Art as an antidote to violence

Abstract Art and creative practice have long been topics of attention in scholarship, although their relevance to understanding war and political violence has been less developed. This article introduces a special issue whose contributions aim to deepen our understanding of how creative processes can disrupt war and its legacies. We affirm scholarship in critical and feminist security studies that has found that top-down, state-based approaches to peacebuilding and transitional justice often fall short of their goals, highlighting the need for more creative bottom-up strategies to disrupt war logics and systems of oppression. In this introduction, we draw on theorizing about how art and creativity can provide us with new language to understand and analyze structures of harm and violence. We explore how creativity and a politic of ordinary encounters can help mobilize people to resist violence. And finally, we consider how art, creativity, and care can contribute to healing and repair after war by allowing their participants to imagine new futures and possibilities. The eight articles that follow each make the case for the central need to explore how art and creative practices can play crucial roles in efforts to disrupt violence, oppression, and harm of all forms.