By Valentina Baú
My research has focused on the use of participatory media in conflict-affected communities. The aim has been to demonstrate that involving community members in a media production provides them with a platform to tell their story about the violence they have experienced and the causes they believe led to it. This facilitates the achievement of a shared understanding of the conflict between groups that were fighting and lays the foundations for the establishment of a new social fabric that encompasses peace.
This is, by no means, an easy process. It is also one that requires the co-implementation of different types of interventions that strive to rebuild peace in those areas. However, what is often lacking in post-conflict contexts is a communication channel that allows people to reconnect. In the aftermath of civil violence, communities are left divided and in need of information to make sense of the brutality they have undergone. Victims and perpetrators live side by side as neighbours, and dynamics based on resentment and hatred hinder the return to a peaceful environment. The mass media are often unable to address the tensions that have remained within communities as a legacy of the conflict; hence, it is crucial to provide a platform where formerly opposing groups can articulate their views.
By drawing on the experience of a participatory video project conducted in the Rift Valley of Kenya after the 2007/2008 Post-Election Violence, when the country underwent a period of intense ethnic violence, I was able to demonstrate the potential of Communication for Social Change in post-conflict settings through the use of participatory video.
Social change is a process that seeks to transform the unequal power relations that affect a community. The literature on conflict studies tells us that, in order to achieve social change, what firstly needs to be targeted in conflict interventions is change both at the individual and relational level. Changing individuals requires adjusting their feelings and behaviours towards other groups, while changing relationships is about creating a meaningful interaction between members opposing groups, which results in the improvement of inter-group relations. This can be represented as follows:
I argue that, from a communication perspective, these changes can be achieved when people participate in the production of a media story that allows them to both reflect upon and become aware of their situation, as well as to share their experience and create an understanding among groups.
In particular, collaborating towards the creation of media content, listening to one another and becoming producers of their own story, allows communities to transform conflict at all levels:
Individual change – participatory video activities contribute to instating participants’ confidence in re-establishing peace, helping them identify themselves as agents of change, and also guiding them in the discovery of new skills. The storytelling process people engage with encourages reflection on their actions during the violence and greater awareness of their present situation and the need to rebuild peace.
Relational change – the participatory video-making process can establish harmony among those who work together in the mixed-tribe workshops. These involve both those who are in front of the camera but also who cover other roles during the production process. Those who watch the final videos through public screenings can exchange views and develop an understanding of the situation for both victims and perpetrators.
Social change – Thanks to the power shifts resulting from newly-developed perceptions of the conflict and of their post-conflict environment, members of different groups begin to engage in dialogue. The existence of different realities of the violence and of the need to move forward are acknowledged, laying the foundations that are needed to begin to build a new social fabric.
A Communication for Social Change approach to peacebuilding recognises how changes at the individual and relational level can be addressed both through the media content production process and the screening of the final media outputs in the community. Within this context, participatory video is seen as a catalyst that can initiate processes of conflict transformation that lead to a wider social change.
Valentina Baú is completing a PhD at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia). Both as a practitioner and as a researcher, her work has focused on the use of communication in international development. Valentina has collaborated with different international NGOs, the United Nations and the Italian Development Cooperation, in various African countries. Her doctoral research has looked at the use of Communication for Development in Peacebuilding, particularly through the use of participatory media. Valentina Baú is the author of ‘Building peace through social change communication: participatory video in conflict-affected communities‘, in the Community Development Journal.
Community Development Journal is the leading international journal in its field, covering a wide range of topics, reviewing significant developments and providing a forum for cutting-edge debates about theory and practice. It adopts a broad definition of community development to include policy, planning and action as they impact on the life of communities.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via
email or
RSS.
Subscribe to only social work articles on the OUPblog via
email or
RSS.
Image credit: Flow chart of social change, by Valentina Baú. Do not re-use without permission.
The post Transforming conflict into peace appeared first on OUPblog.
By Bryan Fanning and Denis Dillon
The Tottenham riots in the London Borough of Haringey took place in August 2011. We examined three responses to them: reports by North London Citizens, an alliance of 40 mostly faith community institutions including schools, the Tottenham Community Panel established by Haringey Council, and the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel established by Parliament.
