‘Storylistening’ as a methodology for peacebuilding among young survivors of conflict and their communities in Colombia

Introduction

‘We learned to live with the war and likewise our land has become accustomed to it’.

These words are uttered by indigenous teenager, Sek, one of the main characters in the animated film El árbol del amor (The Tree of Love), as he stares at a green mountainous landscape, littered with the dead bodies of his neighbours. The film is set in Jambaló, in the southwestern Cauca region of Colombia, which is home to the Nasa people. Jambaló sits on the country’s margins, as one of its most dangerous places, the site of protracted conflict and constant threat. It is also a town grappling with the reintegration of ex-combatants, some of them former child soldiers.

Colombia constitutes ‘a prime example of a country currently challenged with the task of building peace amidst violence’ (Nilsson and González Marín, 2020: 238–239). The young ex-combatants, who participated in this project, face an ongoing threat of (re-)recruitment, either directly by the continued presence of armed groups in the region, or as a response to the stigma and prejudice they might face in their communities and even their families. Understanding the needs and challenges of reintegration are therefore considered essential for promoting reconciliation and peacebuilding (Denov and Marchand, 2014).

As Ripley (2009) notes, a ‘community narrative’ is often the very beginning of recovery in such peacebuilding scenarios. This idea underpinned the design of the El árbol del amor project, where the community narrative is constructed and expressed through the co-creation of an animation, produced by a partnership between researchers, practitioners, former child soldiers and young people caught up in violence. Martuscelli and Villa (2018: 388) stress the importance of including children and young people in specific peacebuilding projects and emphasise the need to create opportunities for their active participation and recognition as peace-builders. Such opportunities can be created through discerning children as ‘leaders of their communities’ in the peacebuilding process; through ‘peace education and reintegration efforts’ and ‘training in leadership, conflict resolution, communication skills and trauma resilience’ (Martuscelli and Villa, 2018: 399).

Led by a team of researchers and practitioners from Bournemouth University in the UK and in partnership with the Norwegian Refugee Council, and Colombian charities Fondación Fahrenheit 451 and Tyet, El árbol del amor is a project, funded by a grant from the UK government’s Global Challenges Research Fund. It involved a series of workshops over 3 months with children and young people between the ages of 9 and 24, some of whom were former child soldiers, but all of whom had grown up with and survived conflict.

Existing literature provides examples of how ‘young people build peace in their everyday lives’ by ‘perpetuating the rhythms of and relationships and practices of day-to-day life’, resisting marginalisation (Berents, 2018: 8–9). Storylistening is therefore presented as a methodology to access the everyday and young people’s interpretations of it, as well as a way of communicating this to a wider audience within the community and even society as a whole.

As a result, the decision not to use interviews as a methodological tool was key to the project. This chimes with Vietnamese film-maker Minh-ha’s (2018) idea of ‘speaking nearby’; allowing ourselves to be free of dominant language and fixed identities to imagine new ways of telling stories. The participants wrote the film’s script, created the characters and the animation, whilst the researchers were observers and facilitators, remaining aware of our own situatedness within the immersive process.

Storytelling is intrinsic to Nasa culture. The animation depicts this practice in a scene, where elders and our young protagonists sit around the tulpa, a fire built on three stones, which represent the father, the mother, and the grandmother. The fire symbolises life, strength and fortitude. The tulpa is where elder tribal leaders bestow their wisdom and disseminate the Nasa traditions. Rappaport’s (1990) research in the Cauca region analyses the role of oral storytelling among the Nasa and how they draw on historical memory to address current political challenges. However, as Chaves et al. (2018: 465) note, the overemphasis on indigenous political struggles with the state ‘eclipses the question of indigenous people’s everyday struggles for survival’.

The concept of ‘storylistening’ emerged from observational and ethnographic processes, and emphasises the idea of sharing and listening. This contrasts to storytelling, which can assume a hierarchical or ‘top down’ quality. Even more inclusive forms which bring together marginalised voices to construct narratives and build empathy, particularly in communities that have been affected by violence and sectarianism (see, e.g. Ataci, 2021; Maiangwa and Byrne, 2015; Opacin, 2021), are based on the assumption that the act of telling engenders listening, and that because narratives of life experience are voiced, they are heard and understood. However, this is not guaranteed.

The young participants in this research project, for example, expressed a sense of exclusion and marginality within their own storytelling traditions, which do not always provide the opportunity to explore their interculturality. Young people balancing their ancestral traditions with notions of western modernity and materialism can feel dislocated. Some community elders recognised how the everyday lived experiences of indigenous youth can be ignored in the wider quest to resist state power. For example, one head teacher explained how young people had often told their stories, but had rarely been listened to.

