There is growing interest among scholars and practitioners in how the arts can help rebuild post-conflict societies. This edited collection explores a range of musical practices for social and political peace. By presenting case studies in each chapter, the aim is to engage with musicality in relation to time, space, peace-building, healing, and reconciliation. Emerging scholars' work on Latin America, especially Colombia, and on the African Great Lakes region, including Zimbabwe, Rwanda and Kenya, is brought together with the purpose of reflecting critically on 'music for peace-building' initiatives. Each author considers how legacies of violence are addressed and sometimes overcome; lyrics are examined as a source of insights. These practical music for peace-building initiatives include NGO work with youth hip-hop, music for peace, work in education on memory, as well as popular culture and shared rituals. Special attention is paid to historical and contextual settings, to the temporal and spatial dimension of musicality and to youth and gender in peace-building through music.

Rafiki Ubaldois a Rwandan-Swedish writer, scholar and photojournalist.

Helen Hintjens is assistant professor in development and social justice at the International Institute of Social Studies, an institute of Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Chapter 1: An Overview: Music for Healing, Peace-Building and Resistance, by Rafiki Ubaldo and Helen Hintjens

PART I Youth and the Future of Liberal Peace

Chapter 2: Resistance and Violence Prevention through Hip-Hop: The Case of Youth from Marginalized Contexts in Colombia, by Catalina Gil Pinzón

Chapter 3: New Colombian Music: Heritage and Multiculturalism on the Constitutional Road to Peace, by Juan D. Montoya Alzate

PART II Contextualising Healing

Chapter 4: Ethno-music Therapy: Perspectives from Kenya and Brazil, by David O. Akombo

Chapter 5: Hope, Destruction, and Reconciliation: Samputus Healing Ngoma, by Brent Swanson

Chapter 6: The Resonance of Music when Teachers and Students Remember War: Experiences from Public Schools in Bogotá, Colombia, by Julian David Bermeo Osorio

PART III: Resistance, Time, Memory

Chapter 7: Reviving Orchestre Impala: Recovering the Past in Rwanda? By Helen Hintjens and Rafiki Ubaldo

Chapter 8: The Lamentations of Thomas Mapfumo: Pfumvu Paruzevha as an Expression of Rural Suffering and Resistance in Colonial Zimbabwe, by Everisto Benyera

Chapter 9: Music and the Aesthetics of Resistance, by Frank Möller