(Illustration by Edel Rodriguez)
The Ibar River runs through the Northern Kosovo City of Mitrovica, located about 60 miles from the border with Serbia. On one side of the river live ethnic Serbs; on the other side, ethnic Albanians. They are separated not only by water but also by language, religion, and history, as well as persistent tensions bred by generations of mistrust. For many residents, the New Bridge, which connects the two sides of the river, symbolizes the division between the Albanian south and the Serbian north, both in Mitrovica and in Kosovo. That most residents of Mitrovica rarely, if ever, cross the bridge represents the society’s extreme social fragmentation—a primary category of risk for large-scale, identity-based violence, including mass atrocities.
It may be surprising to learn that the bridge has become the setting for a market where Mitrovicans come together to buy and sell food, clothing, jewelry, and other items. The market was created in 2021 by Community Building Mitrovica (CBM), a local civil-society organization that has operated in the city for more than 20 years to bridge divisions between Albanians and Serbs. Staffed by a roughly equal number of each, CBM wants Mitrovica’s residents to think about the New Bridge as a meeting point where residents can advance shared economic development goals and celebrate a common culture.
The symbolism of the New Bridge example is deeply resonant today. The intensification of violence between Israel and Gaza following Hamas’ brutal October 2023 attack is a reminder to the world of the ostensible endlessness and intractability of the multigenerational conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Its persistence, based in part on ethnic and religious identities, demonstrates how difficult it is to reverse entrenched identity-based violence, a phenomenon we define as physical, institutional, and structural violence targeting disfavored groups. Contemporary violence in Gaza is just one example, however, of how high levels of identity-based social fragmentation, when left unchecked and combined with other risk factors, can erupt into horrific violence.
Violent conflicts rooted in identity are an enduring part of the global landscape. In 2023, for example, simmering tensions between Serbs and Albanians led to riots and violence in northern Kosovo, not far from Mitrovica.1 A bombing in Omagh, Northern Ireland, raised the specter of renewed violence amid a still fragile peace.2 And in Burma, the Buddhist majority has continued to perpetrate violence against the Muslim Rohingya minority, most of whom remain exiled in refugee camps along the border in Bangladesh.3 The violence in each of these cases reflects the persistent social fragmentation festering at the core of identity-based conflict. Preventing these outbreaks of violence requires actions that target the structural factors at the heart of these conflicts, such as unequal access to basic goods and services, political instability, and segregation. Civil-society organizations are particularly well positioned to take these actions because they are led by people with deep local knowledge and long-standing relationships in their communities who can tackle these issues effectively.
As researchers affiliated with the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (I-GMAP) at Binghamton University, the only university-based institute focused exclusively on atrocity prevention globally, we study identity-based violence and collaborate with practitioners who are developing responses to this violence in different global contexts.4 When people hear the term “atrocity prevention,” they may think of one country sending armed forces to another country to end ongoing mass killing. But atrocity prevention is much more than high-profile, large-scale, sweeping actions. Atrocities, including genocides, result from long-term social and political processes that develop over years—even decades or centuries—and that involve actors at all levels of society, from governments and businesses to educators, medical providers, and other community members. When it comes to atrocity prevention, no silver bullet exists. Rather, effective prevention requires matching engagement at all levels of society and at all scales, from governments to community-based organizations.
For atrocity prevention scholars and practitioners, the work of prevention is quite broad. It is a practice that can take place at all stages of the conflict cycle—before, during, and after violent conflict—and it is most successful when it involves both domestic actors and foreign ones. In Confronting Evil, genocide scholar James Waller uses the metaphor of a river to think about prevention. He notes that prevention activities can take place upstream (before violent conflict), midstream (amid violent conflict), or downstream (after violent conflict).5 Specific prevention mechanisms vary based on the stage of the conflict. While the progression of atrocities is not necessarily this linear, the river metaphor helps convey that individuals and societies can (and should) take preventive action at all stages of a conflict cycle.
