Geographies of Peace

New Approaches to Boundaries, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution

Fiona McConnell, Nick Megoran, Philippa Williams, Nick Megoran, Fiona McConnell

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781780761435
• eBook ISBN: 9780857734921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Social Sciences

From handshakes on the White House lawn to Picasso's iconic dove of peace, the images and stereotypes of peace are powerful, widespread and easily recognizable. Yet if we try to offer a concise definition of peace it is altogether a more complicated exercise. Not only is peace an emotive and value-laden concept, it is also abstract, ambiguous and seemingly inextricably tied to its antithesis: war. And it is war and violence that have been so compellingly studied within critical geography in recent years. This volume offers an attempt to redress that balance, and to think more expansively and critically about what peace means and what geographies of peace may entail. The editors begin with an examination of critical approaches to peace in other disciplines and a helpful genealogy of peace studies within geography. The book is then divided into three sections. The opening section examines how the idea of peace may be variously constructed and interpreted according to different sites and scales. The chapters in the second section explore a remarkably wide range of techniques of peacemaking.This widens the discussion from the archetypical image of top-down, diplomatic state-led initiatives to imperial boundary making practices, grassroots cultural identity assertion, boycotts, self-immolation, ex-paramilitary community activism, and 'protective accompaniment'.
The final section shifts the scale and focus to everyday personal relations and a range of practices around the concept of coexistence. In their concluding chapter the editors spell out some of the key questions that they believe a geography of peace must address: What spatial factors have facilitated the success or precipitated the failure of some peace movements or diplomatic negotiations? Why are some ideologies productive of violence in some places but co-operation in others? How have some communities been better able to deal with religious, racial, cultural and class conflict than others? How have creative approaches to sharing sovereignty mitigated or transformed territorial disputes that once seemed intractable? Geographies of Peace is the first book wholly devoted to exploring the geography of peace.Drawing on both recent advances in social and political theory and detailed empirical research covering four continents, it makes a significant intervention into current debates about peace and violence.

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Introduction: geographical approaches to peace

Philippa Williams, Nick Megoran and Fiona McConnell

Why peace? Why now?

From handshakes on the White House lawn to Picasso’s iconic dove of peace, from anti-war protests to religious devotees praying for peace, the images and stereotypes of peace are powerful, widespread and easily recognizable. Yet trying to offer a concise definition of peace is an altogether more complicated exercise. Not only is peace an emotive and value-laden concept, but it is also abstract, ambiguous and seemingly inextricably tied to its antithesis: war. And it is war and violence that have been so compellingly deconstructed and critiqued within critical geography in recent years. This volume is an attempt to redress that balance, and to think more expansively and critically about what ‘peace’ means and what ‘geographies of peace’ may entail.

In a 2000 retrospective, John Agnew faulted Robert Sack’s 1986 groundbreaking text, Human Territoriality, for ‘understat[ing] the violence’ that occurs when people divide up the world between them.¹ David Delaney later criticized the same book for being ‘rather bloodless’.² These statements echoed Kenneth Hewitt’s 1983 lament that geographers have ‘given almost no treatment’ to war.³ Three decades of scholarship have gone some considerable way to addressing these concerns by re-inserting blood, war and violence firmly into the geographical corpus. Studies of militarism, fear, geopolitics, security, biopolitics and the multiple technologies and techniques of conducting modern warfare abound across much of human geography. Geographical accounts of power can no longer be said to be ‘bloodless’.

As geographers who believe that the discipline has a moral imperative to understand and contest the ways in which war is waged and violence is legitimized, we welcome this shift. However, we share a dissatisfaction with this literature. Whilst doing the important task of challenging the moral logic of war, it has failed to develop equally sophisticated theoretical engagements with, and devote sustained empirical research to, peace. This book is a call for a re-balancing: to insist that we also pay careful attention to peace in order to conceptualize it as more than the absence or aftermath of war. The aim of the book is thus twofold. It is primarily to place peace on the agenda of a broad range of academic geographers. But its secondary aim is to demonstrate the utility of geographical analysis to an interdisciplinary community of scholars who study peace.

