500 students’ narratives of war and visions of peace were collected during storytelling sessions and art workshops from 2007 till 2014 in my classrooms at Holy Spirit University (USEK), St Josef University and Notre Dame University in Lebanon. This qualitative research with young people born in the 1990s, from different religious/sectarian, political and social-economic affiliations, […]
Category Archives: War and Peace
Peace Education
The following article was published by the American University in Dubai: http://www.aud.edu/arts_and_sciences/en/page/3610/peace-education-dr.-pamela-chrabieh Dr. Pamela Chrabieh In An Agenda for Peace (1992), the former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali introduces to the concept of post-conflict peacebuilding as “an action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid […]
Peace is an ordinary possibility
When one encounters a feeling of being stuck, it takes often a while to ask oneself: “What can I do?” Even more time to ask together, as one nation: ‘What can WE do?’ But once one and many acknowledge the magnitude of stuckness and start asking questions, when one and many allow grief to do […]
Bomb Shelter
I walk down the stairway of oblivion To where my body and soul have found refuge. The water beneath me surrounding me crawls on my skin, fills my nostrils with heavy damp air. Water brought from the deep dark earth, sucked up by rotating motors, through cold metal pipes… Touch with my bare hands Feel […]
Why we must teach/learn Peace
The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance. (Nathaniel Branden) Following the analysis of several documents tackling the issue of war in the Middle East, a student of mine asked this morning: “How can there be Peace in this bloody chaotic no man’s land?” This particular question settled in my mind […]
The Road to Hell
Following this morning suicide bombing at a police checkpoint on the Beirut-Damascus highway in east Lebanon killing one police officer and wounding 32 people, the blocking of several roads in the capital, the raid in a hotel for terror suspects, and the numerous articles published few days ago about ISIS (The Islamic State of Iraq […]
Lebanese have to become Good Ancestors
Lebanon has witnessed several conflicts in the last decades, caught in a never-ending cycle of wars, both physical and psychological. One of the dramatic consequences was the proliferation of disparate scattered cities and neighborhoods run by warlords, mafia leaders and tribes, manipulated proxies who mastered the art of utilizing their people, and unconventional participants in […]
Our history is not drawn linearly, it is a braid of stories!
I started to be interested in the war and peace issues in Lebanon when I left my home country to pursue my studies at the University of Montreal (QC, Canada). While living abroad, I learned that once the war grabs hold of you, it never loses its grip; it shapes one’s emotions, thoughts, attitudes and […]
It is about time to start working for Peace
Shocking as it was and is these news of explosions by suicide bombers in Lebanon, fear creeps into the hearts even of those who live way far outside this country. The possibility of dying at any minute, in any place, with no possibility of sheltering oneself goes beyond imagination. During war times, with its own […]
Suicide Bombings in Lebanon: My opinion
Few hours before a suicide bomber blew himself up in a minibus in Southern Beirut yesterday afternoon, I was thinking of Marcus Aurelius famous quote “Do every act of your life as if it were your last” while drawing a ‘local dehumanized human bomb’, as the images of previous blasts were shown on TV. We […]