While the potential for community-based organizations to eradicate ongoing violent conflict on their own is limited, their efforts are an important component of atrocity prevention. Effective and sustainable prevention requires addressing the structural issues that can lead to violence and taking actions to stop them. Because of their deeply rooted engagement with the communities that can be most impacted by violence, civil-society organizations like CBM can play a crucial role in these processes by working to respond to the risks associated with social fragmentation—risks that, when left unattended, can escalate to large-scale violence.
These organizations use on-the-ground knowledge to build resilience and create interventions that promote social cohesion and challenge the underlying dynamics and narratives that divide their communities. These narratives can operate like scripts in deeply divided societies—social dramas in which each person performs their role and interactions between the various actors play out in more or less predictable ways, based on the enduring identity-based conflicts that have shaped how people live and encounter each other. The community-based organizations we study, however, play against that script, demonstrating ways of living together that can foreclose future conflict. Furthermore, their deep roots in the cities and towns where they work earn these civil-society organizations the trust of their neighbors—trust that state actors (governments) or other large transnational entities (such as the United Nations) often struggle to earn. In this way, they are flipping the script on how identity-based social fragmentation has traditionally played out, and in the process proposing and modeling a new way forward.
Social Fragmentation Fuels Identity-Based Violence
Effective upstream and downstream prevention requires understanding the risk factors associated with mass atrocities and identity-based violence.6 Over the past several decades, scholars have developed quantitative and qualitative models that identify the risk factors most commonly associated with atrocity violence, and a growing consensus has emerged that these risk factors typically fall into four categories: those related to governance, economic conditions, conflict history, and social fragmentation.7
(Illustration by Edel Rodriguez)
Of these four categories, we focus on social fragmentation. Atrocity prevention scholar Kerry Whigham (one of this article’s coauthors) describes social fragmentation as “the breaking down of societies into specific identity groups so that these groups eventually cease to interact or associate with each other.”8 Social fragmentation leads to the formation of deeply divided societies consisting of parallel structures.9
Practitioners and scholars often refer to settings with the most extreme levels of social fragmentation and the potential for identity-based violence as “intractable conflicts.” The underlying reality they are trying to name is consistent: In deeply divided societies, the identity group to which a person belongs determines almost every aspect of their life—from where they live and where they work or go to school to which sports teams they support, which businesses they frequent, whom they marry, and even how they name their children. In societies with extreme levels of social fragmentation, identity groups likely live separately because of official or unofficial policies of segregation, may experience unequal access to public services, and together exist in a climate of political instability. Furthermore, they commonly have no meaningful interaction with people from the ethnic, religious, or other-defined groups with whom they are in conflict.
Where identity-based divisions are at the heart of social and political life, people struggle to imagine a way out of these conflicts. In such cases, social psychologists like Gordon Allport and scholars and practitioners in conflict prevention like John Paul Lederach argue that policies and programs created to support interactions across different identity groups can contribute to building resilience and social cohesion, thus engaging with the underlying issues that fuel conflict before they erupt into violence.
How to Flip the Script
Many prevention scholars and policymakers emphasize the work of state actors, transnational organizations, and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) in preventing identity-based violence. Yet local civil-society organizations also play an important role. They have the ability to design interventions that mitigate social fragmentation and reduce new outbreaks.
More important, because of the broad scale at which they work, state actors, the United Nations, and INGOs are significantly limited in their ability to address social fragmentation at the community level. Even though most atrocities start within small communities and then spread across a larger territory,10 reliance on state-centric prevention models ignores solutions that emerge from local civil-society organizations.11 Despite global policymakers’ lack of attention to these organizations and their role in atrocity prevention, researchers are delving into the programs they have developed to respond to the threat of identity-based violence to understand how they work.
Our research focuses on civil-society organizations’ interventions in their communities. Whigham has conceptualized ways to rethink our understanding of intractable conflicts by disrupting established narratives. He argues that because they are the product of generations of entrenched divisions within a society, those living within these conflict scenarios have difficulty imagining the possibility of peace. They lead their lives based on a narrative of historic conflict that makes the struggle itself feel natural and unchangeable.12 In these scenarios, however, when civil-society organizations like the ones we feature in this article demonstrate that there are other ways of behaving and living that do not sustain conflict, they open up new possibilities. By transgressing counterproductive social norms and expectations, they make a peaceful future suddenly more imaginable and achievable.13
Community-based organizations use on-the-ground knowledge to build resilience, create social cohesion, and challenge the underlying dynamics and narratives that divide their communities.
