supporting Syrian children who are not enrolled in school. As a Syrian-Palestinian who studied in France, she felt close to their situation and wanted to use her energy and knowledge to support Syrian families exhausted by displacement. Aware of the precarious living conditions, where families shared a single room, often just separated by curtains, she set up art workshops to give children a space to process their experience, express themselves, develop creativity and imagine a better future when institutions  failed them. 

Taking place in a Syrian alternative school, her workshops gathered children aged from eight to 16 years old who had fallen too far behind on school to be placed in classes. Lasting two to three hours at first, sessions then expanded to full days. They involved designing and making puppets operated by the children themselves, preparing performances and giving several public presentations. The workshops were participatory as children co-created every stage of the show. By developing their own scenarios, children were able to directly address issues related to life in the refugee camp, such as unsafe housing and access to safe drinking water and electricity, while building confidence and cooperative habits that lay the groundwork for peace building later on. 

At first, Maryam explained that the characters mirrored the children’s daily lives: their families, their displacement and their hardships. As they began building puppets and writing dialogues from scratch, the puppets gave them safe distance to project and rework their experiences. One girl created a half-black, half-white puppet (second from left) as a symbol of her doubts. At the time, she was torn between her family, who pressured her to marry against her wishes, and her feelings for another boy. The two colors captured her mix of optimism and pessimism, and crucially gave her a way to voice it.

How does this contribute to peace building? According to Maryam, these workshops helped children voice difficult feelings, build confidence and work with others; skills that support cooperative relationships. Over time, she saw participants become more sociable – some even led workshops themselves. She mentioned a girl who initially stuttered but then gradually gained assurance and later performed on stage “like a real star”. Of the twenty children involved, four went on to pursue artistic paths.

Art, in short, helps children make sense of what they feel and practice more peaceful ways of relating; adults can use it, too, to express memories and move toward reconciliation.

Knitting memory : Tricot d’âmes 

Maryam’s second project, Tricot d’âmes, illustrates art as a tool for sharing memories that foster understanding. Created in 2015, this collective knitting workshop—presented on campus for World Peace Day—aims to create a space where anything can be shared. Born from photographs of tents in Shatila decorated with embroidery and knitted pieces, the project is simple: people bring old clothes, cut and spin them into yarn, and, while knitting, share memories, moments and stories. In other words, the fabric itself already carries traces of a life, and the act of knitting becomes a way to speak safely.

From there, the goal is not only artistic but social. Maryam wanted to transform a gendered activity into a shared, human one: anyone can benefit from a moment of peace, exchange, and release. At the same time, she chose to put women’s rights and living conditions at the center of the workshop. She explained that, in multi-day sessions, men would often watch from a distance at first, refusing to knit because they saw it as “women’s work.” With time, some of them would sit and try it. That moment, when they finally touched the yarn, became an opening to talk with them about the women in their lives.

This approach is consistent with Maryam’s broader philosophy. She believes art can act as a therapeutic tool, but not in the sense of telling people how to heal. Her workshops are about giving participants a place of liberty, reflection and technique. The idea is not to instruct them on what to feel, but to let them express what they choose to share. 

Over time, Tricot d’âmes has also become collective in scale, not just in intention. Since 2015, more than 500 people have taken part in the workshop, coming from around 50 different nationalities. For Maryam, this turns the workshop into a bridge between individuals and stories. It invites people to not rush to judge and actually get to know each other’s paths. It has also crossed class and social lines, taking place in refugee centers, cultural centers and universities. The structure itself has grown, too. At the beginning, only five people could knit at the same time around the frame; now, up to 22 can sit and work together. 

To understand what this looks like in practice, Maryam shared a story from a three-day workshop. On the first two days, most of the participants did not share a common language, so they mostly sat together, sang and worked with their hands. On the third day, with a translator present, some of the women began to open up. One Afghan woman explained the origin of the piece of fabric she was using. She had been forced  to leave Afghanistan in a hurry, without spare clothes. A charity gave her a bright shirt she didn’t like, but she wore it for her whole journey until she finally reached France. After she settled, she never wore it again, but she also couldn’t throw it away because of everything it represented. Instead, she cut it, spun it and knitted it into the shared work.

For Maryam, moments like this are the point of Tricot d’âmes. By turning a personal object into something collective, the woman wasn’t just recycling fabric. She was sharing a memory in a way that could be witnessed by others and asking for recognition without having to justify herself. This, for Maryam, is already a kind of peace building: you learn someone’s story before deciding who they are.

Discovering Maryam’s commitment on World Peace Day, themed “Act Now for a Peaceful World”, sheds light on the role that art can play in peace building. In a moment when conflict is rising, art helps people move beyond traumatic experiences and sustain constructive, cooperative relationships, linking healing with reconciliation. Speaking to the theme, Maryam offered a simple reminder: limit quick judgments and make room for women’s voices, because a society cannot be rebuilt if women are kept in the shadows. The work begins small, thread by thread, but that’s how durable peace is stitched.

Photos Used: All with the permission of the owner: Maryam Samaan