Space for Peace: A Research Agenda

ABSTRACT

Spatial analysis of peace and conflict is slowly but steadily gaining traction. As a new and innovative approach, it focuses on the mutual construction of spaces and agency in a field that has thus far merely considered space as a backdrop against which war, violence, and peace unfold. Conceptually borrowing from disciplines such as geography, anthropology, and others, in this article we propose three avenues for analysing spaces for peace: spatial practices, spatial dynamics, and space formations. Given the novelty of the spatial perspective in peace and conflict studies, we also offer some thoughts on methodology, data collection, and knowledge production.

KEYWORDS:

• Peace
• methodology
• agency
• spatial practices
• spatial dynamics
• space formations

Introduction

How to analyze space in the field of peace and conflict studies? How to translate the spatial turn into more concrete research programmes? How to delineate different research perspectives on space for peace? This article seeks to advance a research agenda to analyze peace and conflict by introducing various approaches and entry roads for researchers interested in taking space as an analytical category seriously. It seeks to provide orientation by disentangling spatial dimensions of the Space for Peace and to point out common issues and ideas. More concretely, by borrowing from various disciplines and already existing studies in peace and conflict research, we develop and illustrate three avenues for analysing spaces for peace: spatial practices, spatial dynamics, and space formations. They cannot be separated from each other, other than for heuristic purposes, for they are closely intertwined. Nevertheless, we hope they help researchers to disentangle spatial features of peace and conflict, and to clarify their own approach and contribution.

To set the stage for this objective, this article offers a brief overview of the spatial turn and its underlying assumptions, a more elaborate depiction of which can be found in our introduction to this special issue Space for Peace (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel 2022; see also Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel 2016). In a next step, we propose three avenues for analysing spaces for peace: spatial practices, spatial dynamics, and space formations. Given the novelty of the spatial perspective in peace and conflict studies, we also offer some thoughts on methodology, data collection, and knowledge production.

Advancing the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies

Introducing the spatial turn in the social sciences, Barney Warf and Santa Arias (2008, 1) write:

In some ways, this transformation [the spatial turn] is expressed in simple semantic terms, i.e. the literal and metaphorical use and assumptions of “space”, “place”, and “mapping” to denote a geographic dimension as an essential aspect of the production of culture. In other ways, however, the spatial turn is much more substantive, involving a reworking of the very notion and significance of spatiality to offer a perspective in which space is every bit as important as time in the unfolding of human affairs, a view in which geography is not relegated to an afterthought of social relations, but is intimately involved in their construction.

Warf and Arias point to an understanding of space that exceeds its materiality by stressing its significance for social relations, thus also for peace and conflict. Here, in both the literal and the metaphorical use of the term, space is a geographic dimension in the context of which events unfold, and which affects how they unfold. To illustrate, if a peacebuilding conference is held in the UN headquarters in New York, the fact that it is held in this building, in this city, in this particular room (say the General Assembly Hall) already tells us a lot about the nature and the importance of this meeting. Here, space is crucial for the event to take place, it is an essential backdrop.

Yet, in the above quotation, Warf and Arias also suggest that space is important to the unfolding of human affairs per se, for it constructs social relations. To stay with the example of the UN conference in New York, the access to the conference space by invitation, the monetary requirements to participate in the meeting for people who have to travel to New York (possibly from far-away countries), the access restrictions to the UN building as well as to meetings in the General Assembly Hall, and so on determine who can participate, add his or her view to the debate on peacebuilding and thus on the peace to be built. Moreover, inside the hall there is a seating plan and a certain protocol that must be followed and that shapes the outcome of the debates. Space is thus a structure that restricts who is allowed in and who must stay outside the gates. Space is thus not simply the backdrop against which events unfold, it shapes their outcome.

These lines of thinking are central to the spatial turn (Soja 1989) in the social sciences. In a nutshell, it contends that space is the product of agency, i.e. not simply a material condition but a complex social construction consisting of norms, values, and ascribed meanings (Lefebvre [1974] 1991, 26). In line with Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration, there is a duality in place: space is produced by agency, yet at the same time it limits what agents can do (Giddens 1984; Löw 2013). To return to the example above, meeting rooms and their ascribed meaning are produced by agents, yet at the same time they limit which agents have access and how they behave within this room. As a consequence, space is never ahistorical or apolitical but always contingent, it comes and goes, it is loaded with power, and reflects the outcome of present and past political struggles.

