Peace research in non-war cities, an analytical inquiry

Keywords: peace, violence, post-conflict, cities, everyday, peacebuilding, Europe
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 20

Abstract

A spatial approach to peace is helpful for thinking about the blurred distinction between peace and war that has received considerable attention in geography of peace research. Terrorist violence is one form of violence that blurs this distinction, for example when military operations are deployed within the borders of the nation-state, against the nation’s citizens. Very little research is carried out though from a peace perspective in Western cities that deal with multiple and nested forms of violence. This paper is interested in how geographies of peace can be relevant for understanding and dealing with both structural and direct violence in non and post-war cities, without falling in the trap to solely focus on violence. The everyday turn in peace and conflict studies offers an opening to analyze non war violence and peacebuilding in Western cities from a peace and conflict approach. Peace is multiple, positive, and always in the making, it is made of the (re)production of positive social relations (McConnell et al. 2014). If war can be analyzed as an experience, as Sylvester (2012) suggest, which is partly physical in the sense of injuries to bodies (Scarry, 1985) and partly affective and emotional (Berlant 2004, Butler 2010), can peace then also be understood as an experience? Since peacebuilding and conflict are productive of spaces in a material and symbolic sense, as Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel (2016) suggest, is there a spatial element to the experience of peace, i.e. is peace particularly experienced in some spaces but not in others?