Challenging the ‘Here’ and ‘There’ of Peace and Conflict Research: Migrants’ Encounters with Streams of Violence and Streams of Peace

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to challenge Global North spatial imaginations of war as ‘there’ and peace as ‘here’. It proposes this spatial rethinking against a background of migration being a defining feature of our time. Based on participant observation and an action research project, the article analyses embodied, emplaced encounters with violence and care that migrants experience in the Belgian capital Brussels. These encounters can be violent, but also productive of trust. The concepts of streams of violence and streams of peace are used to theorize these dynamics, thus reconfiguring understandings of where and when war and peace take place.

KEYWORDS:

• Embodiment
• emplacement
• care
• migrants
• peace
• Brussels

Introduction

For some time, claims have been made in the discipline of peace and conflict research that peace and war in times of globalization are increasingly spatially and temporally conflated. Yet peace and conflict researchers tend to fix their gaze on places and times formally defined as sites and periods of war. This article calls for a shift in attention and seeks to challenge Global North spatial imaginations of war as ‘there’ and peace as ‘here’. The article proposes this spatiotemporal rethinking against a background of migration being a defining feature of our time as armed conflicts in the Middle East and Africa have forced hundreds of thousands of people to risk journeying to Europe in search of peace. Recently, the war in Ukraine has forced yet more people to flee from violence.

A Western European city – Brussels – is the site for this investigation into continuations of violence generated by war and the peacebuilding practices that develop in response. The Belgian capital has become an important hub for migrants in transit between mostly African countries and the United Kingdom, thus providing an interesting example of the conflation of war and peace in time and space. The article is based on ethnographic research that combines several methods. Growing from my own engagement with volunteer work, the analysis leans on participatory observation as well as an action research project undertaken together with the migrants themselves. Through this combination of phenomenologically informed methodologies the analysis makes visible the embodied, emplaced encounters with violence and care that migrants experience in Brussels, and demonstrates that through the bodies of the undocumented migrants, war and its consequences are present in the everyday of the affluent city.

The conceptual lenses shift focus from states to bodies, agreeing with Väyrynen (2019, 2) that war and peace are socio-political institutions that begin and end with bodies. Migrant bodies are targeted for violence by formal actors such as the police as they are considered ‘out of place’ and subject to acts of violence in ‘in-between’ spaces. Further, the migrant body is marked by the original violent circumstance that they flee (see Scarry 1985). As the migrant body moves, so do memories of trauma – as well as concomitant quests for recognition and dignity. Peacebuilding practices develop along the way as immigrants devise strategies to counter violence experienced on the road, supported by residents’ practices of care.

The conceptualization of war and peace as mobile and corporeal does not mean disconnection from dimensions of space and place. On the contrary, war and peace, while not fixed in place, still take place somewhere and are spatially constructed (Björkdahl and Kappler 2017). In this study, I pin down my analysis to a specific place: the city. The increasing importance of urban hubs on migrant routes calls for an attendance to the specificities of the urban as a node where we can read mobile, corporeal war and peace. The article thus considers the spatial dynamics and practices in the city when tracing the transitional lifeworld of migrants in public spaces such as parks and railway stations. Further, corporeality is always relational and both violence and peace are relational (Väyrynen 2019). The article explores the urban as a space for embodied, emplaced encounters between migrants and others and shows how these encounters can be violent but also productive of trust and contribute to the (re)building of social worlds.

In this ethnographic endeavour I have practised a refocusing of peace research fieldwork that goes back to the early roots of the discipline, acknowledging that the field may not be ‘out there’ but ‘right here’ (Jutila, Pehkonen, and Väyrynen 2008, 636), as Brussels was my home at the time of this work. The methodological and theoretical inroads privilege intimacy and the everyday. While not seeking to divert attention from structural aspects of migration, the contribution of the study is to take the experiential perspective seriously. It sets out to make the lifeworld of the shifting migrant community of Brussels emerge, focusing on the experience and expertise of migrants from conflict-affected countries.

