Peace is Personal

About Peace is Personal

Peace between people is rooted in the inner peace of individuals. In this podcast Smajo Bešo and Emlyn Pearce discuss their radically different childhood experiences of conflict and peace. At age seven Smajo was the target of genocide during the Bosnian war and spent nine months living under siege in Mostar, while Emlyn was the beneficiary of a fragile peace built upon apartheid South Africa’s racist systems of oppression. In examining their countries’ traumatic histories, and their own entwined stories, Smajo and Emlyn try to answer the most important question of our age: how can we make deep and lasting peace between people while making peace with our own painful histories?

Publisher

Smajo Beso and Emlyn Pearce

Category

arts · education · news

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

21 Feb 2024

Latest episode

4 Apr 2024

Latest episodes

4 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   4 Apr 2024

   Leadership: Personal Leaders

   Smajo and Emlyn continue their discussion about leadership and in this episode focus on leadership within their own families and personal lives. As children living through conflicts, how did the adults influence them and lead them towards a particular understanding of these conflicts. What is their approach to leadership? What does a leader look like in terms of peace making?

2. 

   4 Apr 2024

   Leadership: Political Leaders

   In the mid-80s South Africa was an international pariah on the brink of civil war, while Yugoslavia was a leading member of the nonaligned movement and host of the Winter Olympics. Emlyn and Smajo discuss how one vital factor led the former to peace and the latter to genocide: leadership.

3. 

   4 Apr 2024

   Peacemaking

   Smajo and Emlyn continue their discussion about the radical ability of storytelling to transform those who tell stories and those who hear them, putting historical facts into emotional terms to supercharge peacemaking.

4. 

   21 Feb 2024

   Storytelling

   How can personal stories create peace? Smajo and Emlyn discuss how stories transform the teller and the listener. The stories told at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission helped establish a lasting peace; but Bosnia’s TRC never got off the ground. How can we each orientate our own story in the direction of peacemaking?

Contact Peace is Personal

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.