The riots coincided with the end of an era of British urban policy when various community-centred regeneration programmes introduced by the previous New Labour Government, were being wound down. One of its flagship initiatives was the New Deal for Communities (NDC), a ten year programme which invested £50 million in each of thirty deprived areas including Tottenham. More recently, David Cameron has promoted the idea of the Big Society with an accompanying rhetoric that blames big government for enfeebling the civic sphere.
Two of the three analyses of the Tottenham riots that we examined shared this perspective. North London Citizens emphasised the need to create new community leaders; the Riots Communities and Victims Panel emphasised an on-going failure of services to engage with communities and vaguely endorses an agenda of neighbourhood-level community empowerment. Cameron’s Big Society agenda envisioned communities and neighbourhoods becoming empowered to take local decisions and solve local problems taking over the running of services and facilities where appropriate. None of the three reports make such recommendations for Tottenham. Rather, they restate in minor key the need for greater responsiveness to communities with no clear ideas about how this might be achieved.
All three reports emphasised a deficit in community cohesion. All three identified inadequate engagement by local service providers with residents as part of the problem. But Tottenham has been here before. The aftermath of the 1985 riot saw considerable effort to improve, foster and build community cohesion in Tottenham. Many of the buildings that were looted and burned in 2011 had been the focus of regeneration efforts.
We had just completed research on the efficacy of such policies when the riots occurred. Our 2011 book Lessons for the Big Society: planning, regeneration and the politics of community participation (Ashgate, 2011) examined a long history of failed efforts by the local authority to secure such participation. There were many reasons for this. Labour held a political monopoly in Tottenham. Community activism not sponsored by the party was often ignored. The institutional culture of the local authority councillors and officials was often hostile to community participation in decision-making even if official rhetoric claimed otherwise. Well-to-do parts of the borough had articulate well-organised groups capable of putting pressure on officials and councillors. Community groups in Tottenham lacked the skills and cultural capital that worked to win responsiveness from institutional actors.
The kind of community capacity that regeneration programmes in Tottenham sought to introduce appeared feeble compared to the on-going capacity for unsolicited activism found in well-to-do areas – expressed through single issue campaigns, the establishment of long-standing amenity groups and well-organised networks able to compel responsiveness from Council officials and councillors. The New Labour diagnosis was that areas like Tottenham lacked the necessary social capital. But the regeneration programmes it put in place engendered only a limited form of community capacity, and this depended on the life-support of funding that has since ended.
What then for Cameron’s Big Society? Even after decades of community-focused urban renewal in Tottenham, both community-institutional relationships and community cohesion remain weak. However, this does not justify the withdrawal of state support or bucolic expectations that civil society can fill the resulting void with minimal support. The very localities that need community empowerment also need state support the most.
We argue that what might work for Tottenham is an approach that seriously interrogates why past regeneration efforts were unable to empower local communities but at the same time accepts that such empowerment cannot be realised without significant state funding. It would take seriously the scepticism-bordering-on-hostility of the Big Society to local authority officialdom. But what Tottenham needs for the foreseeable future is big government willing to learn from past mistakes.
Professor Bryan Fanning is the Head of the School of Applied Social Science at University College Dublin. Dr Denis Dillon is employed by Community Services Volunteers (CSV) in North London. They are the co-authors of Lessons for the Big Society: planning, regeneration and the politics of community participation (Ashgate, 2011). Their article, The Tottenham riots: the Big Society and the recurring neglect of community participation, appears in Community Development Journal.
Since 1966 the leading international journal in its field, Community Development Journal covers a wide range of topics, reviewing significant developments and providing a forum for cutting-edge debates about theory and practice. It adopts a broad definition of community development to include policy, planning and action as they impact on the life of communities. It publishes critically focused articles which challenge received wisdom, report and discuss innovative practices, and relate issues of community development to questions of social justice, diversity and environmental sustainability.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only current affairs articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: After the Riot – View from near Scotland Green. Photo by Alan Stanton, 2011. Creative Commons Licence. (via Wikimedia Commons)
The post The Tottenham riots, the Big Society, and the recurring neglect of community participation appeared first on OUPblog.
