This project stream will explore pluriversal visions of peace within Burundian-Congolese fluid borders. We will bring together communities affected by severe flooding, feminist activists, artists and researchers across Bujumbura and Uvira, two border towns on the Northern coast of the Tanganyika Lake across Burundi and Congo (DRC). Building on  decolonial feminism and arts based methodologies, we will co-produce visual arts. Arts that capture various meanings granted to entanglements of bodies, nature, conflicts and peace. Our team will collaboratively enhance decolonial approaches to peace education in Burundi, South Kivu/DRC, and Belgium.

Specifically, we are seeking to challenge usual power asymmetries sustained within peace education. The project will provide means and spaces for people affected by violence in South Kivu and Burundi to document their own visions of what peace means to themselves, and transmit such visions to their own educative networks and educative networks in Belgium, the country that colonized the region. Overall, the project’s main objective is to develop and reflect upon innovative contributions to re-imagining how peacebuilding education can be delivered.

Deploying participative arts-based methods, we seek to demonstrate

1) people experiencing violence are experts and shall be recognized as such;

2) their expertise shall be integrated in decolonial peace education material;

3) general public, particularly in previous colonies where colonial mind frames continue to reproduce racist stereotypes about African conflicts, shall be exposed these pluriversal visions.