Counter Ideology in the Community: Applied Performance, Inter-Religious Peace Building and Pluralistic Research Methods

On June 19^th a van was driven into worshippers outside the Finsbury Park Mosque, London. From the Imam keeping worshippers from harming the attacker to the Muslim child called an ‘inbred’ on the streets of Cardiff and the landlord who removed the attacker from the pub the Saturday before the attack, people in the UK are making personal decisions that are motivated and informed by ethno-religious beliefs. As leaderless “lone-wolf” attacks proliferate the question that is asked is how can ethno-religiously-framed violence be prevented.

This type of violence demands a new type of peacebuilding. When wars were fought on battlefields between nation states it was vital to build peace between leaders. In a chaotic system where networked cells rely on the internet to radicalise individuals in communities, new networked strategies for peace building become essential. This decentralised reality where marginalised voices are as important as dominant trends begs for processes, methods, ontologies, epistemologies that move beyond binary, hierarchical models. It demands methods that pay attention to the complexity of our communities and social relations.

This paper looks at Migrant Artists Mutual Aid as a case study of socially engaged art production and the aesthetic, conceptual and political forms it engages with. It theorises how performance work could impact meso-level radicalisation by looking at the literature around Visual International Relations. I set out pluralistic research methods that draw on the work of John Law to frame and research performance and peacebuilding in the contest of counter-radicalisation especially of counter-ideology.