To demonstrate this work, we provide examples from three such community-based organizations, each from a deeply divided society whose work exemplifies prevention strategies that mitigate the threats posed by social fragmentation: Community Building Mitrovica (CBM) in Kosovo, the South East Fermanagh Foundation (SEFF) in Northern Ireland, and the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa.
These three community-based organizations are among the nearly 20 such organizations we have studied around the world that exist in societies struggling with identity-based violence. All of these organizations are deeply rooted in the communities they serve and can respond to social fragmentation effectively because of the trust they have generated among residents. These organizations and others like them can use that trust to take mitigating interventions that target social fragmentation. Specific actions by these organizations dismantle narratives and disrupt the script that perpetuates identity-based violent conflict. We have identified four strategies in particular that they have utilized to flip the script on identity-based violence: acknowledge mutual suffering, decenter disagreements that fuel conflict, transform anger into actions for justice, and envision a shared future.
Acknowledge Mutual Suffering
Deeply divided societies are characterized by dangerous levels of competitive victimhood that perpetuate past and present conflict. According to social psychologists Masi Noor, Rupert James Brown, and Garry Prentice, competitive victimhood “refers to each group’s effort to claim that it has suffered more than the out group. Moreover, this competition over the quantity of suffering also implies some dispute over the illegitimacy of suffering. That is, ‘not only have we suffered more than you, but it is decidedly unfair that we have.’”14 Competitive victimhood, in turn, prolongs the intergroup grievances that sustain conflict in a never-ending cycle of indignation and retribution.
The Northern Irish civil-society organization SEFF takes a provocative approach to transforming a divided society. Instead of defining the history of Northern Ireland in terms of Catholics/nationalists versus Protestants/unionists, SEFF focuses on “innocent victims” of violence to inhibit the perpetuation of competitive victimhood between these two groups. For SEFF, this category of innocent victim describes anyone from either side of the conflict who has suffered, as long as they did not actively participate in perpetrating violence during “the Troubles”—the euphemism used in Northern Ireland to describe the heightened violence between the two communities from 1968-1998. Whereas the communities in this context have traditionally seen the violence of “their side” as justified, SEFF embraces an ethos that “there was no justification for terrorism and/or other criminal violence irrespective of who carried it out—criminal violence was wrong and unjustified. Our group’s focus is upon the innocent, and we make no distinction on the basis of someone’s religious or ethnic background.”15
This focus allows members of both groups to see themselves differently, while at the same time recognizing and acknowledging that similar forms of suffering happened to people on the other side of the conflict. By reframing the division between victims and perpetrators, the organization deemphasizes the religious and political differences that have defined the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Civil-society organizations often use this strategy in cases of identity-based conflict transformation and typically refer to it as the creation of a “superordinate identity”: a new identity that highlights shared characteristics that supersede extant identity-based divisions.16 For SEFF, both communities experienced trauma and loss during the Troubles. Rather than allow these losses to sustain competitive victimhood, SEFF creates a sense of shared loss that brings groups together, instead of tearing them apart.
SEFF suffuses its work with this emphasis on victims. The organization has developed an array of services to support members of this community of innocent victims, including trauma and bereavement counseling, and other health-and-well-being services. SEFF also directly confronts social fragmentation by encouraging communities and victims’ families to hold memorial events that bring Catholics and Protestants together, often on the anniversaries of bombings and murders. SEFF’s director Kenny Donaldson has noted that it is often difficult for victims’ families to move past their religious or political identities to see people from the other group who have also suffered from violence as victims. But Donaldson believes this acknowledgment is necessary for Northern Ireland to move beyond the sectarian violence that has marked the country.