Storylistening is therefore an active process and has a shared impact on the ‘listener’ and the ‘teller’, whereas storytelling is an individual process that does not always carry the guarantee of being listened to. While we acknowledge the importance of storytelling in the peacebuilding process, we would contend that storylistening offers a contrast to storytelling through its focus on the listener’s response. This is not to detract from the importance of the story being told, but instead to amplify it to lead to mutual understanding. Storytelling methodologies that urge collaboration and include the voices of the marginalised can and do offer a collective response to peacebuilding, but storylistening with its focus on voices being heard and not only expressed creates opportunities to consider the impact of stories on a range of levels, as described in detail below. Much of the literature illustrates how storytellers can become empowered by sharing their narratives (Ataci, 2021; Opacin, 2021), but often less emphasis is placed on the impact for those listening to and hearing their stories. We make no great claims for storylistening, but we do see it as providing an opportunity to develop a more nuanced understanding of the power of stories within peacebuilding for both individuals and the wider community.

Storylistening is more than simple co-construction between the researcher and the researched. It is a bond forming process between research participants and between them and their wider community. It took shape within a narrative-based culture, but embraced the importance of acknowledging the everyday, as perceived and lived by young indigenous people. Within the context of conflict and reintegrating former child soldiers, storylistening emerged from a strong storytelling tradition to offer a dynamic and inclusive approach to local peacebuilding.

It is important to note that ‘active listening’ is a key component of best practice in interviewing generally (see e.g. Garman and Malila, 2017; Holstein and Gubrium, 1995), and that compassion and empathy can arise from the processes of listening and of telling. However, a distinctive feature of the storylistening experience is that it is bond forming. As Rimé (2007: 317) has noted, ‘sharing emotion has the same potential as collective rituals to bring participants closer to one another’. Rimé’s (2007) research is based on Durkheimian notions of the socioemotional process, which show how sharing emotions ‘contribute to maintaining, refreshing, and strengthening important social bonds’.

Our research shows how the nature of this shared experience varies depending on the relationship between the ‘teller’ and the ‘listener’ and whether or not they share similar narratives. Within the context of El árbol del amor the active storylistening process offered the same shared experience to those that had been recruited as child soldiers. Therefore, as they listened to each other’s stories, there was an element of catharsis and bonds were formed and/or reaffirmed. For those that had not had this experience – the researchers and others within the community – mutual understanding, or what Rimé (2007: 317) refers to as ‘mutual confidence and solidarity’, was created through education or a process of learning achieved through growing awareness. The agency afforded to the participants through the active process of storylistening built confidence for them to invite urgent self-analysis in the wider community to deconstruct victim/perpetrator binaries, avoid stigmatisation and foster reconciliation.

The lack of any ‘guide’ or pre-ordained script was important, so that the young people were free to create their own ‘community narrative’ to share their stories with the wider world (Ripley, 2009). This included the submission of the film as testimony to Colombia’s Truth Commission, ¹ making a contribution to the country’s peace and reconciliation process. As one of our Colombian research colleagues, animator and academic, Albao (2019), noted:

When you are doing something. . .from the root, it is important because you produce something from their real situation and not because someone is giving you a guide to follow.

This imperative encouraged us to consider different ways of eliciting the participants’ stories, through their own words and pictures. Thus, the project incorporates an auto/biographical approach to re-construct first-hand experiences of conflict and to highlight the challenges of reintegration. It presents the participants’ testimonies through the creation of a short, animated documentary. ² Due to the limitations of space within this article, its focus is on the textual narrative construction of the artefact, which underpins the methodological approach we call storylistening. We have written in greater depth elsewhere about the use of imagery in this project (Charles and Fowler-Watt, 2020; Jukes et al, 2021).

The storylistening approach is presented as inclusive, involving young people in the creation of their own stories, through the production of artefacts: drawings, poetry, and human cartography, culminating in their own animation. Nilsson and González Marín (2020) assert that ‘more context specific and localised peace can only be achieved by taking the affected communities’ perceptions into consideration’. This is founded on the notion that ‘security is context specific’ (Nilsson and González Marín, 2020: 240–241). Working with this group of young people embroiled in Colombia’s civil conflict, we sought greater understanding of the suffering it can inflict through listening to their experiences of violence and forced recruitment, including the challenges of reintegration, as well as building inter and intragenerational connections within and beyond their community.