This is not to romanticize ‘peace’. Far from it. In this book, we emphasize the importance of problematizing and conceptualizing what we mean by peace: seeing it as process not an endpoint; exploring how actors make peace in certain ways and in certain places; and stressing how practices of peace are embedded in power relations. Peace can be a yearning for a radically new and just social order, or a mechanism employed by the powerful to resist exactly such change. Peace might arise through the conscious or unconscious actions of both powerful geopolitical actors and everyday folk.

The timing of this book reflects both changing developments in global geopolitics, and a mushrooming of interest in the topic of peace amongst geographers.⁴ As we are writing, NATO is preparing for a withdrawal from Afghanistan, indicating that the high point of the US–UK’s so-called ‘global war on terror’ appears to be over, and there seems to be a shift – in rhetoric at least – from the dominance of ‘war cultures’ to granting more visibility to ‘peace cultures’. In 2011 Philippa and Fiona in the journal Antipode and Nick in Political Geography wrote – completely independently – remarkably similar interventions making the points outlined above.⁵ We received both warm receptions from people who found our arguments resonated with their own concerns, and critical engagements from scholars representing a range of perspectives who disagreed on various points. Whether for or against, the volume of interest generated persuaded us of the utility of putting together this collection to advance these discussions in dialogue with a range of colleagues from different corners of the discipline. This book is intended to take stock of this emerging field and to advance the debates that it raises.

That said, ideas do not assume importance outside of life pathways and the reasons for us coming together to edit this book at this time are also autobiographical. Philippa first approached the question of peace through her research in north India on everyday Hindu and Muslim relations. Whilst the daily reality she had witnessed more aptly resembled ‘everyday peace’, the plethora of literature about Indian society overwhelmingly focused on the history of violence between these two religious communities. It was clear from her research that peace was not some unproblematic, utopian endpoint – so what was it, and how might peace be interpreted? Likewise, Fiona did not start out with the aim of researching issues of peace. Rather, her work with the exile Tibetan community in India focused primarily around questions of governance and the state-like practices of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. However, the topics of both nonviolence as a political strategy, and resistance to stereotypes of Tibetans as innately pacifist, frequently arose in her discussions with refugees and exile officials. This led her to explore how Tibetan articulations of peace have evolved and to question the relationship between violence and nonviolence in this cultural context.

Similarly, ‘peace’ was not a topic of Nick’s research on either the life of the Danish minority of northern Germany or the place of the Uzbek minority in newly independent Kyrgyzstan. In point of fact, he explicitly refused to frame his work in terms of conflict/peace, preferring a more cultural approach. However, as the condition of the former group improved and that of the latter deteriorated, the question of what ‘peace’ meant in these contrasting contexts became harder to avoid. Following the 9/11 attacks and the UK–US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Nick became increasingly involved in the anti-war movement in Cambridge (where we all met at that time), and also began to research very different British Christian responses to these new geopolitical scenarios. This research proved personally transformative by introducing him to the Christian peace tradition within theology. Despite his earlier efforts, ‘peace’ therefore became impossible to ignore as a common theme in these research interests. Thus none of us began our research careers setting out to research ‘peace’. Finding that our work increasingly obliged us to think about peace, we were all disappointed to find that the geographical literature served us poorly here, and we looked to other disciplines for illumination and inspiration –chiefly international relations theory, anthropology, peace studies and theology. This book is the product of those journeys: an attempt to translate what we discovered elsewhere into a disciplinary narrative for geography.

