Mobilities and peace

ABSTRACT

This article considers how an increasingly visible set of mobilities has implications for how peace and conflict are imagined and responded to. We are particularly interested in how these mobilities take form in everyday actions and shape new forms of peace and challenge existing ones. The article considers fixed categories associated with orthodox peace such as the international, borders and the state that are predicated on territorialism, centralized governance, and static citizenship. The article can be read as a critique of liberal peacebuilding and a contribution to current debates on migration, space and the everyday. Through conceptual scoping we develop the notion of mobile peace to characterize the fluid ways in which is being constructed through the mobilitiy of people and ideas.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobility
• peace
• peacebuilding
• migration
• sovereignty
• states system

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The authors are aware that the European ‘crisis’ needs to be placed in the contexts of other Middle Eastern and African states that are experiencing conditions that prompt displacement and migration, and the fact that many of these states host large numbers of displaced or marginalized people.

2. In the case of Germany it has been economic unilateralism.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the British Academy [IC160147], the Carnegie Corporation of New York through its funding of the Everyday Peace Indicators project, and the European Union through its funding of the EUNPACK H2020 project.

Notes on contributors

Oliver P. Richmond

Oliver Richmond is a Research Professor in IR, Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Manchester, UK and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. He is also International Professor, College of International Studies, Kyung Hee University, Korea, and Visiting Professor at the University of Tromso. His publications include Peace Formation and Post-Conflict Political Order (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Failed Statebuilding vs Peace Formation (Yale University Press, 2014). He is editor of the Palgrave book series Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, and co-editor of the journal Peacebuilding.

Roger Mac Ginty

Roger Mac Ginty is Professor at the School of Government and International Affairs, and the Durham Global Security Institute, Durham University. He is editor of the Palgrave Macmillan book series Rethinking Political Violence, and co-editor of the journal Peacebuilding.