Beyond the Game: Sport and Play for Peace Education

Experiences from Lebanon

When: 25 November from 10:00 to 12:00 CET
Where: Online on Zoom
With: Samia Khatib and Nicolas Abou Assly

How can sport and play create opportunities to experience, practise, and reflect on nonviolent ways of dealing with conflict?

This interactive workshop invites you to explore the potential of sport and play as tools for peace education and conflict transformation. Drawing on research, real-world interventions, and experiences from the Sport for Peace project in Lebanon, participants will examine how sport and play can make peacebuilding concepts more practical, participatory, and accessible.

Through discussions, practical examples, and shared experiences, we will explore both the opportunities and limitations of these approaches, reflect on what makes them meaningful, and consider how they can complement existing peacebuilding practices.

Content:

• Young people as experts, contributors and actors in peacebuilding
• From game to peace education: the role of facilitation and reflection
• Why sport and play work as learning spaces, and their limits
• Working with coaches, teachers and caregivers, not only youth
• What short activities can and cannot change, with insights from S4P’s monitoring and evaluation
• Interactive element: a short activity plus group exchange

By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

• Identify different ways sport and play are used in peace education.
• Explain how experiential learning and intentional facilitation can transform physical activities into opportunities for peace education
• Explore opportunities to integrate sport and play into their own peacebuilding practices and contexts.

About the speakers

Samia Khatib

Samia is a Sport for Development (S4D) practitioner, consultant, and trainer with an MSc in Sport and Exercise Psychology from Loughborough University. She also serves on the Advisory Committee of the UNESCO Research Chair Sport for Development, Peace and the Environment in a Multidisciplinary and Global Perspective.

Her work focuses on using sport and play as tools for learning and social development. She works with organisations, educators, coaches, and community practitioners to design and adapt S4D programmes to different populations, cultural contexts, and objectives, including peace education, conflict transformation, gender equality, inclusion, and well-being. Alongside programme design and implementation, she trains and supports practitioners in applying S4D methodologies and uses monitoring and evaluation to improve programme quality and impact. Her approach emphasises practical, participatory, and inclusive learning experiences that respond to local needs and realities.

Nicolas Abou Assly 

Nicolas is a peacebuilding practitioner with a background in law, professional mediation, conflict transformation, and community engagement. As Project Manager at forumZFD Lebanon, he conceptualised and developed the Sports for Peace (S4P) project, which uses sport, play, and experiential learning to support peace education and conflict transformation.

Drawing on his experience in mediation, community mobilization, mentoring, and multi-stakeholder engagement, Nicolas focuses on translating peacebuilding concepts into practical, participatory learning experiences. Through S4P, he seeks to foster self-awareness, empathy, cooperation, respect for differences, and constructive approaches to conflict. His work is driven by an interest in exploring how sport and experiential learning can create meaningful opportunities for peace education in both formal and non-formal learning environments.