The study unfolds in three steps. I begin by further detailing a spatiotemporal re-conceptualization of war and peace, discussing how war and oppression produce continuities of violence and peace practices in space and time. I introduce the conceptual underpinnings for my embodied and emplaced reading, and I outline how the methodology developed. In the next step I turn to an analysis of experiences of migrants in Brussels. I first describe the ways, sites and times of violence experienced by the migrants and how this violence can be understood as a continuation of the original violent conflict. I then discuss how the migrants use their agency to counter violence, arguing that their strategies for security in the city are peace practices, supported by activities conducted by city residents. I conclude that the empirical exploration of embodied, emplaced encounters in a Western European city brings a dividend to peace and conflict research and enriches the default spaces of enquiry. In a world of increasing interconnectedness, the discipline has a moral imperative to understand and critically re-imagine spaces of war and peace.

Spatiotemporal mobilities of peace and conflict

Peace and conflict research has become increasingly cognizant to the fuzzy spatial and temporal lines between war and peace. Conceptualizations of war as contained in specific territories and certain periods are no longer particularly helpful. Notwithstanding these efforts the discipline is myopic in its disregard for the fact that wars produce migration and that large parts of populations that suffer war are, in fact, no longer present in the original war-riven states. Recently there have been attempts to think about these mobilities and their challenges to traditional approaches to peace, security and order in the world (Richmond and Mac Ginty 2019, 607). How do we understand the violence suffered by the hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants that make their way from conflict-affected societies in Africa and the Middle East to Europe? A key claim in this article is that through migrating bodies, war is in fact present beyond the borders of the conflict-affected states as violence morphs and travels with them. I do not claim that there is no difference between the terrors of armed conflict and the violence encountered by people migrating through the EU, for example. Rather, I want to point out that the violence that made a person leave home is not an isolated event, but rather a catalyst that sets off a chain of violent events for the migrating subject on the move, ‘producing a stream of violence across space’ (Dempsey 2020, 1). Such a stream across space also has a temporal dimension, as violence emerges as ‘a processual and unfolding moment, rather than as an “act” or “outcome”’ (Springer 2012, 306).

In concrete terms for migrants, this means that violence morphs into new forms, spaces and times as they are on the move. It plays out in everyday geographies that include both routinized performances and unforeseen eruptions of violence. As explored in critical migration studies, violence generated by the political idea that national sovereignty trumps any rights of individuals to mobility takes place in a number of sites: at borders, within states during the asylum process, and more randomly and scattered towards undocumented migrants on the move (e.g. Mountz 2011; Obradovic-Wochnik 2018; Vaughan-Williams and Pisani 2018). Dempsey (2020) seeks to connect these various sites and understand where and when such violence occurs in three interlinked spaces: in the state of origin, the transit states and the EU host state, and proposes a typology of violence in order to identify how violence is manifested in various ways along the migrant’s route, drawing together the rich evidence of a number of located studies of violence. Dempsey’s conceptualization of violence destabilizes Galtung’s (1969) classical dichotomy of structural violence on the one hand and direct violence on the other, and she argues that these types of violence in fact intertwine and morph. As I suggest and demonstrate empirically below, it is imperative that the discipline of peace and conflict research addresses this ‘unfolding moment’ of violence.

Further, I argue that the phenomenon of peace should be studied also across geographies. I lean on Richmond and Mac Ginty (2019, 616), who note that ‘[m]igration, formal or informal, is a route to peace and order in the absence of security and a viable state’ and suggest that migration may produce a ‘mobile peace’. This is a peace constructed through mobile and networked political agency that challenges the ontology of a spatially fixed world order of states and their subjects. In this understanding, migration is a movement with and towards peace. Individuals who flee wars and violence take decisions not to participate in violence, using their agency to seek out something else as they do not trust the type of peace offered by a system of peace operations and peacebuilding built on the idea that populations stay in one place (Richmond and Mac Ginty 2019, 613). Migration from violence is thus an agential act that directly challenges the ideas of the ‘sovereign state’s right to demand allegiance and claim the bodies and lives of young men’ (Richmond and Mac Ginty 2019, 617). The decision to leave a society riven by armed conflict and oppression is thus linked to peace. Similar arguments are found in critical migration studies that view movement as a deeply human practice (Anderson 2019), and understand the agency of migrants as potentially powerful and transformative, not only for the individual migrating subject but also for society and political change at large.

In addition, the mobile agency of migrants seeking peace is supported and expanded by individuals and organizations that protest the treatment of migrants and create spaces of support and solidarity in transit and host states, offering housing, food and help to navigate bureaucracies, or simply engaging in empathetic human encounters. These actions attempt to counteract effects of the original violence and conflict. Studies of social movements have detailed this work in empirical studies of, for example, ‘refugees welcome’ movements and instances of resistance to the European border regime (e.g. Raimondi 2019; Trimikliniotis, Parsanoglou, and Tsianos 2016; Tervonen and Anca Enache 2017). Kallius, Monterescu, and Rajaram (2015) argue that these ‘horizontal modes of solidarity’ can challenge dichotomies of vertical politics that juxtapose migrants against state interests. In this article these horizontal modes are read as practices of care. My understanding of the political significance of such practices is grounded in ethics of care as developed in feminist theory and its key argument that it is through ‘the practices of care that we fulfil our responsibilities to particular others’ (Robinson 2011, 4). Connections of interdependence and dependence form complex webs of ‘relations of responsibility’, stretching from the intimate everyday to the global (Robinson 2011, 5). I suggest that these practices of care, together with migrants’ own agential acts to flee violence and search for peace, can be conceptualized as streams of peace, complementing the concept of streams of violence as proposed by Dempsey (2020, 1).

Conceptualizing the embodied, emplaced encounter

Key for the above conceptual move is that violence and peace is carried in and by bodies. Armed conflict takes place not only on territorial sites resulting in material destructions and upheavals and so on, but on the site of the body. To approach continuations of peace and violence across space and make them visible, it thus makes sense to focus on the embodied experience. The conceptual point of departure takes its bearings from phenomenology and its insistence that embodied experiences are the prime site for subject formation. The body is the means through which we gain access to the world (Merleau-Ponty 2014; Van Manen 2014). ‘The body in pain’ is marked by violence (Scarry 1985; see also Das 2007) and with this comes that the wound of war is mobile. Understanding the body as carrier of pain and trauma prompts theories of war and peace that rescale to the intimate spheres of the everyday, in order to reveal the violence that travels with the moving bodies.

Importantly, a corporeal reading puts an emphasis on encounters, as the embodied dimension of our lived experience is always relational (Van Manen 2014; Väyrynen 2019). Many embodied encounters that migrants experience are violent, but at the same time migrants are also drawn into relations built on trust and solidarity, that may be more or less formalized in networks and organizations, or evolve through private and more fleeting meetings. Encounters between migrants and residents may generate acts of kindness, of acknowledgement and of resistance and, as suggested above, such encounters can be conceptualized as a form of peacebuilding, in concert with Väyrynen’s definition of ‘[p]eacebuilding and hence peace [as] an event that comes into being in mundane and corporeal encounters’ (2019, 1). The ontological relationality of an ethics of care, as touched upon above, is here key.

Further, embodied encounters always take place somewhere, which means that spaces of violence and/or care are produced through social interactions. From such a Lefebvrian understanding of space (Lefebvre 1996), it follows that ‘the organization of space is significant for the structure and function of peace as well as war’ (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel 2016, 3; Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel 2022). I am thus interested in encounters that are both embodied and emplaced (cf. Brigg and George 2020; Mannergren Selimovic 2019; Mannergren Selimovic and Strömbom 2015). The concept of ‘the embodied, emplaced encounter’ is in this article used in order to access and make visible spatial and corporeal dimensions of experience.