Callus (2010: 64) states that ‘through animation we do see documents – in this case the pictures that document the children’s memories’. She is writing about animation as socio-political commentary in the work of Congolese film-maker, Jean Michel Kibushi, but her observations about memory and authorial voice have a wider resonance. In her analysis of a film drawn by children, where this is not explicitly conveyed, but evident through ‘their naïve aesthetic’, she notes that ‘the drawings – created by the children’s minds and hands – are indexical of their experiences, a trace of themselves’ (Callus, 2010: 64). This form of animation, where the images are created by the characters themselves, is explicitly subjective, she argues, lacking the faux objectivity of the filmmaker and a camera, creating a more authentic narrative.

Indeed, creative methods have proven particularly effective in working with young people, who have traditionally been represented as ‘passive’ and thus lacking agency within the research process (Veale, 2005). Instead, the participatory approach allows researchers to engage youth in the co-creation of knowledge, as opposed to its extraction (Chevalier and Buckels, 2019; Cornwall and Jewkes, 1995; Veale, 2005). Creative methods ‘offer constructivist tools to access children’s shared meanings’ (Veale, 2005: 265). The research process is therefore experienced as transformative, based on principles of social justice, non-hierarchical relationships and reciprocal learning between participants and researchers (Fals-Borda, 2001). In particular, there has been a considerable growth in the use of arts practices for ‘imagining alternative ways forward’ (see, e.g. the Changing the Story project at the University of Leeds). ³ Creating new and more positive social imaginaries has become especially important in post-conflict settings (Crossick and Kaszynska, 2016: 118; Charles and Fowler-Watt, 2020; Cooke and Soria-Donlan, 2020). El árbol del amor sought to effect such transformation through the construction of narratives of empathy and immersion based on storylistening.

This article therefore describes how the short animated film took shape, within a series of workshops held in Jambaló between October 2018 and January 2019, to illustrate how the storylistening methodology evolved. It also explores the ethical considerations attached to the film project and discusses the potential of storylistening as a tool for peacebuilding.

About the project

We set out the project’s aims to:

The animated film was created through three iterative workshops. The first introduced the project participants to basic animation using Adobe Photoshop and After Effects. Participants experimented with various styles of animation and illustration and they also engaged in narrative and storytelling exercises to build trust. ⁴ The second focused on the development of the final script based on the initial stories from the first workshop, and completion of the storyboard according to the script, while the third concentrated on illustration and animation.

There were 25 participants: Children and young people between the ages of 9 and 24. Five of them had been directly involved with the leftist guerrilla faction, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the FARC), two of whom were currently involved in the official demobilisation programme. Most had demobilised with the assistance and support of the Indigenous Guard, which is comprised of volunteers and maintains law and order in the Nasa community. These five former child soldiers were aged between 13 and 19. The other 20 participants were made up of 10 young people (aged between 16 and 24) interested in a media career and who had completed a diploma in animation, and 10 children from two nearby primary schools (aged between 9 and 12). All had grown up in a context of violent conflict.

The first workshop introduced the concept of storyboards for animation, where the participants worked in pairs to storyboard a 30 second short film that portrayed an issue, custom or tradition that was important to them. We asked them to take pictures of objects and the environment to use in their animations, but also to obtain visual and cultural references of where they live. For the second narrative workshop, participants discussed the link between literature, peace and collective memory. They were asked to comment on two texts, written by former child combatants. They were then asked to write their own story, reflecting on the importance of their body and their physical place in the world. There were time constraints, as we had only 5 days for each workshop: Although we started the daily sessions with icebreakers, it felt that we were delving into the issue of conflict very quickly. For the afternoon sessions, the 10 young people worked with the 10 primary school children to illustrate their storyboards. It was important for us to bring all ages together. It worked well, though the children were initially intimidated by the older participants. The five ex-combatants worked on the story. They were given a letter from a former child soldier and asked to write a reply reflecting on their own experiences of conflict. These replies were shared with the researchers, but not with the group as a whole. We felt it was first important for them to feel comfortable as individuals and for us to build a one-on-one relationship with them as facilitators before introducing a group dynamic. We did not tell them we knew they had experience of direct involvement with armed groups. We wanted this to come from them directly and from the trust, which we hoped to build. The children did not share this information on the first day. In fact, it was not until the human cartography exercise when this information was revealed (see below). Most of the initial stories recounted by the ex-combatants included narratives of ‘my friend’ or ‘my neighbour’, which we would later learn were in fact actually about themselves. The girls opened up more quickly. They built a bond with the female facilitators more easily. It would be a few days before they felt comfortable sharing their experiences with the male facilitators. The boys tended to open up more outside of the formal workshop spaces. They would seek out the male facilitators and strike up conversation to continue work, which had begun in the more formal setting.

