The Urbanity of Peacebuilding: Urban Environments as Objects and Sites of Peacebuilding Knowledge Production

ABSTRACT

This article diagnoses a representational bias in current scholarship on the materiality and spatiality of urban peacebuilding. The bias reduces peacebuilding knowledge production to situated processes that unfold in urban environments but that are not constituted by them. To counter this, the article draws on ‘more-than-representational’ thinking to develop a research agenda that reframes the study of urban peacebuilding epistemics. The agenda reconceptualises post-/conflict urban environments as ‘governance objects’ that need to be made known and made ‘governable’. Further, the agenda approaches the peacebuilding production of such objects as a process in itself situated in and (co-)constituted by urban environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemics
• knowledge production
• materiality
• spatiality
• urban peacebuilding

Acknowledgements

My warmest thanks to Catherine Goetze and to the other contributors to this special section, as well as to the editors of JISB and the anonymous reviewers for helpful and constructive comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributor

Anna Danielsson is an Assistant Professor in War Studies at the Swedish Defence University. She was previously a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Government, Uppsala University. Her research is situated at the nexus of (critical) war studies, social theory, peace and conflict studies, and the history and sociology of knowledge.

Notes

1 For discussions and illustrations of these varied positions, see for example Bennett (2010), Coole and Frost (2010), Coole (2013), Fox and Alldred (2017).

2 My use of the concept of site simplifies what is in Schatzki’s work a more nuanced argument. It is thus important to be clear on the limits of the discussion here. My use of the concept of site is merely to lay the conceptual groundwork of an analysis of urban environments as multiple peacebuilding sites, more or less close in spatial and geographical terms, in and through which peacebuilding knowledges emerge. Schatzki’s work, moreover, has the benefit of not relying on or reproducing a substantial distinction between social sites and nature, between the symbolic and the material as distinct realms or ‘worlds’ (Schatzki 2002, 181) (but possibly an analytic one).