Good afternoon, everyone. Before we begin, I would like to invite you to quickly stretch if you need to or take a few conscious
breaths because I understand it gets really tiring when we're sitting for a long time.
And just kind of notice. What you're feeling right now as you're sitting in this room and you've been talking about peace since 9:30 in the morning,
if I were to ask you too quickly, maybe close your eyes if you want to, if you feel comfortable.
Imagine what peace means to you today.
How do you see it? How do you visualise it?
What colours patterned shapes?
From the idea of peace. As you understand it.
Today. And if I can just again invite you to come back to where we're sitting right now.
That'd be great. Before I begin, I also want to acknowledge that it's a huge privilege speaking here today,
not just for the obvious reasons I come from Kashmir and being able to speak more freely or in some ways
freely is the huge privilege that a lot of my friends and colleagues back home don't have right now.
So I just wanted to acknowledge that before I became who bill space, I honestly don't know.
It's a question that I've struggled with since I began this work a long time ago, and I'm not here to claim that I'm building peace back home.
I'm just going to share here what I do in peace psychology and my very humble reflections, learnings and some other learnings as well.
Most importantly, that I have understood and realised through this journey and mostly as a practitioner, because that's where my heart and soul is.
If you had asked me what peace psychology is maybe 10 years ago and how we built peace, I think I would have given you a very flowery answer.
But over the years, I think the understanding of history has evolved,
and as I've tried to understand more of peace, I feel like I don't understand a lot of it.
There's not a I don't have a PowerPoint presentation, I just have a.
Client. Because I was busy getting visa work and travelling work.
No kidding.
This is just to kind of give you a context of where I come from and just so that we get the title right because I had somebody asked me once,
what is BS psychology? Because they kind of interpreted peace, says BS.
And I was like, Oh, that would be interesting to reflect on.
So piece psychology kind of happened to me, it wasn't something that I aspired to do 17 years ago in my high school,
I went to a high school called United World College. It was started by a German educationalists who thought maybe peace could be peace.
Education could be a way to unite people. So it's a chain of high schools around the world right now.
I went to the one in India and at the age of 16 17, I took psychology and started getting trained in conflict resolution,
mediation, conflict management and other techniques. And it kind of brought in the world for me.
And as I asked myself bigger questions of what it means to be a Kashmiri and how can I kind of contribute to the community I am a part of?
So that's where the whole idea of psychology came in,
and it was also inspired by the fact that I'm talking 17 years ago when we were hardly talking about psychology and mental health,
at least in my context.
And I thought there were people obviously working on these initiatives, and there were people separately working on peace building.
And I felt like there was a gap and I wanted to somehow bridge that gap in my own humble race.
I didn't exactly know how to go about that, but psychology felt like the most relevant thing I could do,
especially because there was a lack of holistic, contextualised decolonised approach to healing, justice and peace building.
So I wanted to basically create a support system that was relevant to people in conflict zones just like in Kashmir.
My foundational understanding began with the understanding that humans are complex.
And so he speaks and so is conflict.
We could go to the Moon and probably to the Mars in the next few years, and I think we'll still end up with conflicts.
So I started with the understanding that we need to probably give people skills so
that they can at least cope with the ramifications of living in conflict zones,
not putting too much onus on them only. But I think that's a kind of a beginning step.
And on the ground, a lot of my work has been trying to understand.
How to respond to the conflict when it changes every day when the dynamics of conflict changes every day.
What do you do as a practitioner to support the people that support the community, which you are also a part of?
And in Dipo realise something like neutrality doesn't really exist because there will be times when you will react human.
As a peace builder, you will have your heart broken and your soul shaken, and that happens actually all the time.
And for me, peace has always been a process and not a product,
so I come from a very positive peace building kind of an approach where somebody actually asked me,
How do you build peace in a place with an ongoing conflict?
I think it was an important question, and most of the times when I'm not in existential crisis, I think the answer is quite simple.
By doing what is needed on the ground and I'm just here to share some of the reflections of what I've been trying to do and what I've learnt from it,
basically. So in places like Kashmir, I worked in Kashmir and Afghanistan, in Myanmar and other parts of South Asia.
But my point of reference is obviously majorly Kashmir, because that's what I've done a lot of work in, and I'm currently also based there.
We're talking about places with ongoing mental health crises. Different layers of trauma, helplessness.
Socio economic crisis. Drug menace, unemployment, internet suspensions, communication blockades.
And, you know, you name it. It's a lot of it is really painful to see on a daily basis.
So for me, the psychology was this hopeful kind of thing where I felt like maybe holistically if we understood
humans in their own context and tried to kind of support and take care of some of their needs,
I think at least we can create some windows of calm.