Civil-society organizations use this strategy in cases of identity-based conflict transformation and refer to it as the creation of a “superordinate identity” that highlights shared characteristics that supersede extant identity-based divisions.
An annual remembrance gathering in the town of Claudy, just outside Derry, illustrates this idea of creating a unifying memorial event. On July 31, 1972, three Irish Republican Army-planted car bombs exploded there, killing nine people, both Catholics and Protestants. In the decades following the Claudy bombing, limited occasions existed for all families to come together for collective remembrance. Over the past several years, however, SEFF has worked with the families to hold single and large community-focused events to acknowledge the mutual suffering of all the victims’ families. The 2024 remembrance marked the completion of a reconfigured memorial to the victims of the car bombs, celebrating their lives and recognizing the devastating consequences of their murder on their families and the Claudy community. Others injured in the bombing are also referenced in the narrative etched into the memorial. Events and programs like this one are designed to encourage residents of Northern Ireland to see the violence that characterized the Troubles as having created pain and suffering for all groups, promoting solidarity by recognizing and acknowledging past violence and renouncing it in the future. The identity of all residents of Northern Ireland as victims who share an experience of collective trauma is essential to SEFF’s vision of a peaceful future.
Another example of a program that brings together members of different communities to share in the experience of loss is SEFF’s memorial quilts. Each quilt is composed of patches made to remember and humanize all innocent victims of Troubles-related violence. The quilt patches are sewn by innocent victims’ family members and SEFF volunteers and include personal details commemorating the lives of each victim: a favorite football team, Irish or Ulster Scots dancing, Gaelic symbols, loyal-order symbols such as sashes, and so forth. The quilts are displayed throughout Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and Great Britain at memorials and other events. They serve as a reminder that people from all groups experienced trauma and loss because of the Troubles, irrespective of religious or political identity. Both the making and the viewing of these quilts facilitate the creation of a new community of innocent victims—a community that transcends the traditional identity-based divisions that characterize life in Northern Ireland.
Decenter Disagreements That Fuel Conflict
In fractured societies, each identity group typically has its own historic narrative that reinforces group beliefs and is seemingly impossible to reconcile with how other groups understand that same history. Although such a narrative is a subjective interpretation of the past, each group presents its account as objective and truthful and views the narrative of the other group as propagandistic falsehood.17 When groups engaged in seemingly intractable conflicts embrace mutually exclusive histories, they also allow themselves to embrace their own righteousness and victimhood. Discussions of these conflicts become so heated that they preclude the possibility of engaging on any other issues.
Many community-based organizations in deeply divided societies develop programs that deal with these divergent understandings of the past by bringing together the communities so that they can learn about the narratives of the opposing side. Based largely on the Intergroup Contact Theory, hypothesized by psychologist Gordon Allport in the 1950s in response to the divisions between white and Black Americans in the United States, these programs believe that facilitating contact and conversation about the underlying conflict is imperative for moving beyond it. For example, these organizations may unite young people who represent different communities in conflict and have them live and work together for a few days or weeks, leading them in moderated exercises that allow them to hear others’ perspectives, often for the first time in their lives. When these programs work, they generate empathy between conflicting groups, which can play a crucial role in conflict transformation.
CBM has a different approach. It believes that creating connections across ethnic divisions starts with the perspective that different groups may never agree on what happened in the past, but that these disagreements shouldn’t prevent them from figuring out how to collaborate in the present to build a better community. This approach decenters the historic conflict that often derails efforts to create social cohesion. CBM’s programming instead focuses on finding shared goals and interests that can stimulate relationships, despite the different views people hold about identity and history. Ethnic Serbs and Albanians may not agree, at least in the short term, about who has suffered the most or whose rights are most at risk. But they can agree on issues that affect them mutually that do not directly concern the ethnic conflict.