The remainder of this introduction is structured as follows. We begin with a brief examination of critical approaches to peace in other disciplines, which frames a retrospective sketch of the genealogy of peace studies in geography. We then provide an overview of the chapters that follow, which are grouped into three sections: contesting narratives of peace; techniques of peacemaking; and practices of coexistence. The chapters are conceptually coherent in that they repeatedly return to the same set of questions: what does peace mean? How does that meaning shift through space and time? Who is peace for? Who produces/reproduces peace? The danger in such discussions is of losing sight of the bigger picture. Hence the chapter concludes by asking the question: what is the point of a geography of peace? We argue that the range of meanings that cohere around the word ‘peace’ is integral to, as Gerry Kearns put it, ‘talk[ing] about what sort of home we want to make of the Earth and the ways that geographical studies direct our attention to the forces and capacities that might help or hinder making such a home’.⁶ It is possible – indeed important – both to critically conceptualize peace, and also to be committed to some vision of peace.

Critical approaches to peace in other disciplines

To enable us to think usefully about what peace means and how to study it, we first turn to the fields of international relations theory, peace studies and anthropology. Because explicit reflection on peace has been more advanced in these three fields than it has in human geography, they help us frame our consideration of how geography has thus far encountered, and engaged with, the subject of peace.

International Relations (IR) theory ‘originates in the twentieth-century experience of global war and the desire to avoid subsequent wars’.⁷ Although war has been its focus, the conditions necessary for peace have received a degree of attention.⁸ As Oliver Richmond shows, the theoretical assumptions of the different strands of IR theory have heavily influenced what is understood by ‘peace’.⁹ The realist tradition of IR is based on the core proposition that the key actors in world politics are sovereign states, which act to advance their interests within an anarchic international system.¹⁰ As such, peace is implicitly understood as bound up in the state-centric balance of power and is seen as ‘limited if at all possible’.¹¹ The competing liberal approach remains focused on the state system, but posits the Kantian idea of a future universal peace which exists in the institutionalization of shared liberal norms – democracy, international co-operation and economic interdependence – rather than power politics. Fusing realist, liberal and other perspectives, the discourse and programme of ‘liberal peace’ has emerged as the dominant conceptualization of peace in IR and in the policy world. It developed from a diversification of conflict management strategies and UN peacekeeping interventions, and the co-option of broader grassroots initiatives for reconstruction and rehabilitation.¹² Premised on the assertion that armed intrastate conflicts in lower income countries pose global security threats, liberal peace is promoted through ‘elitist peace negotiations and instrumental use of humanitarian and development aid’¹³ and is thus intertwined with discourses and practices of liberal democracy, neoliberal development and technocratic statebuilding.

A productive area of work on peace in IR, and that which most closely informs the project we are advancing here, has emerged from critiques of liberal peace and the positing of alternative conceptualizations of peace. Pioneering this stance has been Oliver Richmond who, troubled by the normative and Western ideological underpinnings of the liberal peace paradigm,¹⁴ argues that ‘liberal forms of peacebuilding have become subservient to statebuilding’,¹⁵ that these initiatives are dominated by elite international actors and have little positive impact on local communities.¹⁶ Arguing that peace itself is highly contested, Richmond and others have posited the idea of ‘post-liberal peace’. This still connects with ideas of liberalism from IR but is a hybridized form of peacebuilding which foregrounds agency and the politics of peace, attends to the scale of the everyday and the local, and brings to the table concepts of empathy, dialogue and self-determination.¹⁷ This fusion opens up important conceptual spaces for reconsidering peace through foregrounding the ‘pluralism of peaces’¹⁸ and the idea of peace as organic and dynamic. However, these critical IR approaches commonly fail to link the geopolitical to the everyday, and, by not sufficiently attending to ‘undramatic’ contexts of active peacemaking, they struggle to give requisite empirical weight to these alternatives to liberal peace.

A body of literature which has long wrestled with this challenge is peace studies. Its origins as a distinct field of inquiry go back to 1930s quantitative studies in the UK and USA on the causes and consequences of war.¹⁹ The late 1960s and 1970s saw the broadening of studies to conside...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Authors
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction: geographical approaches to peace
• Part 1: Contesting narratives of peace
• Part 2: Techniques of peacemaking
• Part 3: Practices of coexistence
• Bibliography