Everyday international relations: Editors’ introduction

The professionalization of transitional justice (TJ) has received extensive academic attention in TJ and related international relations and peacebuilding scholarship. This article adds an element that has received hardly any attention: namely the presence of activism even among professional and usually donor-funded TJ work. I argue that noticing activism in professional contexts requires attention to the ‘everyday’, meaning to life in between, aside and beyond high politics and officially important actors, actions, processes and events. Based on field research in Sierra Leone and Kenya, I describe and discuss everyday examples of a specific form of activism, namely tacit activism that I encountered with three key interlocutors, one Sierra Leonean and two Kenyan nationals involved in professional donor-funded TJ work. Their activism was ’tacit’ in the sense that it was not part of their official project activities and my interlocutors did not advertise their extra plans and efforts to (prospective) donors. And yet, it was precisely through these tacit plans and efforts that they hoped to meet at least some of the expectations that had been raised in the context of professional TJ projects.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Delivering output and struggling for change: Tacit activism among professional transitional justice work in Sierra Leone and Kenya

Menzel¹

2021

“…In doing so, also these contributions account for an extraordinariness in practice changes that their location in the everyday does not warrant. Rather, when Annika Björkdahl et al (2019: 126) write that the everyday oscillates ‘between the unconscious and conscious’, then this alludes to an in-between that continuously permeates practice performances. As Adler and Pouliot (2011: 4) insinuated in their definition of practices as ‘competent performances’, practices always imply the existence and acceptance of an other, even if the other is reduced to an audience.…”

Section: Change As Extraordinary: Practices and Reflectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affect, practice, and change: Dancing world politics at the Congress of Vienna

Rösch¹

2020

How do practices change? To approach this in practice theory (PT) is a widely debated question. This article brings PT in conversation with the study of emotions in International Relations by considering the role of affect in practice changes. For it is affect that permeates the placiotemporal and bodily constellations during practice performances, continuously provoking changes in and through practices. In initiating this conversation, this article adds to current PT literature by arguing that world political transformations not only find their origin in external conditions, identified as such through individual reflection, but also in affective dynamics of the everyday. To elaborate this more theoretical argument, this article evolves against the empirical backdrop of dancing as an everyday international practice at the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815). Affect that permeated dances in Vienna not only substantiated changes in this practice but, with the waltz replacing the minuet as the preferred dance among international political decision-makers, also changes through it occurred. While the minuet embodied collective sentiments of a transboundary European elite, the waltz helped to further national imaginations of world politics.

“…These developments take on additional salience amidst current attempts, evinced in ideas of hybrid peacebuilding and turns to the ‘local’ and the ‘everyday’ (e.g. see Autesserre, 2014; Björkdahl et al, 2019; Richmond and Mitchell, 2012; Roger Mac Ginty, 2014), to recognise and engage those who are typically excluded from the dominant circuits of peace and conflict resolution knowledge, policy and practice. The basic insight that space is the site where social relations become concrete, and the more challenging understanding that space shapes society as society also shapes space (Lefebvre, 1991; Soja, 1989), promises to both expand peace and conflict scholarship and engage more deeply with everyday people.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The spatial-relational challenge: Emplacing the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies

Brigg¹

2020

The nascent spatial turn in peace and conflict studies is a promising development that expands conceptual resources and offers useful correctives to existing scholarship. However, the turn to space and place tends not to adequately emplace itself (including on its own European-derived terms) or sufficiently engage the socio-spatial difference of diverse peoples. Instead, a de-contextualised knower is invited to apply a new set of mobile scholarly tools in various settings without seriously considering diverse peoples’ conceptualisation and operationalisation of place in socio-political ordering. Long-standing Aboriginal Australian approaches to place, meanwhile, indicate the diversity and sophistication of approaches to space and place. They furthermore show that western political ontology – including the figures of the individual and the state embedded in much dominant scholarship – may not be relevant in many settings in which peace and conflict scholarship is undertaken. Realising the full potential of the spatial turn requires grappling with the relational emplacement of the knowing subject and the varied ways in which place configures socio-political order both for diverse peoples ‘in the field’ and in the centres of dominant forms of knowing in the Global North.