Kyiv

Mosul

Uniform November: Peacebuilding through Place, Memory, and Adaptation

Uniform November is a peacebuilding consultancy rooted in the belief that architecture, space, and memory are powerful tools for resilience and recovery after conflict.

Founded by a former UN staff member with years of experience working alongside NGOs, civil society, and international organizations, we bring deep insight into the strategies, communications, and practices needed to support communities living with the legacies of violence.

We believe that peacebuilding must begin in war. It cannot wait for silence or stability. It has to be shaped in the very conditions of violence, breathing the same air as the people it claims to serve — air choked with drone buzz, sirens, distant shelling, bad bread lines, and flickering generators.

Our work combines consultancy, training, and original research with critical reflection on how societies adapt to conflict, displacement, and trauma. From heritage reuse to housing, land, and property (HLP) solutions, from mapping sites of violence to developing trauma-informed approaches to memorialisation, we focus on practical interventions that strengthen social cohesion and reduce the risk of renewed violence.

Ukraine: Peacebuilding in Real Time

Uniform November has been working in Kyiv, engaging with those shaping peacebuilding under the direct pressures of war. This work goes beyond cultural heritage — it is about understanding how societies improvise resilience while under fire, and how peace must be crafted in parallel with survival.

Our research and fieldwork there has included dialogue with:

Civil actors searching for and recovering the missing from battle lines
Private security operatives and emergency responders
Psychologists and trauma support providers
Housing, land, and property (HLP) specialists navigating displacement and return
Civil alliance group founders shaping collective responses to crisis
Journalists and researchers documenting violence and resistance
Military commanders and activists balancing survival with long-term vision

These encounters inform both our practical consultancy and our research outputs, grounding our conviction that recovery and reconciliation are not abstract ideals but lived processes forged in conditions of exhaustion, scarcity, and danger. The lessons drawn from Ukraine deepen and expand our global work on post-conflict recovery.

What We Do

Heritage Reuse – Breathing new life into buildings and cultural landmarks damaged by war, enabling communities to reconnect with their histories while shaping their futures.
HLP Solutions – Addressing complex housing, land, and property challenges faced by displaced populations to support return, resettlement, and recovery.
Memorialisation & Trauma-Informed Practices – Exploring how memory and place shape recovery, and helping communities create spaces that acknowledge violence without being trapped by it.
Research – Conducting original field-based and theoretical research into peacebuilding, recovery, and resilience — from mapping sites of violence to documenting everyday practices of survival, adaptation, and social cohesion.

Our Partnerships and Track Record

We have collaborated with UNESCO, ICCROM, the British Council, UN-Habitat, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and The HALO Trust, alongside grassroots groups, military stakeholders, and local leaders in Iraq, Syria, Indonesia, and beyond.

Key contributions include:

Designing an urban park for youth in Mosul on land once occupied by ISIS.
Mapping sites of violence in Mosul and Tal Afar with IOM’s MHPSS unit.
Conducting national HLP assessments to support IOM’s resettlement strategies.
Training local and international staff on post-conflict memory, persecution, and place.
Supporting UNESCO and ICCROM’s Revive the Spirit of Mosul project, empowering Iraqi architects and engineers to reuse cultural landmarks.

Why Uniform November?

We don’t see peacebuilding as a template—it’s a process that requires sensitivity, creativity, and honesty. Our approach draws on years of fieldwork, policy expertise, and research to help organizations and communities navigate the complexities of recovery.

Through our writing, consultancy, and partnerships, we aim to deepen understanding of how the built environment, cultural memory, and everyday survival can contribute to stability, dignity, and peace.

Uniform November exists to ask difficult questions, share critical insights, and design practical strategies for recovery and resilience.

Heritage & Memories of Violence

IDP & HLP

Urban Recovery

About Uniform November

Uniform November was launched by Frazer MacDonald Hay in 2016. Since then, it has grown into a consultancy and research platform that connects practice, theory, and lived experience of conflict.

Our work is rooted in field engagement, critical research, and collaborative learning. We share knowledge, exchange ideas, and develop tools that help communities, practitioners, and institutions adapt to violence, displacement, and the long process of recovery.

We offer training, workshops, and tailored educational programmes built around the themes that define our practice:

Peacebuilding in War – Understanding how peace must be shaped under fire, in conditions of fear, scarcity, and trauma.
The Fundamentals of Peacebuilding – Strategy, communication, and adaptation in volatile environments.
Heritage and Socially Significant Buildings – The adaptive reuse of cultural and everyday spaces, and their role in community identity.
The Power of Place – How architecture, memory, and space shape resilience and social cohesion.
The Everyday – Why ordinary spaces and routines matter in both conflict and recovery.
Housing, Land, and Property (HLP) – Navigating the legal, social, and political challenges of displacement and return.
Trauma, Memory, and Violence – Working with built environments imbued with difficult histories, silences, and contested narratives.
Cultural Heritage and Protection – Safeguarding heritage under threat, and rethinking its role in recovery.

Knowledge Sharing

Take time to explore the Uniform November Blog, our knowledge-sharing platform for developing collaboration, dialogue, and awareness across the peacebuilding and humanitarian fields. Here we publish reflections from the field, research insights, and thought leadership on recovery, resilience, and memory in conflict and post-conflict environments.

