Culture, peace and conflict in the Nineveh Plains: strengthening the evidence base for culture-led approaches to peacebuilding

Abstract

While the local turn in peacebuilding emphasises locally-informed interventions, translating this rhetoric into meaningful practice remains a significant challenge. Cultural and heritage-based approaches offer potential for bottom-up peacebuilding but are critiqued for being inadequately evidenced and insensitive to the culture-conflict-power nexus. This article addresses these gaps through a mixed-methods study in the Nineveh Plains, Iraq, utilising 262 interviews, and implementation of three culture-based initiatives. The research provides three core findings. First, there is significant local demand for culture-based approaches, with communities identifying cultural activities as viable pathways toward long-term peacebuilding. Second, the article provides strong exploratory evidence that initiatives centred on cultural exchange and heritage site visits improve intergroup perceptions and communication while fostering sustainable cross-communal relationships and contestation of entrenched misconceptions. Finally, programmatic success is fundamentally rooted in a substantial preparatory phase dedicated to in-depth local needs analysis and a prioritisation of small-scale engagement that emphasises depth of interaction over breadth.