For example, a group of 15 or so teenage Serbs and Albanians came to CBM in 2021 to propose a project to help stray dogs. The group were alumni of a CBM program that had taught English language skills and given Serb and Albanian youth the opportunity to get to know one another. CBM happily offered space for them to meet and organize. The teens then developed a plan to vaccinate, spay/neuter, and feed the local population of stray dogs, including by installing feeding stations across Mitrovica. CBM provided the money needed for dog food and other resources and later connected the young people with a local civil-society organization that cares for stray dogs. While this project had nothing directly to do with the conflict that pervades the city, it galvanized young people from both sides of the river to work toward a shared goal. The project created bonds between the young Mitrovicans, because they got to know each other as people interested in caring for stray dogs. They became friends and followed each other on social media, sending direct messages to one another as a team about when they had sighted and fed the dogs they were watching out for. The project led to these friendships because their shared mission of caring for stray dogs united them more than their identities as Serbs and Albanians divided them.
Another CBM youth project is the Mitrovica Rock School, in which younger Serbs and Albanians from Mitrovica come together to create and perform rock music. Given that linguistic differences between Serbs and Albanians are one of the drivers of identity-based divisions, youth cowrite their songs in English. The Rock School has since become an independent organization and was the subject of the 2020 documentary Music Connects: The Real School of Rock. The process of music writing allows students to know each other first as young people with a shared interest in music, rather than as Serbs or Albanians.
CBM’s programming provides opportunities for Serbs and Albanians to interact, develop relationships, and collaborate on shared projects. These joint efforts direct their focus away from historic disagreements and toward their shared aspirations for the present. To improve the economic well-being of women in the region, for example, CBM created a women’s economic cooperative to support Serb and Albanian women’s shared interest in enterprise and business success. These interethnic alliances are at once challenging economic gender inequality and creating a community of women who can help to normalize relations across communities and families. In fact, CBM’s leaders have observed a greater willingness among women in Mitrovica to look past ethnic divisions to engage in community-building activities.
Transform Anger Into Actions for Justice
Members of deeply divided societies often use the past—sometimes the very distant past—to justify violence in the present. Psychiatrist Vamik Volkan refers to this logic as a form of “time collapse,” in which “the interpretations, fantasies, and feelings about a past shared trauma commingle with those pertaining to a current situation.”18 As a result, yesterday’s victims become today’s perpetrators who believe themselves to be righteous and justified.19 In the former Yugoslavia, for instance, Serb nationalists continue to evoke their defeat in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo at the hands of the Ottoman Empire as validation for their conflict with Bosnian and Albanian Muslims today. Similarly, both nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland remember—quite differently—the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, in which Protestant King William III defeated Catholic King James II—an event that unionists celebrated as a key historic victory and nationalists saw as the beginning of centuries of oppression.
Competing understandings of the past influence how each group envisions the future—competing groups typically understand the only viable future as one in which the oppositional group is no longer present.
South Africa’s social fragmentation also has its roots in the past, when racial divisions were first established and institutionalized during the colonial period, then further entrenched through Apartheid between 1948 and 1994. Although Apartheid officially ended in 1994 with the democratic election of Nelson Mandela as president, its divisive legacies remain quite visible, particularly the segregation of racial communities and the economic disparities among them. In many societies that have experienced such extreme examples of injustice, new cycles of violence can emerge from resentment and indignation. For example, impoverished communities in South Africa have in recent years turned their anger against migrants and refugees from other African countries, whom they scapegoat as drains on their already scarce resources. The understandable anger that stems from past injustices, however, does not have to lead to further violence and injustice.
The District Six Museum, a community-based organization, takes aim at the injustices that generate risk through commemoration programming that has the potential to create new forms of justice in the present. Among the many atrocities perpetrated by the South African government during Apartheid was the forced removal of all nonwhite residents from the District Six neighborhood in Cape Town, beginning in 1968, so that it could be redeveloped for whites only. The museum traces its origins to 1988, six years before the end of Apartheid, as former residents began to organize and consider how to commemorate the neighborhood that existed prior to the removals and to engage in community organizing activities, particularly related to restitution.
