Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies Zulfiya Tursunova has been volunteering at FaithAction International for the last five years and has established connections with FaithAction, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, and other organizations by exposing students to the challenges that newcomers, including refugees and undocumented citizens, face.

More importantly, students attended such events as the Unity Walk and were invited to assess FaithAction ID Drive. They gained skills in community-based programming and the ways community organizations create zones of peace and support for undocumented residents in North Carolina, a relatively new destination for migrant communities.

Zulfiya, in cooperation with David Fraccaro, Heide Castañeda, and Guilford College student Jennifer Marquez-Trejo, published an article, “Creating Zones of Peace for Undocumented Residents During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Civil Society Efforts in North Carolina,” in the high-impact peer-reviewed Global Journal of Peace Research and Praxis. This paper examines how nonprofit organizations and faith-based institutions have created programs, practices, and places that create a sense of belonging and foster community peace-building. However, it says that this is conceptualized and put into practice in unique and varied ways. In addition to offering traditional sanctuary spaces, they have also formed creative solutions to address systemic racism in policing and detention practices.

The efforts described here work together to provide a strong local network of protection and resources for vulnerable populations — a network that was sustained and continued to function even during the COVID-19 pandemic. These cases illustrate how innovation exists in the fight against injustices, as each group produces spaces and forms of advocacy that can act synergistically with one another for the protection of all people regardless of their status. They help us understand peace-building and agency, and how spaces, place, and agency can be re-theorized. We argue also for the central place of storytelling, i.e. a strategic peace-building tool to bridge the gap between newcomers and existing communities to create a sense of inclusion and belonging, construct shared meaning, educate and share knowledge, and exercise agency, all of which are critical in transforming spaces and places in establishing zones and cultures of peace.