Language: English

In many conflict-affected places, young people are spoken about far more than they are listened to. Colombia’s Pacific region of Chocó is no exception. Abundant in biodiversity, culture, and ancestral knowledge, yet marked by historical racism, poverty, and armed conflict, this Pacific region is often portrayed either as a victim of violence or as a distant paradise.

What rarely makes it into the national conversation are the complex stories and political imagination of Chocó’s youth: young leaders who are already shaping peaceful paths in their communities through art, activism, and everyday acts of resistance.

In 2025, the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT) partnered with a group of young artists from the region to challenge that narrative imbalance. Using our narrative peacebuilding approach, we codesigned an arts-based process in which music, dance, and visual art became tools for young people. This approach empowers them to map, analyze, and ultimately enrich the narratives that circulate about their region.

What began as a set of conversations ended in the collective creation and public launch of “La Rompemos” (“We Disrupt It”). This original song, its music video, and a live performance are all rooted in the participants’ own realities and hopes.

Why Chocó? Why Now?

Chocó’s demographics and historical marginalization make narrative enrichment especially urgent. The area’s population, which is majority Afro-Colombian with a significant number of Indigenous communities, endures some of the highest poverty rates and has the most limited state presence in the country.

Two-thirds of the area’s residents live in poverty, with nearly 4 in 10 in extreme poverty. Roughly 80% lack reliable access to drinking water and electricity. Life expectancy lags far behind the national average.

But these statistics hide another truth: Chocó is also home to powerful traditions of cultural expression, community organization, and youth leadership. In other words, its conditions of exclusion and difference are not only material but also narrative.

To help reshape dynamics in such situations, IFIT applies a purpose-built method centered on the metaphor of “narrative trees” standing in a “narrative landscape.” This lens enables communities to see which narrative trees become dominant and why, and which are stifled or blocked. It also allows people to find space where smaller narrative trees can grow.

The aim is not to grow one large narrative tree, or a single unifying message, but rather to populate the narrative landscape with many stories and thereby greater complexity and representativity.

Building on this approach, IFIT’s Colombia team convened 20 young artists—singers, composers, dancers, community leaders, and an illustrator—from diverse backgrounds. They were chosen not only for their creative talent but also for their positive leadership in their communities. The goal was to recognize them as narrative protagonists whose art already shapes how Chocó is seen.

Turning Narrative Insights into Art

Over several days, the IFIT team helped the young artists map the narratives that define Chocó in public debate and everyday life. They noted how the national media tends to emphasize illegal mining, armed groups, state absence, and environmental degradation in the region, while stories of care, creativity, and community organizing remain largely invisible. The youth also explored internal tensions, between Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities and between rural and urban residents.

Using guiding questions from IFIT’s narrative peacebuilding methodology, the group examined: Who tells the story of Chocó? Who benefits from these narratives? Which stories justify certain policies?

The group worked not to erase the painful narratives but to add and amplify stories that reflect joy, pride, solidarity, and long-term vision.

Together, we then worked with the group to translate narrative analysis into artistic creation. The young artists organized themselves into three teams:

• Music: A songwriting group wrote lyrics and melodies grounded in the themes identified in the narrative mapping process—from the trauma of displacement to the beauty of local rivers and ancestral knowledge.
• Dance: A choreography team embodied those narratives, using movement to express resilience and connection to the land.
• Visual art: An illustrator crafted the aesthetic identity of the song and designed cover art.

Draft lyrics were brought back to the group for collective questioning: Are we reproducing stereotypes? Are all voices represented? Does the chorus only denounce what is wrong or does it also promote reflection and solutions?

Rehearsals, studio recordings, and the launch performance at a regional cultural festival were treated not just as artistic milestones but also as spaces to consider how the final product would enter and reshape the wider narrative landscape.

Arts-Based Narrative Peacebuilding as a Tool for Civic Participation

For the participating artists, the process opened a new understanding of narrative power. They began to see how the stories attached to their region can expand or limit their political agency; they can be perceived as victims and criminals or as protagonists of change.

When entire regions are reduced to simplistic narratives, the population’s claims to equal citizenship weaken. Social projects become something done to them, not with them. By contrast, narrative enrichment efforts like those facilitated by IFIT in Chocó allow young people to collectively name their problems, debate their representation, and shape how their region is understood.