The museum is the result of the collaborative effort of former residents, who, along with antiapartheid activists, community and religious leaders, educators, artists, and others, came together to decide how to tell their story and, in the process, rebuild the District Six community. One of the museum’s primary goals has always been to address the underlying injustice of forced removal. Since its founding, it has fought alongside and on behalf of former residents for the restitution of the land that was taken from them during Apartheid. This contest has been a long and grueling process that is, to this point, far from complete. In the meantime, however, the museum has also focused on finding other ways of reconstructing—literally and figuratively—District Six, transforming the anger of injustice that this community has faced into a joyful, shared struggle for justice today. In the face of Apartheid and its legacy, which have segregated and divided South Africans, the District Six Museum tells a story that celebrates diversity and unity, painting an alternative vision of the past and the future.
In many ways, the act of establishing the District Six Museum embodies the idea of transforming anger into a quest for justice. Several examples of the museum’s work capture this idea in more concrete terms. The main floor of the museum, for example, provides an artistic interpretation of the street map of District Six as it existed before the removals and the destruction of streets and buildings that defined it. The map is a celebration of what was and allows former residents to remember where they once lived to ensure that this past is not forgotten. It functions as a surface of inscription and a memory map where they are encouraged to fill in gaps and engage with that interpretation. The map enables other visitors to encounter what was and to see it in relation to what exists there today.
Giving agency to those who experienced the trauma of displacement is critical to the museum’s healing work. For example, it has used the memory of a former central gathering place in District Six, the Seven Steps, to create the Seven Steps Club, a group for formerly displaced community members and their families that has become “the lifeblood of the Museum’s work and the source of much of its energy.”20 Another example, District Six Huis Kombuis: Food & Memory Cookbook, enabled former residents to tell their story of life in District Six through the experience of cooking and sharing a favorite recipe from when they lived there.
Atrocity violence does not just end when the most visible aspects of that violence ends. Rather, its impacts resonate forward.21 Although the official legal structures of Apartheid ended in 1994, its economic structures and the segregation initiated through its policies still shape contemporary South Africa. The District Six Museum is playing a preventive role by trying to bring an end to the continuation of these resonating effects of Apartheid in the present.
Envision a Shared Future
Not only do competing understandings of the past influence social dynamics in the present, but they also shape how each group envisions the future. Specifically, competing groups in deeply divided societies typically understand the only viable future as one in which the oppositional group is no longer present. An underlying belief in the impossibility of peaceful coexistence typically leads to high levels of segregation—both official segregation that comes from state policy and voluntary segregation fueled by generations of suspicion and mistrust of those in other identity groups. Such segregation contradicts the goal of building a diverse democracy. In short, the idea that a future of peaceful coexistence is unfeasible obstructs possibilities for conflict transformation in the present.
Each of our three focal organizations has designed programs to enable members of diverse groups to imagine a common future. CBM provides opportunities for residents to envision a new reality defined by shared goals and their identity as Mitrovicans. For example, the organization has convened representatives from local governments led by people from different ethnic groups to work together to enhance employment opportunities for young people. CBM also emphasizes the importance of civic engagement and providing space for local groups to create and participate in policy debates, focusing on the importance of a shared commitment to what Mitrovica can be.
As we have seen, SEFF has designed several of its programs to convene the innocent-victim community to diminish hostility among opposing groups. In the town of Lisnaskea, SEFF built a community garden, known as an allotment, for local people to cultivate herbs and vegetables. The garden is a place where community residents can grow produce together and get to know one another, thus building social cohesion through working together on a collective project. All who participate have a shared interest in its success. Under the tagline “The Community Growing Together,” the project promotes “learning from the ground that divides us.” In this way, SEFF acknowledges that the conflict in Northern Ireland has been principally over territory and land—who owns it and who controls it. Initiatives like the garden, however, work to create common spaces that serve as oases of togetherness in a landscape that is otherwise starkly divided based on identity.
In the case of the District Six Museum, displaced former residents serve as storytellers and share its history through the lens of their experience, using photos and artifacts to illustrate what community life was like at that time. For visitors to the museum, the tours of the permanent exhibit provide space to reflect on the past and the future.
