“A person is a person through other people”: how we speak shapes peace

Language as a power structure in peace building

Twenty-five years have passed since the adoption of the landmark UN Security Council Resolution 1325, the foundation of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and a global commitment to women’s participation in conflict prevention, resolution, and recovery. 

When I began working on gender and peacebuilding related issues in the Central African Republic, Darfur, Somalia and South Sudan, the WPS agenda was my compass. It gave direction and legitimacy to the idea that gender equality is not an afterthought but a prerequisite for sustainable peace. Yet, through community dialogues in villages, mediation efforts, and meetings in capital cities, I realised that participation is not only about who sits at the table, it is also about how we speak at that table. Peace, I learned, is built not only through policy, but through the words we choose to shape it.

In humanitarian and peacebuilding work, we often rely on what we call a “language of neutrality.” Yet language is rarely neutral. For example, terms like “capacity-building” or “shared learning” may sound positive, or even progressive, yet they can reinforce hierarchies, suggesting that capacity or knowledge belongs elsewhere and must be transferred. This use of language is more common when it comes to women. Too often, women are described as one big homogeneous group and mainly as “victims”, “vulnerable”, or “beneficiaries”, rarely as “leaders”, “negotiators”, or “architects of peace”. Each of these words draws an invisible line, defining who acts and who is acted upon, and in doing so, replicating the same systemic power structures we claim to transform. Becoming aware of these linguistic biases is not political correctness. It is about humility: the recognition that our words can either reproduce exclusion or open space for transformation. 

The relationship between language and reality is closely intertwined, they can reinforce or hinder each other. Certain injustices are cemented precisely by and in language. In communities emerging from conflict, the language used to describe those affected can significantly shape processes of recovery and reconciliation. Research shows that technical or bureaucratic terms may oversimplify complex experiences of loss, displacement, or violence, while labels such as “victim” can unintentionally reinforce identities of passivity and suffering (Papendick & Bohner, 2017). Many individuals reject such labels, preferring expressions that emphasize participation, agency, resilience, and dignity (Bower, 2025; Hepworth, 2023). These are not just semantics. They reveal deeper structures of power. When language continually places women, communities, or local partners in boxes and assigned roles, it becomes part of the very problem we aim to solve. 

A Language of Connection

In many African contexts, peacebuilding conducted only in English or French risks excluding local moral frameworks that sustain community life. Ubuntu, expressed in the Xhosa and Zulu aphorism “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” – “a person is a person through other people” – encapsulates the philosophy that human identity and ethical value are rooted in relationships, interdependence, and communal responsibility (Metz, 2011). Decisions, reconciliation, and social norms under Ubuntu are evaluated not solely by individual interests but by their impact on community harmony. Because Western frameworks often emphasise individual autonomy over relational connectedness, such concepts cannot be fully captured by Western vocabulary alone.

Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o pushes the point further. In Decolonising the Mind, he argues that the most enduring form of colonisation is linguistic: when people are forced to think, dream, or reconcile only in someone else’s language, their moral and social worlds are constrained. In many peacebuilding contexts, using only English or French risks excluding the very cultural and ethical frameworks that sustain community cohesion. A study published on the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 2024 found that peacebuilding proposals communicated in a community’s native language generated more empathy and openness than those presented in a foreign or “neutral” language. Similarly, the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO) argues that language exclusion, especially of Indigenous or minority languages, constitutes a form of cultural violence, limiting participation and belonging.

These analyses very much resonate with my own experience. I have watched women hesitate to speak, not because they lacked ideas, knowledge or expertise, but because the “language of peace processes” didn’t feel like theirs. Some of the most profound insights were expressed in words with no direct English translation or traditional place in peace agreements language, words carrying memory, obligation, and collective identity, often underpinning sources of conflict and thus enabling their resolution. Allowing people to name peace in their own words, whether through local metaphors, aphorisms, or philosophical concepts like Ubuntu, is essential to building justice and enduring reconciliation.

From “Inclusive” to “Broad” Language: The Power of Listening

Italian sociolinguist Vera Gheno challenges us to rethink the very idea of inclusivity. She notes that inclusive language still assumes a centre, a group of “normal” people who possess the authority to include those deemed different. That logic, however well-intentioned, risks reproducing the same paternalism it seeks to overcome. Instead, Gheno speaks of “broad language”, the coexistence of differences rather than inclusion. From this perspective, language is not a gate to be opened for others, but a shared space where multiple identities and ethnicity, religion, social background, non-conforming bodies, sexual orientation, or gender identity can meet on equal ground.

If we expand her thinking to peacebuilding practice, we can manifest broad language by asking people how they wish to be named, listening before translating, and allowing multiple truths to coexist. I have seen this spirit in community dialogues where people invent hybrid words to capture the realities, mixing French, Swahili, Arabic, or Bambara. This creativity is a form of ownership. Language becomes “broad” when it grows in dialogue with those who live its consequences, those who rebuild after conflict and who sustain the peace we seek.

Peace as a Conversation 

Practising “broad language” is not about perfect phrasing, it does not have to be aspirational. It is feasible and, in some cases, already done.  In some contexts, peacebuilders and policymakers have asked communities how they wish to be named, embedding cultural mediators and concepts like Ubuntu in dialogue and mediation, and co-creating glossaries of what “peace”, “security” and “justice” mean to them.  In the last few years, some organizations have reviewed their policies and communications to ensure that language does not reinforce invisible hierarchies, and integrate linguistic reflection into programme design and evaluation. In community practice, approaches like the Gender Action Learning System use drawings, storytelling, and songs to surface experiences of inequality and re-imagine relationships, broadening what counts as speaking peace. 

Practising “broad language” should be systematically part of peacebuilding efforts. It requires presence and patience, the willingness to listen, to let go of certainty, and to make room for others’ meanings, and by extension, others’ experiences. Peacebuilding policies and processes, and agendas as the WPS one, remind us that peace is not a technical outcome, it is also about creating shared spaces and building relationships. And like all relationships, it begins with how we speak to, and about, one another.