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
Why Peacebuilding Needs Climate Thinking and Climate Action Needs Memory, Place, and Justice
By Frazer Macdonald Hay Across the UN and global policy landscape, the term “climate–conflict nexus” has become shorthand for the reality that environmental shocks and social instability are increasingly inseparable. But the nexus is often described in economic or technological terms, food security, water scarcity, critical infrastructure, adaptation finance, and “smart” responses. Yet missing from most of these discussions is something fundamentally human: How people inhabi
Why Peace & Conflict Skills Matter in Everyday UK Life
For most of my working life, I have operated at the intersection of people, place, memory, and conflict . I have worked in cities rebuilding after war; in neighbourhoods negotiating tense identities; in institutions grappling with histories they found difficult to acknowledge; and in communities looking for ways to reconnect after years of silence or division. Through all of this, one insight has stayed with me: Conflict does not begin with violence, and peace does not begin
What the Walled Off Hotel Reveals About Our Liquid Times
Banksy, Bauman, Sontag and the Architecture of Fear by Frazer Macdonald Hay In Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Zygmunt Bauman describes a world slipping from solid certainties into fluid insecurities, a world where social bonds thin, trust evaporates, and fear becomes a political resource more valuable than truth. We inhabit, he argues, an age shaped by negative globalisation: a system that grants radical freedom of movement to some while confining others beh
Are We Listening? Children Speak, Prisoners Whisper, Buildings Remember
By Frazer Macdonald Hay Last Friday unfolded as one of those unexpectedly resonant days, the kind marked by layered conversations with inspiring people, and the kind that ushers you into encounters you weren’t looking for yet somehow needed. Between two such meetings, I stepped into two very different exhibitions in Edinburgh. What I found were two worlds with threshold spaces full of meaning and intrigue, whose contrasts were electrifying: one filled with the imaginative pow
Scotland’s Housing Crisis is a Crisis of Complacency
Until we rebuild public imagination and civic confidence, no amount of policy will fix our housing problem. By Frazer Macdonald Hay Scotland’s housing emergency is usually framed as a failure of funding, planning or political will. But the deeper crisis is cultural. In my new article for The Scotland on Sunday , I argue that we have drifted into a passive relationship with our built environment. We complain about rents and planning decisions, but rarely engage with the proc
A Fait Accompli: Architecture, Memory, and the Norwegian Way
Rethinking Memory, Openness, and Public Space in Post-Terror Oslo Frazer Macdonald Hay / Uniform November In the wake of the 2011 attacks, Norway set out to rebuild Oslo’s Government Quarter as both a symbol of resilience and a statement of democratic values. More than a decade later, that reconstruction tells a different story. Despite years of consultation and political rhetoric about openness, the project has hardened into a vast, expensive, and increasingly centralised re