On a recent visit to the museum, we joined a tour guided by one of the storytellers who had grown up in District Six and whose family was removed from their home there. The participants on the tour were a handful of white South Africans, retirees from a nearby suburb. One of them, a former physician, shared with the guide that he had been born on the day in 1948 when South Africa elected the Nationalist government that inaugurated Apartheid. After listening to the guide’s description of his experience, the doctor commented that “we all bear some responsibility for what happened” and talked about the value of his medical training at the now shuttered Peninsula Maternity Hospital, also located in District Six, where he worked with people from different racial and ethnic groups. The interaction between the storyteller and the retired doctor captures the way in which the museum functions as a space where people can learn from the different experiences of removal and Apartheid and provides a foundation for a shared vision of a future District Six, Cape Town, and South Africa more broadly.
Disrupting established narratives is essential if we want to move away from a perception that conflicts are permanently intractable to a belief that easing the threat of future violence is possible.
Rewriting the Future Begins Locally
We see real promise in the interventions we have studied that address social fragmentation and mitigate the threat of future violence, particularly in settings where identity-based conflicts have endured over many years, if not centuries. These efforts are consistent with the localization movement in international development and global philanthropy, which recognizes the power of indigenous knowledge and community members’ understanding of the dynamics contributing to identity-based violence. Each organization we have profiled is community-based, in a small city (Mitrovica), a rural county (Fermanagh), and a neighborhood in a large city (District Six, Cape Town). In this way, they embody the ideas at the heart of the localization movement.
Interventions at the local level offer important lessons that can be adapted to other contexts experiencing identity-based violence perceived to be intractable. In each example, we have emphasized that these mitigating interventions are not silver bullets to preventing violence. Despite CBM’s efforts, for example, the organization recently postponed a coffee festival scheduled to take place on the bridge in September 2024. It made this decision because of renewed tensions resulting from a combination of ethnic violence and policy decisions by the governments of Kosovo and Serbia that have riled both Serbs and Albanians in Mitrovica. CBM hopes to reschedule the coffee festival in the first half of 2025.
Flipping the script in societies shaped by decades or even centuries of identity-based conflict and division is painstaking work. Many factors contribute to identity-based violence. One need only look at the global divisions caused by the mounting violence in Israel, Palestine, and other countries in the region to see how easily groups take sides, underlining the suffering of one group and erasing the suffering of the other, rather than recognizing that the loss of any innocent life is a tragedy, and one we should work collectively to prevent. Disrupting established narratives is essential if we want to move away from a perception that conflicts are permanently intractable to a belief that easing the threat of future violence is possible.
In these contexts of ongoing violence and suffering, civil-society organizations continue to amplify the voices and actions of those underlining the power of narrative—offering a different vision of the future that bridges divides, not widens them. For example, the Parents Circle – Families Forum (PCFF) is a joint Israeli-Palestinian civil-society organization created in 1995 by Jewish Israeli and Palestinian parents who lost children in the ongoing conflict. Today, PCFF represents more than 700 families who have lost children to this violence. When members speak publicly, they always speak in pairs—one Israeli and one Palestinian—to acknowledge that they have been united in their suffering, rather than divided by it. In doing so, they contribute to building trust across communities, sharing histories, and modeling new relationships for others. Their message: If we, who have lost our own family to this violence, can come together and be friends and neighbors, then anyone can be expected to do the same.
PCFF paints a different picture of what the future of Israel and Palestine can look like, a picture noticeably dissimilar to those plastered on the front pages of newspapers and filling social media feeds today. Of course, PCFF fights an uphill battle, since the story it is telling is quite different from the narratives of the Netanyahu administration and Hamas. And organizations like PCFF cannot be expected to single-handedly transform this decades-old conflict with their words and their actions. But they, and the other civil-society organizations detailed in this article, remain valuable examples of what is possible. Even in cases where identity-based divisions have defined the ways in which people engage with the world and one another for generations, these civil-society organizations demonstrate that another way exists. What is past may be prologue, but that does not mean it is prophecy. Through their creative initiatives and thoughtful programming, these organizations are realizing a new, more peaceful future.
Read more stories by Susan Appe, David A. Campbell & Kerry Whigham.