Geographies of Peace and Antiviolence

Abstract

Geography’s ties with war‐making, territorial and imperial conquest are well known. Geography has also made contributions to the study of peace. In recent years, geographers have been engaged in a rich debate over the relations between studies of war and peace and the conceptual and methodological frameworks for approaching studies of violence. This paper reviews the vibrant recent literature on geographies of peace, which features two striking points of consensus. First, peace must be understood as a process. Second, defining peace is a question of defining violence. These points of consensus, in turn, raise questions about research sites and methods. To flesh out some of these issues, this paper turns to Galtung’s theorizing on peace and structural violence. The concept of structural violence has been very influential, but remains undertheorized. The third section, in turn, details feminist theories and methods of researching violence that challenge undifferentiated landscapes of war, peace and structural violence. The fourth section illustrates the ideas of peace as a process and epistemologies of violence by way of example. I sketch the context and terms through which “antiviolence” organizing emerged in the United States over the past 30 years. Antiviolence, as developed most centrally by antiracist, feminist activists and theorists, offers not only a powerful analytic for understanding connections among forms of violence and uneven spaces of harm and well‐being, but also a practical way of bridging spheres of organizing that might otherwise remain discrete. I conclude by offering implications drawn from antiviolence praxis for geographic studies of war and peace.

War and Terrorism, Geography of

“…In part, the promotion of more peaceful geographers was in response to the specter of nuclear annihilation. More recently, geographers have critiqued not only the naturalness and necessity of war (Kobayashi, 2009;Loyd, 2009aLoyd, ,b, 2011Loyd, , 2012Gregory, 2010;Koopman, 2010Koopman, , 2011Ross, 2011;Williams and McConnell, 2011), but have also promoted a more normative vision of geography as an academic discipline (Megoran, 2008(Megoran, , 2010(Megoran, , 2011Inwood and Tyner, 2011).…”

“…Indeed, considerable discussion has centered around the politics and contestation over the 'meaning' and 'definition' of peace; this work has been spurred, partially, out of a recognition of the false dichotomy between 'war' and 'peace' as well as 'violence' and 'nonviolence.' Drawing inspiration from Galtung's (1969) influential separation of 'direct' and 'structural' violence, many geographers have destabilized the epistemological foundations of a range of artificial, socially constructed binaries, including but not limited to war, peace, violence, nonviolence, conflict, and postconflict (Kirsch and Flint, 2011;Ross, 2011;Loyd, 2012). Flint (2011: 31) accordingly calls for an approach that views the spaces of 'peace' and 'war' as intertwined; he suggests that social relations are basis of construction of both and concludes that instead of discrete categories, it is more productive to think of a continuum of social settings in which power relations and political differences always exist, but in varying degrees of consensus and nonviolence compared to disagreement and violence.…”

“…Peter Taylor (2004), likewise, sardonically writes that "God invented war to teach Americans geography." Geography, from such a position, is seen as Mars' handmaiden (Wisner, 1986;Cloud, 2002;Barnes, 2008;Kobayashi, 2009;Loyd, 2012). Recent critiques of both warfare as 'natural' or 'necessary' and the broader 'military-industrial-academic' complex have argued that traditional military geographies are linked with geographical determinism that supports and safeguards the sovereign power and territorial integrity of the state (Barnes, 2008).…”

Comunidad de paz: una paz ‘otra’ en San José de Apartadó-Colombia

“…Segundo, hacen una crítica profunda a la paz moderna o 'liberal' , construida a partir de la 'seguridad' para los ciudadanos, garantizada o impuesta por el Estadonación, la cual reproduce la dominación del Estado sobre sus súbditos y los no ciudadanos, el hombre sobre la mujer, y las empresas capitalistas sobre sus trabajadores y la biosfera (Daley, 2014;Dietrich, 2002Dietrich, , 2012. Ahora bien, al explorar la diversidad de ideas sobre la paz, estas literaturas demuestran que la paz no tendrá que ser entendida como una condición utópica del futuro, como se pretende desde la noción de paz moderna, que la busca sin alcanzarla a través de operaciones militares y tratados entre Estados, sino que la paz es siempre un proceso, la cual se puede producir a través de las prácticas cotidianas (Loyd, 2012;Williams, 2013). Por ejemplo, formas de 'paz moral' desde la hospitalidad, como la salaam islámica -Como ya se ha mencionado-, el shalom judío (Fasheh, 2011) o el t'ùmmu del pueblo Kambaata en Etiopía (Gebrewold, 2011), que sostiene que la paz se puede construir entre vecinos y desconocidos siguiendo normas de cuidado interpersonal.…”

“…Por ejemplo, al describir los viajes trasnacionales de un cantante de Kirguistán a Israel como una geografía de paz, aún cuando ese cantante es un millonario que apoya la ocupación israelí de territorio palestino, Megoran admite que "la paz para un grupo de personas puede ser mala noticia para otro" (2014, p. 225). De hecho, lo que se llama 'paz' frecuentemente refleja la victoria de un grupo armado sobre otro (Dalby, 2014;Foucault, 2003), la represión de la protesta en contra de la injusticia (Ross, 2011), o las jerarquías arraigadas de explotación patriarcal, racista y clasista (Daley, 2014;Federici, 2010;Loyd, 2012), las cuales yo argumento que no se deben considerarse 'paz' en absoluto.…”