Music and sound in times of violence, displacement and conflict

In 1980, Peru was plunged into a bloody internal war confronting the state and two armed groups: Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA). The Shining Path was a communist Maoist terrorist group whose stated aim was to replace ‘bourgeois democracy’ with a ‘new democracy.’ It claimed to fight against the elites to empower the campesinos (‘Indigenous peasants’). However, they lost track of their initial aims, and ultimately committed atrocities against the campesinos themselves, soldiers, trade unionists, and other civilians. Their violence was met with escalating violence from Peru’s state armed forces, and many lives were lost. The conflict spanned nearly 20 years claiming over 70,000 lives and traumatising the entire country. In the aftermath, violence was replaced by silence along with distrust, disunity and distance between the Andes and Lima, the capital – a silence that only music seemed to break. Trauma bled through lyrics and notes when it was banished from political and public discourse. This violence began when I was born and continued until after I left my country at 17. My whole life in Peru was framed by conflict, violence, fraught silence, loss, racism and segregation exacerbated by the conflict, and the trauma it left me, my family, and the whole country. I cannot deny or escape this beginning in life, but I can attempt to understand and work for change. I have made it my academic purpose to study the role of music as a tool for conflict transformation, particularly during and after periods of hyper violence and social division – music as an unflinching outlet when our speech is silenced by tears, fears and impotence. Yet society must also look beyond the positive potential and impact of music, to also consider its potential association with manipulation, amassing power, and stoking violence. Where words fail and the state does not help, music can play many roles, including in acknowledging trauma, promoting understanding of the roots of conflict, negotiating social guilt, facilitating public debate, contributing to reconciliation, expressing a collective sense of cultural survival, and preserving social memory (Fast and Pegley 2012; O’Connell and Castelo-Branco 2010; Ritter and Daughtry 2007; Urbain 2008). But it can also be a painful reminder of a violent past, and thus a site of tension between the competing desires to remember and to forget. How, when, and why do these roles play out? How has music been used to understand, remember and transform social conflict?