ABSTRACT
Community development (CD) and peacebuilding must work hand in hand to address the poverty-conflict nexus. This chapter explores GraceWorks Myanmar’s community development education programme, which adopts a participatory arts-based pedagogy to attempt to strengthen everyday peace formation within an ongoing CD programme in Rakhine State, Myanmar. Rakhine is the poorest part of the country and embroiled in intractable conflict and recent ethnic cleansing. The chapter considers key theoretical foundations of the programme, and evidence that it has given rise to new critical-awareness of conflict dynamics, leading to greater empathy, new sense of identity, and strengthened empowerment to advance everyday peace formation, even in such a deeply divided context.
