In this opening article for the Reimagine Peacebuilding Community Publishing Series, Dzikamai Bere reflects on the role of storytelling in building community memory, preserving learning, and inviting members to contribute to the emerging Reimagine Story Bank. Drawing from his own journey into Reimagine, including the Malawi design retreat, the article argues that storytelling must help communities listen more deeply, not simply make themselves visible.
On 1 December 2020, just as I was getting so fed up with COVID lockdown, speaking to the very same people and on the verge of losing my mind, I received a refreshing email from Christian who at the time was with Conducive Space for Peace.
The email opened, “You are warmly invited to participate in twenty-four, two-hour conversations spread over five months with like-minded peacebuilders to jointly reimagine and co-create the future of peacebuilding.” Wow. Who would say ‘no’. That was the beginning of my journey to this community that we now call Reimagine Peacebuilding. It was love at first sight.
When a chance came to play a more active role, I volunteered to join the design team that would help shape what the Reimagine Community could become. Together with another community member from Zimbabwe, we even offered to host the design retreat in Zimbabwe. It was going to be a phenomenal experience, until the Government of Zimbabwe denied visas to some of the members.
In an instant, we moved the meeting to Malawi. Instead of moving into a hotel, one of the team members hosted us at their home. Design sessions took place on a big balcony. Meals happened in the lounge. We took turns doing the dishes. We wandered into the library, played with the dog and the children, went for a walk, a swim, the market, and danced to music. It was a powerful introduction to Reimagine. We became, truly, a community.
It has been years since that experience. Not every moment since then has been easy. Some experiences were tough and hectic. But the moments of deep human connection and love have energised me through the difficult times in the community. These are the stories I have preserved in me. They help me pull through.
I have come to value the power of stories in building communities, strengthening them, and preserving them. Sometimes we become so fixated on what needs to be done that we forget to share the simple stories that make our communities special. This is why we are introducing the Story Bank in the Reimagine Community. The goal is to invite all of us to be intentional about noticing special moments, documenting them, sharing them, and preserving them.
I come from Africa, born and raised in rural Zimbabwe, where the day ended with the whole family gathered in a round hut for supper. Yet the main food around the fireplace was often the stories of how the day had progressed. We shared the things that made us laugh and the things that made us cry. In the morning, the day would begin with us gathering around the fire again, warming bath water and sharing stories of the beautiful dreams and the scary nightmares from the previous night. Stories made us laugh and cry. From this experience, I know the power of storytelling in building communities.
Communities exist in conversations, memories, stories, experiments, silences, disagreements, shared questions, and the small adjustments people make as they continue to build the future. Stories capture their struggles and successes. Stories preserve knowledge and learning.
If stories are not documented and shared with care, they can disappear. Untold stories remain locked inside individual experience. They can pass through the community without becoming part of the community’s memory.
But there is another risk too.
Sitting around the fireplace, we did not only learn to tell stories. We also learned to listen to the stories of others and connect with the storytellers.
A community that tells its stories without listening deeply can turn memory into performance. It can begin to speak more than it hears, mistaking visibility for understanding. It can publish stories about peace while closing its ears to the people, practices and communities from which peace is being patiently imagined.
This is why storytelling is important.
In the work of peacebuilding, there is always a risk of becoming locked into the mechanical language of project logframes, activities and budgets. We must remind ourselves that the work of reimagining peacebuilding does not only happen in formal meetings, strategy documents, or funded projects. Much of it happens quietly, in the lived practice of people and communities who are testing new ways of relating, organising, accompanying, resisting harm, and building the conditions for peace to become possible.
Some of that work is visible. Much of it is not.
The Reimagine Peacebuilding Community exists because we believe that peacebuilding must continue to be questioned, renewed, and practised differently. We are a community of activists, peacebuilders and practitioners from different backgrounds and contexts, seeking to reimagine and put into practice new ways to work for peace today and in the future, in our own communities and globally.
This work must not be reduced to a series of projects. We can rehumanise it by listening to the stories of the communities we serve and hearing their heartbeats. We can also rehumanise it by telling the stories of what we ourselves are becoming.
We begin this storytelling journey with a simple conviction: what we are learning together should not disappear into meeting notes, private conversations, or isolated individual experience. It should be gathered, reflected on, shaped with care, and shared.
There are many reasons why we must tell these stories. We tell stories to remember, and to make sense of what has happened. We tell stories to carry pain, hope, warning, wisdom and possibility across time. Communities do not live by data alone. They live by meaning and memory. They live by the names they give to their struggles and the language they use to describe what they are becoming. They live by the songs they choose to sing in times of struggle and the art that carries the unspeakable.