Of course, an initiative like ours cannot alone address the region’s larger structural inequalities. However, it can open space for new conversations—in classrooms, on local radio, and in municipal debates—about what a place like Chocó is and what it could be.

By listening closely to young artists and supporting them as narrative actors, we set the stage for a richer, more inclusive story of who “we” are.

Originally published in Resilience & Resistance.

Narratives are powerful. They shape our understanding of ourselves, other people, and the world around us. These systems of shared stories provide the justification—often unconsciously—for all our actions, including how we navigate differences.

For this reason, narratives can play a central role in driving polarization and conflict. But when understood and managed properly, narratives can help people deal with divisions, take shared responsibility for resolving problems, and build more inclusive societies.

In divided contexts, the narrative landscape is usually dominated by just a few stories that simplify complex realities and portray one group as heroes and others as villains. Such limited accounts create an extreme sense of “us versus them” that becomes the norm and blocks the cross-group engagement necessary for democracy to work.

The Risk of One Unifying Story

A standard depolarization tactic used to bridge fractioned groups has been to spread a new narrative that is based on unity and common ground. But people on both sides tend to ignore, or even attack, these unifying narratives.

Narratives can be rejected when they don’t affirm people’s understanding of the world or when they include values or facts outside personal experience. When divisions run deep, unifying narratives can be dismissed if they do not respond to the group grievances that are spurring them to conflict.

As an example, in an attempt to counter ethnic divisions and electoral violence, the government of Kenya launched a 2004 public communications campaign with the slogan “I am proud to be Kenyan” (Najivunia Kuwa Mkenya). Instead of increasing national unity and patriotism, the campaign gave rise to ridicule and the counter-slogan “I tolerate being Kenyan” (Navumilia Kuwa Mkenya).

Most Kenyans rejected this narrative of unity and pride because it was imposed without sensitivity to the socioeconomic inequalities and political instabilities that marked the country at that time.

The Value of Enriching the Narrative Landscape

Rather than dealing with polarization by creating a unifying or externally developed narrative, it is better to work directly with people who subscribe to divisive narratives and then transform these stories from within.

At the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), we do this in three ways.

• The first approach is to raise awareness about how narratives shape us, how they spread within and across networks of people, and how social and traditional media content producers and influential actors use narratives consciously and unconsciously to achieve their ends. We help people see the deep historical roots of divisive narratives, often in collective trauma, as well as the consequences these stories have for today’s actions and policies.
• The second way is to use narrative transformation strategies and tools—such as positive attribution and open-ended public debates—and work with influential actors and diverse groups at local and national levels to introduce new elements into their stories. These tools add complexity to the simplified us-versus-them narratives and help people spread transformed narratives to others.
• The third method is to amplify smaller stories that have been eclipsed by the dominant divisive narratives. These overshadowed stories show the complexity of the social and political reality and enrich the entire narrative landscape.

In Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico, where narratives are key drivers of polarization and democratic challenges, IFIT teams have tailored our narrative peacebuilding approach to local realities. We have shown policymakers, civil society, and educational actors how to use narrative transformation tools designed for their specific context.

Because we recognize how important the arts are to building and spreading narratives, we have also used novels as a starting point for difficult conversations about the narratives that influence people’s attitudes, including victims and perpetrators, toward dealing with the past. We have brought together young people, who normally would not have interacted, to compose and perform songs that tackle the divisive narratives from their region, which is marked by armed conflict and segregation.

Narrative Peacebuilding as a Key to Inclusive Democracy

Over time, narrative peacebuilding has infused all of IFIT’s work. It is central to how we develop theories of change, reach out to stakeholders, design our activities, and facilitate interactions between people on different sides. Narrative transformation is now “in our blood,” and influences what we do every day.

One lesson we have learned is that bringing people into dialogue across divides is more effective when we understand not only what underpins their polarizing narratives but also how our own narrative biases influence the way we behave toward others, and even whether we choose to engage with them, often without realizing it.

In addition, we have learned that this type of work requires ongoing training, reflection, socialization, and documentation so that we can be sure we are aligned with the people we are working with. We must be aware of how narratives are affecting any given situation. This enables us to adapt to conditions as they evolve, whether during one of our activities or at the national level.

The main lesson we have learned, however, is that inclusive democracy is far more likely to thrive in a rich narrative landscape filled with diverse, complex stories. This makes narrative peacebuilding crucial to managing polarization and conflict.

Originally published in Resilience & Resistance.