Storytelling has been a crucial vehicle to build common narratives, understanding and mutual trust between and within communities throughout the centuries. Stories have the potential to create new meaning, stimulate empathy, build nuanced perspectives by countering misconceptions, and catalyse people’s dreams and aspirations towards concrete community action. Yet despite its potential and documented added-value in the context of peacebuilding efforts, its application in the context of social transformation processes and policymaking remains limited.
QCEA’s publication ‘Storytelling from the Frontlines: Forefronting the voices of communities most affected by militarism and the climate crisis’ brings a selection of stories from communities in disparate locations of the world who are united by the connecting thread of militarism and the climate crisis. Through storytellers’ eyes, we see how militarisation and securitised responses negatively impact the natural environment that communities depend on to survive and thrive, as well as how militarisation hinders local efforts to tackle climate and environmental issues at the community level.
Click here to read the full publication in the French language!
Listen to Yara Hasan from Bil’in, Palestine talk about the links between militarism, occupation and climate crisis:
Listen to Cristóbal Pop, representative of the Gremial de Pescadores (Fishermen’s Union) of the municipality of el Estor, Izabal (in Guatemala), talk about the repression and criminalisation against local communities:
Listen to Tateh Lehbib, an architect living in Sahraoui refugee camps in the south-west of Algeria, talk about greenwashing and deliberate exploitation of natural resources in occupied territories:
Listen to Tiara R. Na’puti, a Chamorro Indigenous scholar from Guåhan, Mariana Islands talk about challenging the idea that climate change needs to be securitised:
Listen to Kim Vo Dinh from Collectif Vietnam Dioxine talk about the impact of militarism on nature:
Listen to Isa from the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination talk about the possibilities of radical imagination in ZAD, Notre-Dame-des-Landes, in France:
