The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

This session was streamed but not recorded

Curated Track: 

Description:

Questions of war and peace dominate the headlines. They are also pressing questions for students in university classrooms and scholars forming research agendas. The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine raised the specter of another European war, or even escalation into a wider conflagration. Post-Cold War optimism now seems naïve, and beliefs that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan marked a turning point in the War on Terror seem wildly optimistic. These dramatic events came on top of long-term tensions, especially the western focus on China’s growing power through the twin strategies of the Belt and Road Initiative and creating a blue water navy. On the other hand, we see that steps towards peace are possible. Violence has remained in abeyance in Northern Ireland, despite post-Brexit tensions. The Black Lives Matter movement has been successful in making racial justice and post-colonialism a central concern in many aspects of life. In sum, intertwined processes of peace and conflict are ongoing. This is manifest in a tapestry of geographies of war and peace that can only be understood by identifying inter-linked spaces and the simultaneity of processes of peacebuilding and conflict making.

Geographic scholarship and its critical framing of conflict and peace is particularly relevant, rich, and provocative. War and conflict have become a strong focus for political geographers (Mamadouh, 2004), while the topic of peace has emerged as of equal importance as a way of understanding the processes, scalar experiences, and engagements of political geography (Megoran, 2011; Williams and McConnell, 2011). The essence of our proposed session(s) is that war and peace are manifestations of the intertwined construction of geographies and politics (Boulding, 2000; Kirsch and Flint, 2011). Indeed, peace is never completely distinct from war. In this CFP, we are interested in investigating understandings of how the myriad spaces of war and peace are forged by multiple agencies, some possibly contradictory.

The aim of this session(s) is to critically examine a number of themes:

Agency: Peacebuilding and conflict-making are the outcomes of intersecting social processes at multiple scales initiated and conducted by various actors.

Mutual construction of politics and space: The agency of peacebuilding and conflict-making is situated in, and simultaneously re-creates and re-arranges, geographic settings. The settings provide opportunities and constraints for agents.

Multiple scales: All geographical settings are multi-scalar in that the global and the local, and all intervening scales, are mutually constructed through processes that operate primarily within, but also transcend, any particular scale.

Multiple geographies: There are many forms of geographical settings, but the prominent ones are places (arenas of activity and identity), territories, networks, and scales.

The twin dynamics of empathy/othering and inclusivity/partitioning: Identities based on geographical identities and attachments (including but not limited to countries and regions) and membership in social groups (class, race, religion, gender, and sexuality) can foster a sense of difference and separation that may fuel conflict or a sense of shared experience or concern that can enable empathy and peacebuilding.

Resistance/militarism: The essentially militaristic nature of capitalism and states provokes actions of resistance. Some of these actions may be anti-systemic and engender fundamental social change. Other actions may re-create the same forms of violence and militarism but in new ways, such as many cases of national separatism or the criminal actions of terrorist and fundamentalist groups.

This session(s) is sponsored by the Political Geography Specialty Group and co-organized by Colin Flint and Kara E. Dempsey.


References:

Boulding, E. (2000) Cultures of Peace. Syracuse University Press.

Kirsch, S. and Flint, C. (2011) “Introduction: Reconstruction and the worlds that war makes” in S. Kirsch and C. Flint (eds.) Reconstructing Conflict: Integrating War and Post-War Geographies, Ashgate Publishing, pp. 3–28.

Mamadouh, V. (2004) “Geography and war, geographers and peace,” in The Geography of War and Peace, C. Flint (ed.), Oxford University Press, pp. 26-60.

Megoran, N. (2011) “War and peace? An agenda for peace research and practice in geography,” Political Geography 1: 1–12.

Williams, P. and McConnell, F. (2011) “Critical geographies of peace,” Antipode 43: 927-931.

Non-Presenting Participants