Johan Galtung writes that “peace is the absence of violence, and much more.” Elsewhere, he defines that “much more” as harmony, equity and cooperation. He goes on to offer an invitation: “Let a thousand dialogues flourish.” For Reimagine, these ideas belong together. If peace requires harmony, equity and cooperation, then dialogue becomes one of the ways communities discover what peace demands in practice. Storytelling is part of that dialogue. It is how communities speak, listen, remember, question and imagine together.
This is crucial for our storytelling process. We are not telling stories simply to describe what has happened. We are trying to open dialogue around what our practice is teaching us: where harm is being resisted, where cooperation is being built, where equity is still absent, and where new possibilities for peace are beginning to take form.
For Reimagine, storytelling belongs inside the work of learning. It helps us notice what practice is teaching us and name the questions we are carrying. It helps us return to our values and build a public record of practice, not because we have everything figured out, but because others may also be searching for new ways to work for peace.
The peacebuilding field is full of language. We speak of transformation, localisation, accompaniment, systems change, power shifting, inclusion, participation, justice, healing and resilience. These words are important. They can also become hollow when they are not connected to practice.
One of the tasks before us is to keep asking: what do these words mean when they are lived?
What does co-creation require when people disagree? What does collective leadership demand when decision-making becomes slow, uncomfortable or unclear? What does care mean in a field shaped by urgency, trauma and exhaustion? What does solidarity look like beyond statements? What does it mean to shift power when old habits of expertise, hierarchy and control continue to appear in new language?
Martin Luther King Jr. warned that peace is the presence of justice, not simply the absence of tension. For Reimagine, this means that storytelling cannot be satisfied with soft language about harmony. It must help us ask where justice is present, where it is absent, and what kinds of practice move communities closer to it.
These questions cannot be resolved through slogans. They require reflection from practice. They require stories. They require honesty. They require spaces where people can say: this is what we tried, this is what we learned, this is what did not work, this is what we are still trying to understand.
That is why we must tell stories.
We tell stories to make sense of our experiments. We tell stories to learn in public. We tell stories to contribute to a wider conversation about what peacebuilding can become when it is grounded in community, shaped by dignity, and guided by people who are willing to rethink inherited ways of working.
Our Manifesto reminds us that we are independent, self-led, and accountable to the collective, motivated by its needs and those of the communities of which we are part.
Accountability also lives in how we represent what has been learned.
When a community tells stories, it makes choices. It decides which stories to tell, whose voices to foreground, what details to include, what to protect, what to anonymise, and what responsibilities come with making something public. This is why our storytelling and publishing process must be guided by care, consent, confidentiality and faithful representation.
We do not tell stories to extract from people. We do not tell stories to simplify complex experiences into attractive narratives. We do not tell stories to present ourselves as having solved what we are still learning to understand.
We tell stories as a form of responsibility.
This means being careful with the experiences of others. It means refusing to turn vulnerability into content. It means acknowledging contributors, contexts and sources of learning. It means asking whether a piece of writing strengthens dignity or exposes people to harm. It means accepting that some stories should not be published, or should only be published differently.
Good community storytelling must be clear and well crafted, but it must also be ethical, grounded and faithful.
Every community carries memory. Some of it is formalised in documents. Some of it lives in relationships, stories, jokes, disagreements, shared language, repeated questions, and the moments when a group begins to understand itself differently.
If this memory is not gathered, it can fade.
The Reimagine Peacebuilding Community has already generated important forms of knowledge: reflections from gatherings, experiments in collective leadership, shared values, practices of mutual support, and questions about how peacebuilding must change in response to the world as it is. Our Manifesto speaks of collective intelligence, co-creation, collaboration, joint action, openness, honesty, commitment, humility, respect, humanity, self-care, collective care and peace.
These values are not decorative. They are a record of what the community has chosen to hold as important.
The storytelling series is one way of continuing that record. It allows us to build a community memory of practice. Not an archive of finished answers, but a record of experiments, insights, questions and attempts. Not a museum of what was once said, but a resource for what can still be done.
Wangari Maathai’s Nobel Lecture reminds us that peace is connected to the work of protecting the environment, promoting democracy, defending human rights and advancing equality. Her witness is important for us because she helps us see peace not as an abstract ideal, but as something cultivated through repeated acts of courage, restoration and care.
When we tell stories, we leave traces for one another. We give future conversations something to return to. We allow new members, partners and peers to see what Reimagine believes and how those beliefs are being tested in practice.
This first cycle begins with written articles, but storytelling is much wider than writing.