Massey (1994) therefore draws attention to the contingency of space. To her, as a social construct, space is never a container that clearly delineates a here/there, us/them, but rather it is permeable and stretches beyond its boundaries so that inside and outside mutually constitute each other. The outside is part of the inside, the inside of the outside. Similarly, for Castells (1996), the postmodern condition in which we live is marked by the global ‘space of flows’ due to linkages and connections between people situated in particular localities with people elsewhere/anywhere, transcending what we understand as global and local, and (re-)producing interconnectedness on a global scale. As we see below, this is also highly relevant for spatial dynamics in peace and conflict.

All of this suggests that the production of space is a highly political endeavor (Lefebvre [1940] 2009, 33), for various agents compete over the ascribed meaning, the prevalent norms, and the dominant values. To continue developing the above example, the international peacebuilding discourse shaped in the General Assembly Hall, and from which most peacebuilding interventions are designed, holds certain assumptions about post-conflict space formations as well as about the role of the international and the local. It often upholds a simple division between international and local spaces, regards local communities as lacking agency and mobility, and understands post-conflict spaces to be empty spaces. This in turn has implications for how international peacebuilding actors approach peace, reconciliation, democracy, and security in post-conflict spaces. Taking space seriously allows for unraveling these dynamics.

A research agenda for peace and conflict studies

The spatial turn opens up various avenues for analysing peace and conflict. In order to show the analytical benefits of the spatial turn, the following section discusses three entry roads – spatial practices, spatial dynamics, and space formations – that focus on different dimensions of spatial analysis. This is inspired by Rau (2017), who has disentangled them for the discipline of history, and Buckley-Zistel (2021), who has translated this to the field of International Relations. Distinguishing these dimensions helps to make visible nuances and contrasts, yet, importantly, this can only be done for heuristic purposes, for they are closely intertwined and mutually affect each other. In the following, with reference to peace and conflict studies, we therefore explore spatial practices, spatial dynamics, and space formations, the key entry roads for different agents in the constitution and impact of spaces for peace and conflict.

Spatial practices

First, spatial practices focus on the agents and activities through which spaces are created, transformed, or dissolved in relation to peace and conflict. To repeat, the spatial turn views people as active agents in the production and interpretation of space. Agents create space through spatial practices that make up spatial behavioral patterns, i.e. spatial dynamics as outlined below. Hence, buffer zones, security corridors, safe areas, security zones, and so on are all constructed, maintained, challenged, and dissolved by spatial practices. Analysing spatial practices thus serves to zoom in on actors and possibilities for and restrictions of agency (see Gusic [2022] and Cole and Kapper [2022]).

Spatial practices make social space happen, they produce social realities so that there ‘are ways of doing things’ (Pouliot 2015, 238), and consolidate (yet also challenge, change, and dissolve) spaces through repetitive and patterned actions. In our understanding in this article, spatial practices are thus a constitutive process of spatial dynamics, as explained below. As expressed by Macaspac and Moore (2022, 6): ‘[s]patial practices influence the dynamics of peace and conflict in profound ways, from daily, localized, and embodied actions to spatial framings and narratives that inform organizational behaviors and peace agreements’. Against this backdrop, researching spatial practices brings forth research concepts such as identity, exclusion, segregation, belonging, territoriality, and cognitive space to understand peace and conflict as an emplaced practice. This is for instance done by capturing the micro-practices of individuals performing peace in their everyday (Mac Ginty 2021).

To illustrate, for instance, recent research in peace and conflict studies explores the agency of peacekeepers and peacebuilders in post-conflict contexts. Contained within the international community's approach to post-conflict spaces is the assumption that places can be reconstructed, states made, and peace built, and that peacekeeping practices produce territoriality and reconfigure post-conflict spaces in ways that also shape perceptions of security. Research that zooms in on spatial practices includes inter alia studying how various agents actively seek to shape space to demilitarize and manage conflict (Heathershaw and Lambach 2008; Kühn 2008) or to promote particular dynamics of post-conflict settlement or reconstruction (Ó Tuathail and Dahlman 2011). It shows how United Nations peacekeepers perform security through their daily practices that transform spaces, as demonstrated by Higate and Henry’s (2010) work, revealing the implications for local populations of such practices as the demarcation of space into zones and enclaves. In a similar vein, Lemay-Hébert (2018) demonstrates how the security-mapping practices of the United Nations peace mission to Haiti were part of the securitization of the everyday that structured the peacekeepers’ relations to the local population. Security mapping with color-coding is a spatial practice which has been used in a number of other spaces of intervention, such as in Kabul and Baghdad (the ‘green zone’), in Mogadishu (the ‘white zone’, a secure zone for the international community), or in the Democratic Republic of Congo (‘red zones’ or areas of unrest) (Lemay-Hébert 2018).

Such analysis of spatial practices in conflict zones reveals the contradictory mix of insecurity and security that peacekeeping produces in spaces of intervention by shaping, dividing, and segregating them. The notion of emplaced security captures this link and invites us to examine the political nature and consequences of peacekeepers’ spatial security-seeking practices, including their creation of the material and ideational structures of intervention spaces and places (Brigg and George 2020; Wallis 2020). Thus, some spatial practices produce boundaries between peacekeepers and conflict-affected populations, undermining trust and encouraging isolation and bunkerization (Duffield 2010; Read 2018), and they may also call into question the programmatic claim that it is possible to do no harm. For spaces of intervention can generate everyday moments of high insecurity for both conflict-affected populations and peacekeepers (Mannergren Selimovic 2019, 139; Mannergren Selimovic and Strömbom 2015), particularly if they lead the latter to treat local populations with suspicion or even as a threat (Wallis 2020).

In contrast to spatial practices that produce spaces of conflict and insecurity, other spatial practices seek to transform, counter, remake, reconfigure, or dissolve such spaces, thus contributing to emplacing peace and security. To illustrate, in cities divided by conflict such as Belfast, Nicosia, or Mostar, spatial segregation is often viewed as pertaining to ethnically segregated spaces (Bollens 2012; Gusic 2019, 2022; see also Cole and Kapper 2022; Bădescu 2022). Such a viewpoint tends to provide a snapshot and a static understanding of life in a divided city and fails to capture mundane activities of everyday life that frequently require moving across spaces as well as traversing different territories. This practice of movement by people may ultimately challenge the material and ethnic division of space (Greenberg Raanan and Shoval 2014). As Bădescu (2022) and Gusic (2022) discuss in their contributions to this special issue, it may allow for peaces to exist next to each other or parties to the conflict to move closer together.

Movement and mobility as practice may also challenge our understanding of where peace and conflict take place. Recent research has used mobility to make us rethink the notion of peace and to demonstrate how movement challenges understandings of peace, conflict, and security. As Mannergren Selimovic (2022) demonstrates, mobility and movement construct new ways of viewing ‘here’ and ‘there’ in peace and conflict research. Focusing on the implications of mobility and agential dynamics of peace, Richmond and Mac Ginty (2019) have developed the notion of mobile peace to capture and characterize the fluid practices with which peace is being constructed through the movement of people, including for example migrants and refugees.

Moreover, paying attention to spatial practices reveals that terms such as spatial belonging and territorial identity in post-conflict spaces require a deeper understanding of the fleeting, changing everyday activities of individuals. Post-conflict spaces are characterized by a variety of micro-level, everyday practices that enable individuals and communities to prevent conflictual exchanges and thus to avoid conflicts in interactions with those operating in the same space (Mac Ginty 2019). Thus, normalcy and ‘everyday peace’ may be achieved by people not only by doing things in a particular way so as to avoid conflict, but also by doing things in a particular space (Bátora et al. 2020; Lepp 2022). In the divided city of Mostar, the processes of spatial governmentality were shaped by ethno-nationalist power linked to identity, manifesting themselves in, for example, a divided education system and in segregated/integrated schools (Björkdahl 2015). In the Old Gymnasium, the first integrated school in Bosnia–Herzegovina, spatial self-governing long co-opted ambitions of shared space, and some students defined it as ‘two schools under one roof’. Eventually, some students began to mix to have a cigarette during recess in the school's bathroom, to them a no-man's land (Hromadžić 2011). Thus, the practice of smoking in the spatial fringes of the ethnic space demonstrated the students’ resistance to the spatial division, so that their practice transformed the space into a shared space. Moreover, in order to transform sedimented spatial structures and routinized practices, artistic performance can show alternative routes by refusing to operate within these given spatial structures (see Cole and Kapper 2022).

There is, hence, an ongoing dynamic relationship between people's conception of space, their practices within it, and the production of the space (Lefebvre [1974] 1991). Spatial practices enable us to see the process of the construction of social and material space, and the relationship between perceptions of space, spatial practices, and space (Greenberg Raanan and Shoval 2014).

