The focus of this article is a critical evaluation of the impact of international development and conflict-resolution funding on theatre in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The article complicates the predominant narrative of theatre as ‘cultural resistance’ in conflict zones by historicizing the Ford Foundation's role in the institutionalization of Palestinian drama; delineating the effects of neo-liberal state building and development on Palestinian modes of performance; and subsequently, analysing the Freedom Theatre's imbrication in a normative, humanitarian logic. Aid, while ensuring the material conditions for the growth of the Palestinian performing arts, promoted a structural dependency that emptied the language of anti-colonial resistance of emancipatory potential, generating a soft, phantom sovereignty for the audience of the international community. By reimagining ‘freedom’ as liberation from a backward, conservative society, the language of the human rights industry and its attendant cultural economy spawns a spectral ‘cultural resistance’ where freedom and nationhood appear real and unreal – visions refracting, but not existing in, reality.

International aid has influenced and, in part, shaped the artistic sector in Africa's Great Lakes region (DRC, Rwanda, Burundi) since the 1990s, a period marked by numerous conflicts and mass violence. Due to NGOs’ programmatic foci, artists performing for social change are increasingly compelled to focus on reconciliation and conflict resolution, generating political awareness and bringing about social change, healing and peacemaking. Through a comparative analysis of European and local productions on the genocide this article asks, how and why does an ‘NGO-style theatre’ develop a specific audience in the region? How have themes such as mass violence, inter-ethnic conflict and social cohesion become the main concerns of the territory's theatre? How do performances made and/or sponsored by NGOs challenge not only theatre's form, its social stakes and functions, but also the conception of its audience and the relationships between actors and spectators?

This article provides a contextual analysis of Janakaraliya (‘Theatre of the People’), a theatre company acclaimed for its excellence in theatre for social justice and peace building in Sri Lanka. It discusses the governing conditions that enable its practice and evaluates its impact, whether this be the biopower of the state and non-state actors during periods of political violence, donor funding frameworks, or the Janakaraliya archive itself as an actant shaped by donor rationalities. Drawing on a recent research project entitled The Theatre of Reconciliation, the article builds an argument for changing the terms on which the arts in peace building are evaluated, and for a shift in the dominant narrative on Janakaraliya which collapses its sophisticated aesthetics to a binary of Sinhala–Tamil ethnic relations. The logic of this revision would be fuller acknowledgement of the troupe's aesthetic forms and styles as a more robust signifier of the pluralities that constitute Sri Lankan society today and therefore of post-war reconciliation itself.

From 1980 to 1981, the Baxter Theatre of Cape Town, South Africa, produced a multi-racial Waiting for Godot that garnered vastly different reactions in the various cities to which it toured. With a cast led by John Kani and Winston Ntshona, icons of anti-apartheid theatre, it was sometimes hailed as a scathing anti-apartheid polemic, sometimes admired for its ‘universality’, and in one case denounced and shut down by anti-apartheid activists as a piece of pro-apartheid propaganda. Based on both archival research and interviews, this essay investigates the artists’ intentions and the public's reception in order to illuminate how the international theatrical circuits dovetailed with international activist circuits, sometimes supporting one another, and occasionally tripping each other up.

How can indigeneity be understood through training actors in a colonial context? Do ‘Western’ acting schools misrepresent and exploit indigenous practices and cultural traditions towards reinforcing the settler state? Or does a given school's integration of such praxis and customs demonstrate inclusivity, equity and progressivism? At what point does incorporating indigeneity in actor training become a tokenistic appropriation of marginalized cultures? Drawn from fieldwork as a 2019 Fulbright scholar at Toi Whakaari, New Zealand's National Drama School, I intersect training with culture and society. Using the Acting Program as a case study, I deploy an ethnographic methodology to address the aforementioned questions by investigating Toi Whakaari's bicultural pedagogy while positioning it as a reflection of New Zealand's national identity. I especially explore the school's implementation of Tikanga Māori, the practices and beliefs of the country's indigenous peoples. I argue that while some questions remain, Toi Whakaari integrates Māori forms in a manner that is culturally responsible and pedagogically effective, thereby providing a model from which other drama schools can learn.