Articles

Frazer is a peace-building consultant and writer whose work explores the intersections of architecture, memory, and violence. He is the founder of Uniform November, a consultancy working internationally on post-conflict recovery. He has worked in Iraq, Ukraine, Mexico, and Indonesia with organisations including the UN’s International Organization for Migration, UNESCO, ICCROM, The Halo Trust, and a range of NGOs and universities in Norway, the UK, and the Netherlands. He holds a Master’s degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of St Andrews and writes regularly on how everyday places carry the weight of war and resilience.

Frazer's Articles

Articles

The Scottish election question no party is answering: how do we build peace at home?

A Manifesto for Adaptive Reuse

Trump the Orange: In Search of the Warrior Gene

Rooting for the Survivor: What Epic Films Teach Us About War

Light, Warmth, and the Everyday Bravery of Ukrainian Culture

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The Scottish election question no party is answering: how do we build peace at home?

This is the first article of mine published by The Times , and I’m reposting it here in full. It argues that Scotland’s biggest peace-related risks are not military, but social and political, and that as elections approach, the absence of any serious discussion about peacebuilding at home should concern us all. Peace, as John Buchan reminded us, is the absence of fear. By that standard, it deserves to be treated as national infrastructure, not an afterthought....... John Buch

A Manifesto for Adaptive Reuse

Declaration We live among buildings that are older than our assumptions about them. Many were not designed for the lives we now ask them to host, yet they persist, materially, culturally, energetically. In an age of climate risk, social fragmentation, and accelerating development pressure, demolition has become the most reflexive response to architectural difficulty. This manifesto argues that such reflexes are no longer tenable. Adaptive reuse is not a secondary architectura

Trump the Orange: In Search of the Warrior Gene

Recent advances in behavioural genetics compel us to ask one of the great questions of our time: Does President Donald Trump possess the so-called “warrior gene”, or is he merely very loud? The “warrior gene”, more formally a low-activity variant of the MAOA gene, has enjoyed a long and dubious afterlife in popular culture. It is said to correlate with aggression, impulsivity, risk-taking, and a fondness for dominance displays, particularly when combined with childhood adv

Rooting for the Survivor: What Epic Films Teach Us About War

By Frazer Macdonald Hay “Author’s avatar. Statistically unlikely to survive the third act.” About halfway through Avatar: Fire and Ash , it occurred to me that I was rooting for someone I would never be. This is not a complaint about the film. It is doing precisely what epic stories have always done, and doing it very well. The unease lies elsewhere: in how instinctively we accept the perspective it offers. Entire villages burn. Creatures fall from the sky. Bodies accumulate

Light, Warmth, and the Everyday Bravery of Ukrainian Culture

What Ukraine’s public art reveals about resilience once the celebrations are over As the New Year settles in and the decorations come down, much of the world has already moved on from the festive season. Attention turns to priorities, plans, and the practical business of the year ahead. Yet beyond the glow of celebration, not everyone has had the luxury of pause or reset. For Ukrainians, there was little or no festive interlude. No collective exhale. No safe distance from los

Venezuela and the Comforting Illusion of Political Agency

Reports that the United States has conducted military strikes on Venezuela have triggered a familiar cycle of commentary: urgent analysis, heated debate, moral positioning and calls to action. Television panels fill airtime, social media polarises, and the same question is posed repeatedly: what does this mean, and what should we do next? After hours of listening to speculation and expert opinion, I found myself with a disquieting realisation. What I was participating in was

A Note of Thanks

An acknowledgement of the everyday acts of care and courage that rarely make headlines. This year I have spent time in places shaped by violence. I have walked past burned-out parliamentary buildings and destroyed police vehicles. I have stood among riot police by the hundreds. I have interviewed protesters and survivors of political violence. I have witnessed drone attacks and missile strikes. I have met former service personnel living with PTSD and life-altering injuries. I

The Uncomfortable Ordinary: Evil, Responsibility, and the Banality of Systems

by Frazer Macdonald Hay On 18 May, I published an article titled “ An Uncomfortable Framing of the Most Heinous .” It was an attempt to sit with an idea that resists moral comfort: that the perpetrators of the worst crimes in human history are rarely the monsters we want them to be. Last night, while watching Nuremberg (dir. James Vanderbilt), that discomfort returned with renewed force. The film centres on the uneasy relationship between Hermann Göring (played by Russell C

When Fragility Comes Home: What the UK Can Learn from Conflict Zones

Experiences in Ukraine, Iraq, and Indonesia show how social division, inequality, and weakened institutions can destabilise societies, and how social protection could prevent it. Scotsman articles by Frazer Macdonald Hay I have spent much of the last two decades working in places shaped by conflict, displacement, and structural injustice. In Ukraine, I documented and profiled personal stories of individuals striving to preserve dignity amid trauma, teachers whose schools had

Architecture as Evidence: Why the Prisons Museum Matters

By Frazer Macdonald Hay Across the world, ordinary buildings have been made to bear extraordinary violence, schools, factories, churches, hospitals repurposed as prisons, execution grounds, torture chambers. These places do not simply fade when the conflict ends; they remain as scars in the social landscape. The Prisons Museum seeks not only to document these sites, but to protect their testimony, to transform hidden trauma into public memory, to support justice, and to give

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““whatever is true for space and time, this much is true for place: we are immersed in it and could not do without it. To be at all - to exist in any way – is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place”.

"No one therefor can conceive anything, but they must conceive it in some place”.

Owner:

F.M.H..... MLitt Peace & Conflict, Msc Architectural Conservation BA (Hons) Int. Architecture; MCSD, PgC TLHE

F.M.H is a Post-conflict, consultant - Specializing in Social Cohesion, DDR, Memorialization, Architectural Conservation, Housing Land and Property (HLP) issues.