In today’s environment, we can see conflicts in many places. These include intra-state wars such as in Ethiopia, inter-state wars, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and conflict manifest in discursive dehumanisation. The construction of enemies and us vs. them distinction makes peaceful coexistence, let alone peaceful cooperation in the pursuit of some form of the common good, nearly impossible as identities and views are considered incompatible and based on incommensurate values. Conflict is also visible in the amplification of polarisation through social media in mature civil societies such as those in the US or the UK.
This is not to say that conflict is inherently bad and should be avoided at all costs – indeed, conflict can be healthy and lead to progressive outcomes but only if it is negotiated and managed through non-violence with all actors adhering to a set of ‘rules’ or upholding a set of ‘civil norms’. And this can only be achieved through communicative peacebuilding.
Building civil peace is an ongoing process aiming to achieve cooperation between the different members and groups of society despite deep divisions and strong disagreements. Peaceful cooperation can be achieved through the performance of three categories of civil norms – (1) assent to civil peace (a firm yes to peace), (2) substantive civility (acknowledging the equal civil standing of all members of society) and (3) capacity building and civil competencies (both at institutional and individual levels). These building blocks of peace are performed across the communicative spectrum of civil society. This includes unmediated communication (discussion and dialogue, debate, mediation and negotiation); the factual mass media (news journalism, documentaries, non-fiction); the fictional mass media (novels, poetry, TV and radio soap opera); and the performative (dance, theatre, music) and the visual arts (photography, street art, graffiti, architecture and space, paintings, memorials). It is through all these communicative outputs that communicative peacebuilding is undertaken, that societies communicate with each other, as well as define and represent themselves internally and to the external world.
For communicative peacebuilding and therefore the performance and achievement of peaceful cooperation to be successful it is necessary to uphold the three principles of discursive civility. Discursive civility is a civil-communicative skill that enables citizens to manage and negotiate conflict, deep disagreements, and division in agonistic and non-violent ways. It helps them navigate difference and otherness all by pursuing a common objective on behalf of an inclusive and solidary society: civil peace as peaceful cooperation. It also makes communicative engagement between participants from different groups and with different views safe. Discursive civility acts as a guarantor for safety and provides the basis for the creation of safe spaces. The three principles of discursive civility which can be learned and taught are:
- Principle 1: Participants have to make a commitment to manage their individual negative emotions (emotional forbearance).
- Principle 2: Participants have to make a commitment to listen to the other and, importantly, to hear the other (perspective-taking).
- Principle 3: Participants have to commit to making only such contributions that are supportive of the pursuit of peaceful cooperation (reasonableness).
These three principles need to be locally and contextually interpreted and applied by peacebuilders and across the communicative spectrum of civil society. Their upholding, the playing by the ‘rules’ of discursive civility, is essential to civil peace and peaceful cooperation. Without them, lasting self-sustainable peace is impossible.
Over the past year, I have spent a lot of time discussing and advocating communicative peacebuilding, defending its essential role, and training peacebuilders and NGOs in it in various parts of the globe. I discovered that indeed communicative peacebuilding is easily recognised as essential and quickly valued as an important peacebuilding tool by local peacebuilders in particular. It is something that often is intuitively done but needs to be explicitly formulated to be able to become part of programming choices and peace education curricula. I believe it is an urgent imperative to recognise communicative peacebuilding as equal in importance to political and economic peacebuilding. This entails that we all understand communication as essential to peacefully cooperative and associative societies and including the arts – often falsely dismissed as entertainment or as the activity to include if there is money left in the budget. It also entails that peacebuilding needs to include training in the skill of discursive civility as a basic citizenship skill; one that is considered at least as important as media and information literacy.
In short and to conclude: without communicative peacebuilding, the move from enmity to co-citizenship will be at best short-lasting and in the worst case entirely unfruitful.
Stef Pukallus
Dr Stef Pukallus is Senior Lecturer in Public Communication and Civil Development at the University of Sheffield (UK) and Founding Chair of the Hub for the Study of Hybrid Communication in Peacebuilding (HCPB). Stef’s overall research interest is the role that public communication (broadly conceived) plays in the building, maintaining, strengthening as well as diminishment and destruction of civil societies across the globe. She is particularly interested in communication’s transformative capacity and has applied this interest to conflict communication (hate speech, dehumanisation, polarisation) as well as to peace communication (post-civil war, European integration). She has developed her own model of communicative peacebuilding, an intrinsic element of which is discursive civility. Stef has acted in an advisory expert capacity to both the European Commission and the United Nations. Her latest book is entitled ‘Communication in Peacebuilding’. Civil wars, civility and safe spaces (Palgrave Macmillan 2022).
