Intergroup political theater: Transforming social representations among peace leaders in contested territories

Territorial contestations entrench opposed groups within tight political and psychological constraints, seemingly rendering improvements to intergroup relations intractable. In this paper, we examine political theater as a novel tool for enabling intergroup dialogue to transform social representations of intergroup relations. Participants are selected leaders from two groups involved in a territorial conflict in the Philippines: community leaders of the Guardians of the Marsh ( N = 7), closely entwined with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front; and Christian sociologists doing peace projects at the Mindanao State University—General Santos City ( N = 5). We describe the design and implementation of a set of culturally embedded, participatory, and power‐sensitive theater exercises to facilitate intergroup dialogue between community leaders. Through a mixed methods analytical strategy, we compare participants' theater utterances in the first and second halves of the workshop. Triangulated results from quantitative and qualitative analysis show shifts in social representations toward more just and trusting intergroup relationships. The study affirms the usefulness of political theater as a tool for intergroup dialogue, customized to conditions of asymmetric conflict between two groups embroiled in territorial conflict. Furthermore, we caution against using conventional intergroup dialogue as a tool for peacebuilding, when features of dialogue support the underlying structural foundations of inequality and muted resentments.