The communities we serve are already telling their stories in many forms: through songs, murals, poetry, testimony, dance, theatre, ritual, memory, prayer, silence, protest, humour, and the everyday language through which people describe what they have survived and what they still hope for.
Part of the work before us is to remain attentive to these forms of community storytelling. If we only listen for stories that arrive as formal essays, reports or articles, we may miss the deeper libraries already alive in the communities around us.
A song may carry what a report cannot. A mural may hold a community’s grief and defiance. A poem may say what a meeting leaves unsaid. A ritual may preserve memory across generations. A joke may carry political truth in a way that formal language cannot safely hold. Silence itself may tell us something, especially in communities where speech has carried danger.
To tell our stories without closing our ears means paying attention to these forms of knowledge. It means asking how communities are already making meaning, preserving memory, resisting erasure, and imagining peace through their own languages and creative practices. Publishing can help carry some of these stories into wider conversation, but it must never become the only recognised form of knowledge.
The task, therefore, is not simply to write about communities. It is to listen for the ways communities are already speaking.
This storytelling and publishing process is also an invitation to members of the community to reflect on their own practice and ask: what am I learning that may be useful to others? What question has stayed with me? What experiment is unfolding in my context? What story from my work might help someone else think more deeply, act more carefully, or feel less alone?
The invitation is not limited to polished writers. It is not only for those who have formal publications, academic training or communications experience. Reimagine storytelling must remain accessible to practitioners, activists, organisers, facilitators, companions and community members who are learning from the field.
Some contributions may come as reflective essays. Others may come as field notes, stories from practice, learning briefs, conversations or unfinished questions. In future, they may also come through interviews, audio, photography, poetry, art, music, or other creative forms of community expression. What matters is that the contribution comes from real experience, treats people carefully, and helps the community learn.
A good contribution does not need to claim certainty. It may simply say: here is something we are learning.
That is enough to begin.
To reimagine peacebuilding is to accept that the existing language, structures, habits and power relations of the field are not beyond question. The Manifesto calls us to understand, address and transform existing norms, structures and power relations because this is essential to achieving the peace we seek for ourselves and our communities.
Storytelling can help us do that work.
It can help us interrogate the assumptions we have inherited. It can help us show what community-rooted peace practice looks like beyond institutional vocabulary. It can help us surface tensions that are often hidden. It can help us connect personal experience to collective learning. It can help us ask whether our structures, approaches and actions truly mirror our values.
John Paul Lederach’s work on moral imagination asks peacebuilders to remain rooted in the hard realities of harm, violence and injustice while still daring to generate constructive processes that move beyond them. This is close to the heart of reimagining peacebuilding. It asks us to see beyond the immediate crisis without denying it. It asks us to create possibilities where the dominant story insists there are none.
For storytelling to serve that kind of imagination, it must be honest.
It must make room for complexity. It must resist the pressure to present every story as linear, successful or complete. It must allow contributors to speak about uncertainty, mistakes, contradictions and questions. It must treat experimentation as part of how communities learn.
The future of peacebuilding will not be shaped only by new frameworks. It will also be shaped by communities willing to document what they are discovering as they practise differently.
This first storytelling and publishing cycle is modest. It will include original articles, community submissions where members are willing to contribute, light editorial review, and publication through the Reimagine Peace platform and aligned spaces where appropriate. The aim is coherence, care and usefulness.
We begin with the belief that there is value in making our learning visible.
We begin knowing that the community is not a single voice, but a collective of people working across different places, histories, disciplines and struggles. We begin knowing that no article can capture the whole. But each article can hold a fragment of the larger story.
These stories matter because they help us remember what brought us together, what has tested us, what has sustained us, and what we are still becoming. A story can help another practitioner recognise their own struggle. A song can carry a memory. A mural can hold grief. A poem can open a conversation that ordinary language could not reach. A published piece can remind a community why it must keep listening.
We are not telling these stories because we have arrived at final answers. We tell stories because we are committed to learning, practising, questioning, listening and imagining in public. This is how we begin to build a Story Bank for reimagined peacebuilding.
As the Manifesto reminds us:
“We aim to co-create and co-lead spaces, thought and action for a just, equitable and dignified peace.”
We are building a very imperfect community. In this space, we struggle, we cry, we laugh, we sing, and we draw. We must resist the temptation to think that we should wait until we have a perfect story before we tell it. I am a firm believer that the journey is the destination. That is why we must begin telling our stories today.
Hopefully, the next story will be yours, whether from your experience in Reimagine or from the communities we serve. Please do not deny us the pleasure of learning from you.
