How Food, Sports and Arts Can Change the World

While peace and conflict scholars have long focused on “hard power”, such as security, political, and economic domains, soft power, or “the ability to get what you want through attraction”, is especially important for building peace in contexts of group-based conflict.  Food, sports and arts are promising soft power spaces since they are central to group identity, universal experiences, ways to communicate without words, and hold strong emotional connections to memory, but are commonly overlooked by peacebuilders. 

In response, this research examines the efforts of “everyday ambassadors” who use food, sports and arts to influence the thoughts, behaviors, and/or feelings of others towards cross-group inclusion, belonging, and peace. Drawing on theory from marketing and the social psychology that underlies it, and deploying mixed methods from case studies and qualitative interviews to quantitative analysis of media and social media, I broaden the repertoire of strategies to build inclusive and sustainable peace.

I am grateful to the Folke Bernadette Academy (Swedish Government) and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy for generous support in funding work that inspired and became this project.