And I don't want to call it peace because I feel like that's a lot to say,
but I feel like some windows of calm so that they can kind of understand what's happening to them.
And in that intersectionality has been very important to me, and that's how I have been working at the intersection of mental health,
psychology, arts, conflict transformation and peace building, especially with a localised, culturally relevant kind of an understanding.
I'm just going to briefly talk about some of the themes I've been working with because in the next ten minutes, that's all I can do.
Mental is political. Many times when I speak about it, people are like, Why don't you just only talk about psychology?
Don't talk about politics.
I think the times we live in, it's increasingly going to be even more important to acknowledge that mental is political and vice versa,
especially in conflict zones where individuals like me try to do something on the ground.
But then you have an overarching political framework which impacts all aspects of your life, whether you like it or not.
There's also a very heavy emphasis on this word, which I'm sure you heard a lot resilience in the past couple of years.
I've come to hate the word. I don't like it any more.
Because I feel like there's just too much onus on the surviving communities to be resilient, to go on despite the chaos.
Despite the conflict. And that does not help.
I'm still struggling with the word healing, I don't know if it really happens in conflict zones.
I think most of the times we just try to put Band-Aids on the wounds because that trauma is really intrinsic.
It's intergenerational. And sometimes imagine I'm talking to somebody on the phone today providing psychological
first aid and the internet and the phone lines get cut because of the political turmoil.
The next time I speak with this person could be three months after I get up to 15 days later, you know,
and the next time I speak with this person, I have to go back and start from point zero, which gets exhausting for both of us in the process.
The next time that I'll briefly touch upon is decolonisation and contextualisation.
I know these are very heavy words that people have so many theories about.
I'm not here to give you any theories in my very simple, humble understanding.
I feel like a lot of peacebuilding field is still very colonised, and so is psychological support.
And to begin with, we need to kind of colonised a lot of these words.
For instance, I studied in the West as well, so when I came back, I thought I was going to teach some fancy things to, you know, people back home.
So let's start with self-care. And as you would know, the the current notions of self-care, you know, Netflix and chill.
That's actually not self-care, especially for a community like ours where community is a huge factor.
And individualism doesn't really exist. I mean, talk to women about self and they're like, What is that?
And I'm not here to discredit the whole concept of self-care. I think it has its own importance.
But in places like Kashmir, the notions of care and nurture and support comes from communities,
so you cannot actually see it in in a silo, you have to see it within the context of the broader community.
And in that the contextualisation is so important, the work I was doing in the U.S. before I came in, I had to kind of put it away,
get rid of my accent that I had picked out because I had been studying internationally
for a while and create new modules that I thought could help people on the ground.
And I've been trying to do that through a lot of experiential workshops, modules, seminars that take into consideration the local richness of art,
culture, spirituality, you know, creativity and a lot of other things religion as well.
I think that's an important factor. And we there's often a debate between psychology and religion,
when religion actually can be a huge psychological support, which is the case in Kashmir is what.
The third theme and something very close to my heart is creating community safe spaces for expression, dialogue and interconnectedness.
So in so the picture that you're seeing is actually from an initiative that I do, it's called a zone dope.
So Deb is basically from the Kashmiri architecture,
it used to be like a balcony kind of a room from where you could basically stargaze moon gaze zone means moon in Kashmiri and Dobies basically a room.
So this is kind of a modern idea of a zone,
but the initiative is called zoo in Durban in that people come together and they share their narratives of what is happening to them psychologically,
what is a conflict doing to them? What are their mental health needs and other needs?
And they do it through a different creative ways through storytelling, through, you know, artistic expression.
Art is an integral part of everything I do because I think that really helps at all levels.
So because of COVID, Zoom is something that you could basically do anywhere.
I've done it on the streets and schools and community places. But because of COVID last year, we were really restricted.
So I had to do it in the basement of a local cafe who were very helpful and kind of hosted us for free.
All my work in Kashmir is also free, so to also look for other community support from people.
So this is from, I think, the Women's Day or the Mental Health Day that we try to do this.
But this is sometimes the first space or the only space for women,
especially who come together and express what is happening to them or their stories of abuse or domestic
violence or psychological needs and their aspirations and hope for a peaceful future as well as.
As you would have seen, mental health, for instance, is an integral part of the work I do.
It's not the only thing, but I think it's an important one and there's still so much stigma attached to mental health.
I once told my mom that I think I'm going through anxiety and she was like, Don't tell this to anyone.
Nobody will take you seriously. So the stigma is huge and.