Spatial dynamics

Next, spatial dynamics focus on the social construction of spaces and analyze their emergence, change, and dissolution. Compared to the previous aspect, they constitute more of a bird's eye view. This concept highlights dynamics, i.e. unravels processes, scale and trans-scalar processes, interactions, mutual constitutions, and relationality. Examples from peace and conflict studies include the implementation of global peacebuilding norms in post-war societies or the emergence of spaces of violence in the global so-called War on Terror (Prinz and Schetter 2021). With a focus on transitional justice and memory, Buckley-Zistel (2016) reflects on the mutual relationality of the so-called global and the so-called local and how a different conceptualization of these scales and their mutual constitution might enable alternative forms of agency, while Pain (2014) explores the political geography of domestic violence through the complex of international warfare and intimate violence at home, challenging the dichotomy between public/private space. Analysing spatial dynamics thus serves to help us understand how spaces mutually constitute and how they relate to each other.

The idea of spatial dynamics makes it possible to explore, inter alia, how transnational orders are translated to local orders and back, and how local dynamics stretch out in networks across spaces and places and connect to global politics. This is captured by the notion of trans-scalar peace systems (Millar 2021; Hellmüller 2021). International, local, and national actors with their own diverse agendas seek to shape post-conflict spaces. In the process, what is global, local, national, international is constantly renegotiated and mediated, and transcends the boundaries of the particular state. Other lines of research have studied this process through a conceptual lens of hybridity, in particular focusing on encounters between local and global actors and providing an alternative conceptualization of post-conflict spaces. For Mac Ginty (2010, 391), hybrid peace emerges at ‘the interface between internationally supported peace operations and local approaches to peace’, pointing to two different scales – international and local – which constitute the peace to be built. Hybrid peace is located at the intersection between top-down and bottom-up peace, so hybridity becomes a third space between the global and the local on which peace is placed (yet also where it is constantly contested).

Spatial dynamics run against a more classic understanding of levels of analysis (see also the section on methodology below): the individual, national, international, etc. These levels of analysis tend to be viewed as permanent and static, and actors are assumed to move between them as if hopping from one platform to another or engaging in what has been referred to as scale jumping (Masson 2010). Increasingly, this conceptualization is being challenged by constructivist approaches to human geography, for instance regarding social movements and how they use space, how spaces shape social movements, and, conversely, how movements shape spaces (Koopman 2015, 341). Here, it is important to understand how space is instrumental for how movements can develop and move around on the one hand, yet on the other hand it is also key to analysing how social movements shape spaces through their practices and engagement (Miller 2000, 10). And, as Brigg, George, and Higgins (2022) discuss in their contribution to this special issue, there are always hierarchies and power asymmetries involved that inform the outcome of these spatial dynamics.

To provide another example, transnational networks such as women's situation rooms (WSR) to implement the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda are initiated by civil society actors to encourage substantive participation of women in peacebuilding processes (Onyesoh 2019). As a transnational network, they act as an alternative and newly developed space between various scales (the global, national, local) with various agents (international organizations, other transnational networks, nation states, local governments, and so on) to lobby for the successful implementation of WPS nationally, providing an important space for women to participate in politics within and across state boundaries. And yet, the transnational scale is not simply available to be occupied, it has to be created through the spatial practices of social movements, both discursively and materially in places that can then be physically visited. Through their movement, agents develop new connections between levels and therefore new places of belonging and identification (Masson 2010). What takes place is not simply an upscaling, i.e. a relocation of local or national concerns to a higher level (Dufour and Giraud 2007, 1154), but the emergence of new connections, levels, and (virtual or actual) rooms.

Space formations

Lastly, space formations ask what form of spatiality is involved, i.e. how space matters and manifests itself. This manifestation can be material in terms of actual physical structures such as the United Nations headquarters, peace museums, territories, buffer zones, borders, etc. Yet, it can also be less tangible and more conceptual, such as global, local, center, periphery, North, South, or more metaphorical, such as networks and hubs (Hönke 2018), or even virtual. The aim of analysing space formations is to become aware of their features as relevant for peace and conflict studies, of their semantics and contingencies, in order to stimulate critical reflection. This also includes what preconceptions and understandings they are based on; as Kappler (2013, 12) points out: ‘[t]he social codes and established norms in such a space … determine what is acceptable in that space according to the rules and norms established at a given point of time and context’. Thus, space formations such as borders, territories, battlefields, or buffer zones are produced by the practices of agents with particular agendas in mind. They are ‘the outcome of a series of highly problematic temporary settlements that divide and connect things up into different kinds of collectives which are slowly provided with the means which render them durable and sustainable’ (Thrift 2003, 95). In this sense, and to return to Lefebvre, spaces are the results of past struggles and thus highly political even when they become generally taken for granted and unquestioned. Analysing space formations thus serves to expose the underlying imaginaries, norms, and values enshrined in particular spaces.

This is for instance central to recent literature on post-conflict spaces, so it is instructive to briefly look at a range of space formations. To begin, after a violent conflict, a variety of international or national actors with different agendas and objectives supports the building of peace, a civil society, and a functioning state. In many such instances, peacebuilding and statebuilding become blurred. First, statebuilding is based on a particular understanding of the state, including that it is static, not dynamic (Heathershaw and Lambach 2008). Such a state resembles a container with clear borders in which peace is supposed to be built and where the former parties to the conflict are supposed to live together peacefully (Esu 2016; Kühn 2012). It is also often the site at which peace accords are located, as critically assessed by Bell and Wise (2022). Second, the envisioned peace, too, is often an abstract idea, lacks local authorship and ownership, and fails to make a difference to the people living in these post-conflict spaces. In addition, scholars have argued that peace and peacebuilding also exist in the virtual space, and sometimes and in some post-conflict societies only there (Heathershaw 2009). Peace in Cambodia, for example, is regarded as only a virtual peace, where processes of democratization are ‘mainly visible to those observing from the outside of the post-conflict zone in the liberal international community rather than those upon whom this peace is being visited’ (Richmond 2005, 185).

A further example for space formations in peace and conflict follows from the spatial practice of solving conflicts by creating (sometimes new) spaces in terms of new territories. These territories are particularly useful in cases where ethnic minorities with alleged grievances and infringed minority rights claim political autonomy through mechanisms such as territorial autonomy, secession, and independence. This has been the origin of pseudo-states such as Republika Srpska, Kurdistan, and Palestine as well as new-born states such as Kosovo, South Sudan, and East Timor. Moreover, as Lewis, Heathershaw, and Megoran (2018) observe, the field of peace negotiations and mediation is replete with the names of places such as Camp David, Dayton, Rambouillet, Oslo, Geneva, or Bonn. These newly constructed space formations serve to remove negotiating actors from the space of conflict and from their political constituency to an alternative space in which complex conflicts may be amenable to solution (Henrikson 2005; cited in Lewis, Heathershaw, and Megoran 2018). In doing so, negotiators create an alternative space which (ideally) functions as a non-political, neutral space. Bell and Wise (2022) call for a new imaginary that moves beyond state-centeredness and that is critical of an understanding of scales as fixed and of spaces as containers. Regarding peace agreements, they argue that it is crucial to focus more on local dynamics and how they relate to dynamics at other scales, producing a typology of agreements as used at different stages of a conflict life cycle.

Importantly, there is an underexplored interplay between spatial formations and spatial order. Engel (2020) argues that past experiences of space and imagined spatial orders are framed as spatial formats, turning such framings into political projects. One example of such an imagined spatial format is Republika Srpska, where the ethno-nationalists use a particular spatial format for statebuilding purposes (Björkdahl 2018). According to Engel (2020, 223), spatial formats are initially not material, they do not constitute a social space, but space that is ‘ordered through rendering visible “accepted”, “valid”, “relevant” or “important” spatial formats that can be selected by political actors for particular political purposes’. In that sense, ordering space is a political construction where it is made visible and given meaning. Spatial ordering is a way of stabilizing spatial formations (cf. Engel 2020, 224).

All of these examples have in common that they put spatial formations center stage and in doing so open this black box to reveal their underlying assumptions, norms, and imaginaries. A spatial lens thus helps to bring to the fore the understanding of a particular space formation in which the peace is (supposed to be) built, how this space should look, and what understanding of peace this entails.

Methodology

How do we research space formations, spatial dynamics, and spatial practices? Since space is rarely perceived or placed at the center of inquiry in peace and conflict research, we can only present a few ideas emerging from the field. It is therefore instructive to assess methods developed in other disciplines such as political geography, human geography, ethnology, and sociology, as we shall do below. Importantly, while we differentiate three avenues for researching space for peace for heuristic purposes, most methodologies focus on a combination of all three perspectives, weaving them together into a larger tapestry for collecting empirical data.

Within peace and conflict studies, the few quantitative approaches are predominantly used to examine international and civil wars and have until recently often been trapped in a state-centric paradigm. However, new datasets have compiled geocoded data that enable scholars, students, and analysts to explore the spatial dimension of peace and conflict patterns at specific locations, generating new answers to the critical questions of where peace and conflict take place (Höglund et al. 2016). Spatially disaggregated information thus helps move beyond the state level of analysis and, for example, study the exact location of violent events.

