Peace

This introduction provides an overview for the following collection of articles that engage with, and aim to extend, recent scholarship emphasising space as a category of analysis in peace and conflict studies. Attempts to ‘spatialise’ this field of enquiry have emphasised the ways actors and ideas travel and transform across scale (from the personal to the local, regional and global) and how agents, actors and identities constitute, and are constituted by, space and place in dynamics of conflict and peace. Attention to space has increased appreciation of the complex nature of nature of war- and peace-‘scapes’, and reflects upon space as material and symbolic, given meaning through peoples’ embodied activity and interactions. The articles in this issue engage with the foundations of the spatial turn and build upon innovations in spatial analysis of peace and conflict by focussing on the idea of ‘emplacement’ and emplaced security as critical to peacebuilding efforts and processes of conflict transition. To do so, we consider place in a relational sense, focussing on attachment, affective connection and narratives of place-identity as these are connected with conflict management, security, governance and political ordering.

Section: The Spatial Turn In Peace and Conflict Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emplacing the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies

Brigg¹,

George²

2020

“…Of course, geographers are centrally concerned with space and place, and despite the discipline’s long-standing involvement with war and conquest (Koopman, 2017b: 4978), geographers have in recent decades gradually increased their engagement with peace (see McConnell et al, 2014; Megoran et al, 2016: 124–130; for an annotated bibliography see Koopman, 2017a). Recent literature on peace in geography has naturally enough highlighted the need to consider contextualised, pluralistic, everyday and distributed approaches to peace, while also challenging critical geography’s reliance on agonism by proposing a positive account of peace (Bregazzi and Jackson, 2018).…”

Section: Space Place and The Relational Challengementioning

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.

“…This article builds upon the increasing scholarly attention toward investigating the geographic and spatial dimensions of peace. In the last decade, the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, 2016; Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017; Brigg and George, 2020) and the subfield of peace geographies in human geography (Courtheyn, 2018; Koopman, 2017, 2019; Loyd, 2012; McConnell et al, 2014; Megoran, 2011; Williams and McConnell, 2011) have introduced theoretical and analytical innovations that allow us to better capture the spatialities of peace by examining the interactions between geography and peace. These innovations broaden our understanding of peace by going beyond the analytical constraints of state and state-centric processes and revealing other grassroots peace efforts previously ignored in peace research.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatialities of peace zones

Macaspac¹

2022

Peace zones are popularly understood as demilitarized geographic areas. While many peace zones have been documented around the world, scholarly research on the topic is surprisingly sparse. Furthermore, the existing literature focuses toward analyzing the complex social and temporal dynamics of peace zones. There is less work that examines the spatial processes that are mobilized in making the peace zones work. Building upon the analytical innovations of the geographic and spatial approaches to peace that highlight the spatialities of scale, space, and place, this article foregrounds the multiple spatialities of peace zones. Through a case study of the peace zone in the indigenous community of Sagada in the Philippines, this article argues that the peace zone is maintained through territoriality, interdependence, and the refusal of violence that weave together the politics of scale, space, and place.