Peace in Practice: An Arts-Based Workshop

About the event

We are delighted to part of Geneva Peace Week 2025 with an arts-based workshop, inviting participants to explore peace not as an abstract ideal but as a lived, creative practice. 

• Date: Tuesday 14 October, 11:00-12:30
• Venue: Maison de la Paix/Geneva, Conference Center C2 (pétale 5) 
• Capacity: In-person, 24 participants
• Main Organiser: Caux Initiatives of Change Foundation
• Partner: Geneva Peacebuilding Platform

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

In a world where faith in the possibility of peace can feel fragile, this 90-minute intermodal expressive arts journey invites you to reimagine and re-envision what a peaceful world could look and feel like.

Through a blend of creative writing, sound, movement, and visual arts, you’ll awaken the imagination as a force for transformation — both personal and collective. As peacebuilder John Paul Lederach reminds us, peacebuilding is a profoundly creative act, and the moral imagination emerges “in the messiness of innovation,” finding its way into the art and soul of building peace.

Rooted in expressive arts principles and drawing from phenomenology, imagination-in-action, and poiesis, this session invites you to experience peace not as an abstract aspiration or rigid concept, but as a living, breathing practice of creativity and connection.

Together, we will explore:
🌱 What inner resources sustain us in the ongoing work of peace?
🎨 How might we extend artistic and relational invitations to others, imagining a shared, just, and compassionate future?

Through embodied storytelling and collaborative creation, this space offers safety, inspiration, and creative collaboration, nurturing empathy, collective wisdom, and renewed hope.

This workshop is an opportunity to pause, to create, and to remember that peace begins in the act of imagination itself.

WITH:

MARUEE PAHUJA (India), Expressive Arts Consultant, Process Facilitator, Visual Artist, Creative Leadership

Maruee Pahuja is an impassioned Expressive Arts Consultant, Process Facilitator, Visual Artist, and Eye-Care Practitioner passionate about bridging arts and science. At the Caux Initiatives of Change Foundation, she fosters peacebuilding through arts-based approaches and drives strategy with Creative Leadership, the Caux Foundation's initiative for young leaders and is a member of the Caux Arts and Peace Encounters Advisory Committee. With over 300 workshops worldwide and collaborations with 25+ non-profits, Maruee champions arts-based interventions for leadership and community resilience. A speaker at Geneva Peace Week 2024, the International Day of Conscience 2025 and the Caux Democracy Forum, she has created 5,000+ multimedia artworks and exhibited nationally. Dedicated to transformation through creativity, Maruee continues to inspire and innovate globally.

INES MOKDADI (Tunisia), 2025 Global Engagement Events Coordinator at Caux Initiatives of Change, University Professor of English & Creative Leadership Youth Initiative

Ines Mokdadi is the 2025 Global Engagement Events Coordinator at Caux Initiatives of Change. Alongside this role, she is a Professor of English at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences in Kairouan, Tunisia, where she specializes in Linguistics. Her research focuses on critical discourse analysis, power dynamics, and narrative transformation. When she’s not in the classroom, Ines works as a freelance translator and interpreter, and is a proud Caux Scholar alumna (2025). She also spent time as a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) at the University of Notre Dame in the USA (2020-2021), further cultivating her passion for language and cultural exchange. Ines is deeply committed to civic engagement, inclusion, and global understanding. She volunteers as the Lead Content Strategist for the Creative Leadership team, focusing on youth-driven initiatives. More recently, she expanded her work with IofC UK, where she trained participants in the Refugees for Re-Builders (RRB) programme on Ethical Leadership for Just Governance. This role underscored her dedication to supporting refugees and promoting ethical, community-driven solutions for a more just world.

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About Geneva Peace Week

Geneva Peace Week is a leading annual forum in the international peacebuilding calendar through which organizations in Geneva and their international partners come together to share knowledge and practice on a diverse range of topics related to peace across contexts and disciplines. 

#GPW25 #ArtsandPeace