Research that takes a predominantly qualitative approach often emphasizes the local and the everyday of spatial practices. To closely study emplaced peace, security, and conflict, quantitative and qualitative scholars need to reconcile the possible tension between ‘the desire for “authentic”, inclusive and bottom-up methodological rigor and the demand for scientific rigor’, as pointed out by Firchow and Ginty (2020, 134). What they term good enough methodologies, balancing methodological rigor with an understanding of the constraints of suboptimal research contexts, are needed when studying complex phenomena such as peacebuilding processes and conflict dynamics. Thus, the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies is promising, as it expands our methodological resources and analytical tools and offers useful correctives to existing scholarship in peace and conflict studies (Brigg 2020).

Levels of analysis and trans-scalar methodologies

In line with the spatial dynamics discussed above, the spatial turn offers useful methodological tools and analytical devices to address how spaces and scales relate and mutually constitute each other, and thus how they offer new perspectives on the persistent level-of-analysis problem. Addressing this problem for instance includes an expanded conceptual repertoire, such as correctives, trans-scalar approaches as well as geocoded disaggregated data countering the ‘tendency to take the nation-state for granted as the central unit of analysis’ (Chojnacki and Engels 2016, 34), and thus to avoid perpetuating the construction of the nation-state as a territorial container, which is central to methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Schiller 2002; Geo-PKO Dataset 2020). Recognizing that scale, like space, is an outcome of social practices and processes (Swyngedouw 1997), scale is predominantly mobilized to move beyond prioritizing the state as the unit and level of analysis or beyond thinking about space as a simple container for human activities. Against this backdrop, Millar (2021) develops the idea of trans-scalar ethnographic peace research as a methodology to better understand the interaction of conflict and peace dynamics across scales, in particular to examine the concepts on which the scales are built and to trace the circulation of ideas between these scales. Building on this research, Sara Hellmüller (2021) develops the notion of trans-scalarity to study how this comes about intentionally and unintentionally in transitional justice processes and how it helps unpack both positive and negative notions of peace. Consequently, a shift to scale helps disentangle peacebuilding from statebuilding. It recognizes that building self-sustainable peace requires an understanding of conflict dynamics as trans-scalar, including the body and the home as well as the national and global scale and all scales in between (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013).

Including the space of the human body and corporeal agency in peace and conflict studies, Väyrynen (2019) reveals how peace and war touch our bodies in multiple ways and how the body is in turn constitutive of war and peace. In a similar vein, studying micro-practices, Mac Ginty (2019) finds the home to be a key part of everyday and ontological security for many people. The everyday connects to the international and transnational through the analytical device of circuitry, which emphasizes the connectivity between apparently unconnected levels/scales. As a concept, it denotes movements in all directions. It suggests an infrastructure of routes along which people, practices, and ideas can travel, and as such a circuitry can stretch across the globe (Mac Ginty 2019, 245). Thus, as an analytical device, circuitry helps us understand the linkages between the everyday, the vernacular, and the ontological on the one hand and the national, international, and transnational on the other.

Ethnography and being in place

To research where peace and conflict take place, ethnographers employ methods of being in place in order to closely observe and experience how peace and violence are lived, and enrich this with interviews, focus group discussions, and narrative walks (to be specified below) to capture emplaced knowledge. Such ethnography often starts in the everyday as people experience it and explores how the relevant dynamics of peace and conflict are constituted by and in the everyday. As observed by a number of scholars, post-conflict spaces are characterized by a variety of micro-level practices that enable individuals and communities to avoid conflicts. Williams’ (2015) detailed ethnographic engagement with Muslim communities in Varanasi, India, produces knowledge about such micro-level, everyday practices. These practices are in some ways connected to, affected by, and constituent of the spaces and of peace(s), revealing that place, the everyday, and people's experiences are the relevant elements which shape spaces for peace. Firchow and Ginty (2020) use focus groups to find out people's perceptions of peace and to develop their own set of indicators for an emplaced peace. In their analysis of social behavior and variation in institutional logics governing spaces, Bátora et al. (2020) develop an extended version of the concept of everyday peace, including a focus not only on micro-level individual agency but also on an important meso-level dimension where social interactions take place. Moreover, feminist scholars with an interest in spatial dynamics have employed ethnography in order to map gendered geographies of violence, to foreground women's experiences of war, and to explore how bodies matter politically in relation to war and peace (Schrock 2013). Scholars have also conducted multi-sited ethnography to investigate fluid and fleeting phenomena such as dynamics, processes, and patterns of peace and conflict, because these phenomena are ‘multiply situated and hold an emergent global dimension’ (Marcus 1995, 102).