As explained above, in the Nasa community there is a strong oral storytelling tradition. However, in this particular project the benefits of reading and writing were evident as key elements in confidence building and empowerment. Writing down stories helped some participants clarify what they wanted to say. It was a way of validating their experiences through seeing their own thoughts on paper, however simply expressed. Albao (2019) described the final animated film as using:

a collage effect. This was the choice of the young participants. They wanted to reflect the blur of fiction and non-fiction, which is why you see animated trees and mountains, but a real river or an animated bus with real tyres that we filmed or photographed. Sure, animation offers the children anonymity, but they wanted to be sure that people would realise that this is a real story, that what we see and hear in the film really happened, and that it happened to them.

Ethical considerations

I struggled with immense feelings of guilt and powerlessness in the field, as did the whole team. It was good we were here as a foursome – we helped comfort each other (Charles, 2018).

The project presented a range of ethical challenges, which are analysed in detail elsewhere (Jukes et al., 2021) and which we sought to mitigate through the design, execution and post-production phases. This entailed adopting a dynamic approach, which involved a constant dialogue between the teams working in Colombia and their colleagues back in the UK. The UK researcher on the ground wrote a detailed field report to describe and evaluate the progress of the project and the challenges it presented. These were the key ethical challenges:

Storylistening and auto/biography

Storylistening draws on elements of auto/biography, in that it engages with memory and identity, where space and time are important. The auto/biographical approach allows us to interrogate the young people’s narratives, aware that humans organise their stories in narrative fashion along meaningful consequential events (Bruner, 1986; Denzin, 1989; McAdams, 1985). Human identity is narrational – lives are composed of the narratives by which time is experienced, since lives are lived through time (Erben, 1998). These narratives constitute human experience. As Brooks states:

Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories that we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all of which are reworked in that story of our own lives that we narrate to ourselves in an episodic, sometimes semi-conscious but virtually uninterrupted monologue (Brooks, 1992: 3).

Interpretivist inquiry requires imagination, which needs to be anchored in empirical data to be made comprehensible. Personal narratives are ‘an act of imagination that is a patterned integration of our remembered past, perceived present and anticipated future’ (McAdams, 1993: 12). The El árbol del amor project, as an artistic and cultural pursuit, is shaped by our imperative to encourage new social imaginaries, new ways for groups of people to think about their lives in society, captured in stories and images (Taylor, 2004: 23). This is particularly important in the Colombian context, which is characterised by the powerful and sustained imaginary of violence (Steiner, 2005). As already explained, in the Nasa community, specifically young indigenous people navigate a delicate balance between tradition and modernity, which can complicate their perception of their place in the world.

It is also important to note the dynamic and unfinished quality of these narratives, so that we are constantly, ‘recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions . . . situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed’ (Steiner, 2005: 3). In devising a methodology for storylistening, an interpretivist, narrative inquiry approach resonated: The participants were sharing their own human experiences of conflict and trauma to shape a community narrative in their own words, presented as an animated film. So narrative inquiry can weave together social context and individual life more intricately than any other methods – for us, it is intrinsic to storylistening. Ricouer (1980) claims that individual human will and social influence are joined inextricably in the narrative characteristics of human identity. To attempt their complete separation, he argues, is to do methodological violence to the understanding of lives. Bruner (2004) extends the idea of a life in time as narrative to be plotted, or storied (Figure 1):

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Figure 1.

Life as narrative (Bruner, 2004).

Translated to El árbol del amor, and cognisant of the imperative to inspire social imaginaries, we adapted Bruner’s ‘Life as Narrative’ model (2004) to shape our storylistening approach (Figure 2):

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Figure 2.

Adapted from Life as narrative (Bruner, 2004).

High enduring feelings, such as love, loss, betrayal, pity, hope, joy and regret might still be present as timeless, transcendental emotions, but within the context of our project, the ‘emotional legacies’ (Nussio, 2012) of ex-combatants and the ‘peace anxieties’ (Charles, 2020) of former child soldiers are also in play. These concerns about identity, jobs and purpose are among the greatest life stresses for many former child soldiers, and indeed ex-combatants in general. Denov and Marchand (2014) highlight what they call ‘constant transitions and adaptations’ as former child soldiers embark upon the reintegration into civilian life.

