Write On! Features: Stitching The Broken Script – Why Peacebuilding Needs A Storyteller’s Logic By Ali Al Bayaa

By Ali Al Bayaa

Writing from the perspective of context analysis, Ali Al Bayaa explores why lasting peace depends not only on treaties and institutions, but also on the stories communities tell about themselves and one another.

Peace Is More Than A Treaty

Peace is often presented as a matter of borders, ceasefires and political agreements. We picture diplomats around tables negotiating water rights, power-sharing and the lines that separate opposing sides. These things are essential. Without them, violence may continue. But a signed agreement is not the same as a shared peace.

On the ground, lasting change depends on whether people can imagine a future together. That is why a context analyst must sometimes think not only like a researcher, but also like a novelist.

A context analyst studies the history, relationships, power structures and pressures within a community before a programme is designed. They collect evidence, but their task goes further than data. They must understand how people explain what has happened to them, who they blame and what they believe is still possible. In other words, they’re trying to understand the story a society is living inside – and whether that story can change.

When The Story Becomes Too Small

Violence often leaves behind what we might call narrative closure: a story that has become too narrow to contain complexity. In this kind of story, people are divided into heroes and villains, victims and enemies. The ‘other’ is no longer a neighbour with a family, a history and reasons of their own. They become a fixed character in a repeated tale of grievance.

Peacebuilding must therefore involve more than legal agreements or the repair of roads and institutions. It should also become an act of ‘communal editing.’ People need space to examine the stories that have divided them and to find language in which the word ‘we’ no longer feels like a betrayal.

International law can provide the structure for peace, but a community must give that structure life. Without a shared sense of belonging, a treaty may stop the fighting without creating the trust needed for people to live together.

Finding The Stories That Already Exist

Novelists know that a character’s actions cannot be understood without their backstory. The same is true of communities.

Though an outside organisation may arrive with a carefully designed programme, it will struggle if that programme feels imported or disconnected from local experience. Peace can’t just be grafted on to a society, it needs to grow from language, memories and practices that people already recognise as their own.The context analyst therefore searches for what might be called the community’s ‘local peace archives.’ These may be found in folk songs, oral histories, family stories, religious traditions, local customs and memories of times when people chose cooperation over revenge.

Perhaps there’s a story about an ancestor who protected a rival family. Perhaps a song celebrates a harvest shared by neighbouring groups. Perhaps older residents remember a marketplace, school or festival that once brought people together. These stories don’t erase injustice and, certainly shouldn’t be used to romanticise the past. But they can remind a community that conflict isn’t its only inheritance. They show that mercy, cooperation and shared life also belong to its history.

When international organisations ignore these local resources, they risk teaching people a new language of peace while overlooking the one already present in their culture.

Listening For Common Ground

Finding these stories requires a patient and specialised form of story-listening. The analyst is not simply asking people to list their needs. They’re listening for the experiences, images and memories that reveal how individuals understand themselves and those around them. They are also looking for moments when one person can recognise something of their own life in the story of someone they once regarded only as an enemy.

A farmer may hear that the family across the dividing line fears losing the same land, livelihood or future. A parent may realise that another parent carries the same anxiety for their children. Two people may still disagree profoundly, but they are no longer one-dimensional characters in each other’s stories.

This doesn’t mean empathy replaces justice. It does however demonstrate that justice has a better chance of taking root when people can see one another as human beings rather than symbols of a hostile group.

Peace is also less likely to last when it is treated as a gift handed down by political leaders or international institutions. Communities need to see themselves as authors of the process. Their knowledge, choices and relationships must help shape what comes next.

 Rewriting The Future Together

Reintegration may be the hardest part of peacebuilding. It asks people to imagine a future that has not yet existed and to make room for those whose version of the past may be very different from their own.

Local myths, traditions and family histories can help here. When they’re taken seriously within diplomacy and reconstruction, they offer a society a fuller picture of itself. People can begin to see that they are not merely rival groups trapped in an old conflict, but participants in a continuing story whose next chapter has not yet been written.

This doesn’t require everyone to agree on a single account of the past. In many places, this would be impossible and even harmful. It does, though, require people to make room for more than one memory  building a future that is not dependent on one side’s story erasing the other’s.

The pen matters because it records what official agreements often miss. It can challenge an exclusionary textbook, preserve the story of a neighbour who resisted hatred and give language to a future in which the ‘other’ becomes a partner rather than a permanent threat.

The Stewardship Of The Word

The context analyst is ultimately a steward of these words and stories. Before writing a formal report, they’ve already done some of the work of a novelist. They’ve tried to understand the community at the centre of the story, the history that shaped it and the moment when its shared sense of ‘we’ began to break apart.

More importantly, they’ve listened for the places where a different future might begin.

Only then can an analyst understand how a community speaks about justice, grief and forgiveness. Their report should not impose a finished story from outside. It should help create the conditions in which people can author and build peace for themselves.

Treaties, institutions and political agreements are essential. But they’re strongest when they become part of a living story that people recognise, shape and carry forward.

Where violence demands an ending, storytelling can help a community imagine a homecoming: not a return to the world as it was, but a movement towards a shared home that has still to be built.

Ali Al Bayaa is a researcher and regional specialist in conflict analysis, human security and human rights, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. He is currently a Political Regimes Fellow at the Human Rights Foundation.

Connect with Ali on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albayaa/

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