Narrative walks

Using narrative walks as a qualitative method to construct grounded data, it is possible to explore the dimensions of the complex, diverse, and uncertain landscape of peace and conflict (Jerneck and Olsson 2013). During narrative walks, the research participants lead the walk and decide on the locations and the topics to discuss with the researcher. In addition to empowering the research participants to become an active agent of the setting and, in doing so, countering the power asymmetry in research and knowledge production, this method also takes into account the body in movement and the subjective experience of walking. It allows for examining places through the narrative of the research participant's life story, and to feel places through bodily experience. However, narrative walks can also be guided by the researcher striving to collect emplaced data or the route can be jointly decided on by the researcher and research participant in a collaborative effort. Thus, attention to space and place has increased appreciation for the complex nature of warscapes and peacescapes, reflecting upon space as symbolic and places as material, and giving it meaning through people's embodied activity and interactions (Brigg and George 2020).

Mapping

Moving on from narrative walks, one of the most common ways of examining the perception of space in geographic research is through cognitive maps. This practice is derived from the assumption that cognitive maps influence spatial behavior (Golledge and Stimson 1997; Murtagh and Murphy 2011). In peace and conflict research, cognitive maps help explore the relationship between spatial perceptions, perceived territorial boundaries and divides, and actual spatial activity. Such mapping methodologies have been employed to explore movement in Belfast and Jerusalem (Switzer and McDowell 2009, 337; Greenberg Raanan and Shoval 2014, 28). During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the political situation strongly influenced people's interactions with their surroundings, producing cognitive maps that were highly attuned to spaces perceived to be safe or unsafe (Switzer and McDowell 2009). Today, memories of the Troubles are connected to these cognitive maps of conflict, influencing the spatial movement of the people of Belfast. Comparing mental maps to actual movement, Greenberg Raanan and Shoval (2014, 28) used GPS tracking technology to chart the movement of women in Jerusalem and examine spatial and temporal segregation and the crossing of boundaries in a divided city. Forde’s (2019) study of Mostar and Cape Town also relies on mapping and demonstrates how it is an accessible, inclusive, and participatory methodological approach. These spatial methodologies can be employed to explore the impact of conflict on spatial movements, perceptions of space, and on how memory is emplaced in post-conflict spaces. They demonstrate the potential of mapping methodologies to be used to materialize the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies.

Geocoded and disaggregated data

Quantitative analysis of peace and conflict now has access to new geocoded datasets, making novel spatial analysis of both peace and conflict possible. Geocoding is the process of turning a description of a location, such as its physical place, into a precise location on a map: a pair of coordinates. Geocoding one or multiple locations will output geographic features with specific attributes that can be used for spatial analysis. Whereas conflict data is generally available for large-scale events such as civil and international war, the SCAD dataset¹ (n.d.), for example, contains geo-referenced data to provide latitude and longitude coordinates for more than 7900 conflict events in Africa. It offers systematic tracking of a broader range of conflicts such as social and political unrest, including strikes, riots, protests, communal conflict, and other social disturbances in Africa not covered by traditional datasets on civil and interstate war. As such, it is a new tool to spatially analyse conflict patterns.

UN peacekeeping operations are another phenomenon that has been successfully geocoded, providing insights into the geography and spatial practices of peacekeeping operations (Cil et al. 2020). Spatial analysis of UN peacekeeping involves a complex multidimensional geopolitical framework that incorporates the linkages and contradictions between macro and micro spatial scales and may reveal how peacekeepers through their practices affect the political and human landscape within which they operate (Higate and Henry 2010). The Uppsala University Geo-PKO Dataset 2.1 (2020) provides geocoded data on UN peacekeeping deployments and offers information on key attributes of peacekeeping at different scales, enabling scholars to explore variations in peacekeeping at the sub-national level and to address new questions about peacekeeping operations and their effects (Cil et al. 2020).

Conclusion

It is our main contention that space matters. It is only through space that social relations become concrete and often even material through the construction of buildings, borders, infrastructures, and so on. And yet, even if space matters at a given time and at a given place, its borders are permeable and ever changing as an outcome of continuous negotiations in the social world. Instead of being a fixed container, space formations are the product of social life – of spatial practices – as well as the structural limitations to this life, which is never static. Space formations are never permanent or pre-given but contingent and ever changing. For the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies, this means that space itself becomes an analytical category: analysing the constitution of space moves center stage.

