From 16 to 24 June 2026, Vienna hosted something a little unusual: a peacebuilding training where the main tools were red noses, juggling balls and a willingness to bring laughs and joy to the public. Clown Peace! – A Peace Circus Lab on Street Artivism brought together 22 participants from Italy, Palestine, Spain, Ukraine, Germany, Austria, Estonia, France, the Netherlands, Egypt, Slovakia, Romania and Kosovo for eight days of clowning, circus pedagogy, movement, artivism and embodied creativity, funded by Erasmus+.
The group was as mixed as the map it came from: youth workers, clown and circus artists, and educators, all working with young people facing exclusion, discrimination or limited opportunities. That mix was the point. Clowning only works when you let your guard down, and over the training days the participants explored exactly that: how vulnerability, presence and humour can open conversations that political vocabulary often closes. Behind the laughter sat serious questions about power, intersectionality and polarisation, and about how artistic, non-violent activism can respond to them.
In that sense, the training itself was its own best argument. Twenty-two people from thirteen countries, some of them from communities affected by conflict, spent a week co-creating, failing, laughing and trying again in a safer space — and the group they built along the way was already a small practice of peacebuilding. It also connected to a longer SCI story: from volunteers rebuilding houses after the First World War to rebuilding relationships, narratives and communities a century later.
The training didn’t stay in the seminar room. The group met the local Rebel Clown group in Vienna for a field visit and they exchanged tools for street clowning and performance. On the final day, the group took their new skills to the streets and performed in the centre of Vienna — a public street performance that turned passers-by into an audience and the city itself into the final module of the training. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZHSit_iYEk
Clown Peace! was an Erasmus+ training funded by the Austrian Erasmus+ National Agency for Youth as part of an accreditation project in the field of youth (2021–2027). If it left one lesson behind, it might be this: peacebuilding doesn’t always need a conference table. Sometimes it needs a circus.
Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union.
