UK Peacebuilding Students Learn from Play

Sara Downham-Lotto 2022

As Peace Studies Masters students, we had been exploring metaphors that can symbolise aspects of conflict engagement and/or peacebuilding. I (Sara) chose play, and facilitated a 10 minute game for my cohorts to consider:

• Play in the process of how the ‘game’ was conceived and put together. In groups of 3, the ‘playing’ cards were to be assembled into ‘harmonious’ compositions on large sheets of paper – intentionally organic and incongruous in shape and hand-cut and painted by previous Arts Lab workshop participants (prisoners, students of art, primary school children, adults suffering mental health difficulties). 
• Play with participant engagement – their approach to the challenge; how they experience it or think and feel about it. 
• Play too in how this shared experience of collaborative game-playing might encourage the act of playfulness in all of us, whilst also shedding light on good practice as a peacebuilder.

The 30 students comprising over 14 different nationalities came up with both beautiful visual compositions and words or phrases that the process evoked in the context of peacebuilding. Most commonly arrived at were concepts such as ‘unity in diversity’, ‘co-operation’, ‘interconnectedness’, ‘community’, ‘beauty in chaos’, ‘thinking outside the box’, ‘different perspectives’, ‘collaboration’, ‘observation’ and ‘attentiveness’.

‘We all know that children learn through playing. Everybody understands that when kids are doing things like tipping liquid out of cups and playing with stones and building things and singing songs and so on …. we know that that’s all part of their way of coming to understand the world. Nobody says “why are those children wasting their time doing that? Why don’t they do something useful?” You know that that’s what children have to do. That’s their way of becoming acquainted with reality. Children learn through play ….. and adults play through art. We’re continuing that process that children do and which we’re sort of told to stop doing after a certain age. But throughout their lives, adults are engaging in this kind of play that we call art. And they’re either doing it vicariously by watching other people doing it, going to the movies or going to galleries or they’re doing it themselves by doing versions of it like styling their hair, or wearing their clothes in an interesting way or finding new ways of telling stories …. all of these things, I think, are art that we do because our primary power as beings is that we are imaginative creatures. That’s the only thing we’ve got over animals. The fact that we can imagine; we can imagine a bridge and then build it. We can imagine a new kind of treatment for an illness and then implement it. We have to practice imagining all the time. We’re born with the equipment to do it but we aren’t born with the capability of doing it. We develop that through life and through play and through art.’

Brian Eno

All photographs courtesy of Haroon Khalid