A lot of my energy and time on a daily basis back home goes into doing a lot
of awareness campaigns on the stigmatisation of mental health conversations,
bringing people together, creating mandated working groups, sharing resources.
We're talking about basic unawareness.
People still don't know the difference between a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a counsellor, a therapist, for instance.
So in these 10, 12 years on the ground, I've also been trying to compile resources,
especially who would offer their services pro bono to young people or students who especially, you know, afford these things.
Mental health conversation in itself is a privilege in places like Kashmir because.
There's so much trauma that a lot of people sometimes don't even know that they're going through mental health issues,
so the stigmatisation of it becomes even more important.
The last thing that I just want to touch upon very briefly is counteracting the enforced normalisation that comes with conflict,
which leads to dehumanisation. So, for instance, the abnormal is the norm back home, you know, seeing people getting killed on a daily basis,
shuttling between funerals and weddings, maybe sometimes in the same hour.
It's all very normal. Back home,
we sometimes joke about it like kids used to open the newspapers in the morning to see if somebody has gotten killed so that they can have a day off.
So the normalisation of conflict is one of the most, scariest things.
And personally, it breaks my heart to see people going numb with the conflict.
And it also creates a lot of dehumanisation.
And in that a lot of foundation of purpose of the work I do is to create a bridge where people can stand, pause and ask them, says, is this normal?
Because most often they don't even have that privilege or that safe space to ask themselves these questions.
But if they do ask those questions to themselves,
it creates a bit more of self-awareness and gives them space for emotional expression and meaning making.
Cooper's space. In Kashmir, peace pieces, sometimes also one of the most controversial words, so for a long time,
people thought I was a counsellor and I let them think that way because I was like, OK, I can do my work on the ground.
And it's also futuristic. You will hear people say peace will happen one day.
And it's also localised because it, for instance, in the Kashmiri context, if you also ask, like little kids,
I did some peace education modules with little kids in schools, and even for them,
peace is the political freedom, and the local word for that is azadi.
I don't know who builds peace, but what I've been trying to do on the ground in terms of trying to create windows of peace and calm comes at a cost.
It's exhausting, to say the least, with all the nice fancy things we've been looking at and learning about since morning.
Well, I've been working on the ground for a good 11 years now and I feel exhausted.
And this is not to say that I hate the work I do.
I love the work I do, but it's absolutely heartbreaking on a daily basis because this lack of support, this lack of resources.
I know Jonathan and other people talked about those things, but it's not just financial resources.
There's a lack of psychological support. And that's why, for instance, they've been coming here and seeing all of you.
I feel more energetic than I would have at home. There's increasing scrutiny back home.
There's almost zero freedom of expression and no self-care practises, and I have been affected by a lot of this personally.
I started having anxiety in 2019 when there was like a huge shift in the political scenario in Kashmir.
And since then, my head has been going down the drain.
I would have loved a few more issues, but that also made me realise the need of well-being and psychological approach towards peacebuilding.
I think so much of peacebuilding is still socio economic, physical protection kind of based, and it needs to be holistic, not just psychological.
We need to look at digital rights of people, legal rights of people.
I do a lot of advocacy on ripest WP as forums, especially for holistic protection of young people who don't just need social economic protection.
They need, you know, a psychological protection, they need legal protection and all of that.
Before coming here, I had to read it. Think about what to speak here because I didn't also want to get into trouble back home.
Yeah, a lot of people didn't know why I was coming here because I wasn't sure if I'd be
allowed to come here at the airport because that's how things are back home right now.
And in that mental health and psychological, holistic approach to peace building is not a nice thing.
I think this is this should be a fundamental thing to peace building.
If not now then when I think pandemic has been a great reminder of a lot of these things and moving forward.
I think this is the only way to go if you're going to invest in peace building and in people on the ground,
you also need to take care of their basic needs, which include psychological needs end to end.
I think there's always a movement happening. It's not like we need to create a new movement, but.
Is there are there enough people listening?
I've had enough people listening with empathy, Kashmir still is absent from a lot of international forums, papers, agendas that even I am a part of.
And it's often called a disturbed area and it's actually a conflict zone with an ongoing settler ward.
So as a as an international community, when we talk about these things, the movement is there.
But why aren't people speaking because they don't have the privileges to always speak and if they are speaking, are we listening enough?
Are we listening with empathy, especially in the age of clicks and links when we put up a link online and we feel like our job is tied?
If you want to be in peace building apart from empathy and, you know, humility and other things.
I think one thing has to be constant.
You have to let your heart break and you have to let it break enough for yourself to feel what these humans are feeling in their context,
which is not happening very often today. I think that's the only way to go about building peace.
Piece by piece, I'll stop there. Thank you for listening.