The events in our project are depicted in the five chapters of the child soldier’s life: (1) their existence in and growing awareness of a violent and conflict-ridden society (their ‘warhood’); (2) the moment of recruitment (involuntary or voluntary); (3) their time as a child soldier (life inside the ranks); (4) the exit from the armed group (calculated or spontaneous); (5) life afterwards (reintegration). In previous research we have identified epiphanic qualities which mark the transitions between each of these chapters (Charles and Fowler-Watt, 2020), but equally important are the spaces in between, which constitute the ‘everyday’ of an individual’s life. This everyday is as eventful as the epiphany.

The narrative style of the project workshops was important in providing a dialogic forum which can encourage young people to organise ‘the episodes of everyday life and this format is likely to embrace episodes that are emotionally charged’ (Harris, 1993: 283). In this sense they gain insights to their emotional lives, which ‘allows the children to make choices about what their emotional lives should be like’ (Harris, 1993: 290–291). Dialogue can also constitute a transformative experience, which supports agency (Shor and Freire, 1987).

The form used to portray their feelings and events might be diary, letter, report, interview, but could be animation or any other creative output. There is also a fourth section in our table: Catharsis. This involves an emotional transformation, for example, the child soldier free from violence and able to imagine a peaceful life in civil society. Likewise, the community narrative attempts to arouse collective catharsis, whereby the whole community is awakened to the experiences of those living in their midst and is able, through mutual understanding and solidarity engendered by storylistening, to move away from the stigmatisation of the former child soldiers. Avoiding the ‘top-down’ concept of development, we are most interested in social transformation, the potential for change. Storylistening enables us to link alternative social imaginaries to the personal and collective process of catharsis that epitomises transformation. The output of the process is less important than the impact, that is, the transformative potential of what we discern to be a grassroots method. Working with these components within the El árbol del amor project, we start to see how the key constituents of narrative inquiry intersect with art and visual representation to produce storylistening.

Storylistening in action

Storylistening operates on three levels: (1) the individual/auto/biographical; (2) the intragenerational (peer-to-peer); and (3) the community (or intergenerational). At the individual/autobiographical level, being listened to fosters and encourages participation, thereby generating catharsis and confidence. At the intragenerational level, defined as peer-to-peer exchanges, storylistening is shaped by shared or non-shared experiences. If the listener and teller share the same or a similar chapter of experience, then, storylistening generates empathy and forms bonds between them. If listener and teller are, however, engaged in an exchange about a non-shared experience, then this conversely generates awareness-raising and a mutual understanding. At community level, which in the case of former child soldiers, might also be conceived as a form of collective intergenerational dialogue, then, storylistening can enlighten and encourage a collective reflection, which not only contributes to a mutual understanding, but in this particular case, it also reduces stigma and fosters reconciliation with former child soldiers, who were perhaps once perceived as the enemy/perpetrator and a threat to social stability (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Storylistening.

Conclusion

We do not intend to overstate the potential for storylistening as a peacebuilding methodology, but in the context of El árbol del amor, it was highly effective, to the extent that we have employed it in other participatory peacebuilding projects. It is the transformative potential of storylistening outlined in detail above that is most striking, as the young people developed confidence through being listened to:

There was a lot of stuff I never talked about because I thought nobody was interested. When I noticed people would listen, I spoke more. It made me feel safer and better (an anonymous participant, 15-years-old).

Their participation in the project was so life-changing for the participants, that they felt impelled to share their message of peace with the wider world, feelings expressed by A’te in the film:

. . .that with this story, those who make war will listen to us.

The voices of the participants were heard beyond the workshops and the film when they screened it, firstly in their own community, where the head teacher made the observations about young people not being listened to, noted above and secondly at the Truth Commission in Bogota in September 2019. Here, El árbol del amor was accepted as the first audio/visual testimony by the Commission. In a moving address, one of the young animators spoke of his pride and even disbelief that as an indigenous young man his voice and his story had been heard and was being included in the country’s official narrative of more than 50 years of conflict.

Creative methods have become known for the affordances they bring to the process of the co-creation of knowledge (Veale, 2005). Storylistening in particular creates an immersive, equitable space in which individuals’ autobiographical narratives are voiced, listened to and heard, which in chorus forge social bonds and inclusion that can inspire change. For the individual, storylistening offers the potential of catharsis, while for the community, it offers the opportunity for collective reflection. In the particular case of child soldiers, storylistening engenders effective reintegration and more broadly fosters reconciliation, which underpins everyday peacebuilding at the community level.