Peace geographies in political geography and peace and conflict studies are two fields of research with a lot in common, but for a long period they developed and remained contained in disciplinary silos and little dialogue and cross-fertilization occurred. In addition, by going beyond the binary of positive and negative peace and the analytical constraints of state-centrism, new understandings of where peace takes place were possible, as were new theoretical innovations and a rethinking of spaces for peace (Macaspac 2022).

In this article – and in the special issue Space for Peace as a whole – we advocate for including spatial analysis in peace and conflict studies. Space matters for three reasons: first, investigating space formations makes us aware of their features, norms, and imaginaries and how they are relevant for peace and conflict research. The examples discussed in this article and in the special issue put spatial formations center stage and, in doing so, open this black box to reveal the underlying assumptions of these spaces. This helps expose the understanding of a particular space formation in which peace and conflict take place and what understanding of peace and conflict it entails. Second, the focus on spatial dynamics challenges the static understanding of space and demonstrates that space is dynamic, socially constructed, and relational regarding other spaces, making it possible to analyze the emergence, change, and dissolution of particular spaces as some of the contributors do. Third, and related to this, exploring spatial practices reveals the everyday practices and activities through which spaces are created, transformed, or dissolved. To return to Lefebvre ([1974] 1991), there is an ongoing relationship between people's conception of space, their practices within it, and the actual production of the space. Since peace and conflict is a highly spatialized field, analysing its spatial dimensions is central to discern its characteristics.

Methodologically, the spatial turn draws on existing methods and approaches, with some being particularly pertinent to investigating spaces for peace. Being in place, mapping, narrative walks, disaggregated geocoded datasets where zones of peace can be identified are of great value to trace the contours of spaces, while trans-scalar approaches help to challenge the level-of-analysis problem and identify spaces for peace. Moreover, by employing space as an analytical device, new and plural understandings of peace are made visible, such as mobile peace, emplaced peace, peace(s), virtual peace, everyday peace, etc., demonstrating the analytical purchase of space for peace.

Importantly, the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies also holds ethical value regarding the collection of empirical data. As Brigg, George, and Higgins (2022) argue in their article, the construction of knowledge is influenced by the power relations between the researcher and the research participant, so that researchers are often out of place in their endeavor to inquire and to know. By avoiding the imposition of concepts, terminology, and narratives on communities living in conflict and post-conflict spaces, scholars are better placed to value and interact with local knowledge and knowers. Thus, the spatial turn needs to recognize and engage with those who are typically excluded from the dominant circuits of producing peacebuilding knowledge, policy, and practice. An external knower cannot arrive and apply a new set of methodological tools in a variety of settings without taking into consideration the different ways people conceptualize and operationalize space in socio-political ordering (Brigg 2020, 535). To realize the full potential of the spatial turn, according to Brigg, requires us to grapple with the emplacement of the knowing subject, for ‘the spatial turn must itself be “emplaced”, thereby countering long-standing patterns in dominant knowledge production and the pattern in nascent peace and conflict studies’ engagement with concepts of space and place’ (Brigg 2020, 537). To do so requires placing knowledge production amidst spatialized relations and thereby expanding current spatial thinking in peace and conflict studies.

Acknowledgements

This article is part of the 2022 special issue Space for Peace, edited by Annika Björkdahl and Susanne Buckley-Zistel. The research of Susanne Buckley-Zistel was made possible within the framework of the research project ‘Regional Research Center Transformations of Political Violence’. The research of Annika Björkdahl was made possible within the framework of the research project Vulnerable Cities: Conflict Prevention in Urban Planning, Urban Regeneration and Urban Governance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research of Susanne Buckley-Zistel was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) [grant number 01UG2203D]. The research of Annika Björkdahl was supported by FORMAS (Swedish Research Council) [grant number FR-2016/0004].

Notes on contributors

Annika Björkdahl

Annika Björkdahl is Professor of Political Science and her research includes spatializing peace and conflict studies, gender studies and peacebuilding.

Susanne Buckley-Zistel

Susanne Buckley-Zistel is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies where she mainly focuses on memory and transitional justice, feminist and spatial perspectives, and peacebuilding.

Notes

1 The Social Conflict Analysis Database (SCAD n.d.) includes protests, riots, strikes, inter-communal conflict, government violence against civilians, and other forms of social conflict not systematically tracked in other conflict datasets. SCAD currently includes information on social conflicts from 1990 to 2017, covering all of Africa and now also Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.