In this opening episode of Season 10, Vera Al Mawla, President and Co-Founder of Peace of Art Intl. and former MENA Regional Coordinator with UNOY Peacebuilders, speaks with Martina Migliorisi about what peacebuilding really looks like on the ground in Lebanon and across the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region. From building a grassroots organisation from scratch to continuing that work through the 2024 war and Israeli aggressions on Lebanon, Vera speaks with rare honesty and depth about what this work actually demands. She reflects on the difference between peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding; the role of art as a tool for dialogue and community resilience; why young people are not the present of peacebuilding; the psychological toll of living and working in permanent crisis and what it does to an entire generation's sense of reality; the contradictions at the heart of international systems that document atrocities in real time and yet consistently fail to act; and the reality of protection for local peacebuilders who are largely left to rely on each other, on local knowledge, and sometimes on luck. All of this against the backdrop of the threats the field faces today: shrinking funding, collapsing civic spaces, militarisation, and the failure of international systems to protect the people they claim to serve. The Peace Corner Podcast is a collaboration between UNOY and CSPPS.