The urban is explored as an important space for such embodied, emplaced encounters between lives lived in peace and lives lived in violence. As a growing body of literature explores, the urban is a site for warfare – and fear of warfare – by distant enemies through, for example, acts of terrorism (Grahams 2004). The focus here is different, as I am interested in the war as the mobile wound carried by migrants into the cityspace. European cities have become nodes for migrants as places to meet others, to stay for a while ‘under the radar’, hoping to reach their destination. Encounters with violence and care take place in urban spaces often characterized by their intransient and unstable nature. The urban is by definition a space in which bodies come together and experience each other relationally; it is made up by people and proximate practices as the city is heterogenous, and it comes into being through friction, creativity, closeness and density (Bollens 2001; Gusic 2019; Gusic 2022; Pullan and Baillie 2013). This fleeting space is constructed through the movement of bodies, some are residents, others are visitors of various kinds. Further, urban spaces are also places, in the sense that ‘place’ is a material form, a physical site that is shaped by and shapes people’s practices. (Therborn 2006, 512). The materiality of the urbanscape comes with voids in the built environment that are defined by unclear ownership or maybe situated in inaccessible areas, such as grounds under a viaduct, a dusty park in close proximity to a railway station, or structures such as culverts or abandoned buildings. They are ‘in-between spaces’ that hold a special importance to those in liminal states of being, like undocumented migrants. Hence material aspects of space shape the production of violence and care in the city.

Drawing these insights together, it seems possible and even necessary for peace and conflict research to de-territorialize understandings of where and how peace and conflict take place. The next step in this article is to illustrate how war and peace mobilities are lived ‘on the ground’ as I turn to the empirical investigation.

Situating migrant lives in Brussels

Over the last few years, tens of thousands of undocumented migrants have passed through Brussels. A smaller number end up staying and seeking asylum, but the overwhelming majority use the Belgian capital as a transit space on their journey towards the UK, where they perceive they have the greatest chance to find work and even get asylum. The migrant community of Brussels is thus transient because its members are constantly shifting and on the move. At the same time, it is permanent as the community has over the last five years become a tangible presence in the Northern Quarter of the city. Most of the migrants are young men, come from African countries and have arrived to Europe along the so-called central Mediterranean route (UNHCR 2017), usually crossing the sea in small boats from Libya to southern Italy, and then making their way northwards through Italy and France. The people cited here are from the deeply conflict-affected countries of Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia.

As a response to the increasing number of undocumented migrants in the city, the Citizens’ Platform in Aid of Refugees (Plateforme Citoyenne de Soutien aux Réfugiés) was created in September 2015 and has since then developed on a voluntary basis an infrastructure to support the migrants. It includes a centre for medical, legal and material support, a shelter as well as a network of several hundred families and individuals that offer migrants a bed for shorter or longer times in their homes. This network became an important starting point for the gathering of empirical material for this study, as further explicated below.

Embodied and spatial methodologies

The methodological framework for this study consists of several strands of ethnographic research, united by a phenomenological perspective on the embodied dimensions of lived experience (Van Manen 2014). The framework combines participant observation and action research including three focus groups as well as six individual interviews, as discussed in detail below. Importantly, empirical observations have been gathered over an extended time period and are informed by my own embodied, spatial and relational experiences and observations in the world of undocumented migrants and support agents during my work as a volunteer at the help centre that I did for a few hours a week for about six months in 2018–19. While this began as an undertaking separate from my professional work, after a while I began to see connections to my work in peace and conflict research. I thus began to make notes as a form of diary about the fragments of life stories that I was given access to as well as about my observations and feelings regarding volunteer work. The work with the diary forms an important knowledge pool for this study.¹ As a volunteer I mostly did two jobs. One was hectic: sorting and handing out donated clothes at the help centre where big queues formed every day. This work made me privy to encounters between migrants and residents engaged in acts of care. The second task was slow: accompanying individuals to clinics in different parts of the city that offered specialized medical help on a voluntary basis. Together with one or sometimes two migrants I walked and took the metro, often spending quite some time in waiting rooms. Through this work I spatially experienced the city with the persons I accompanied, becoming familiar with which areas they perceived as dangerous or relatively safe. The palimpsest of the city in its many experiential layers of danger and safety emerged, as their experiences were very different to how I as a resident perceived the city. I began to see common themes in the stories they shared during these times – they said something important about streams of violence, embodied trauma, spatial expertise and ongoing encounters with violence and care.

After some six months of regularly helping out at the centre, I heard about plans for an action research project initiated by the urban research hub Metrolab,² and taking the opportunity to explore in a more structured manner the themes that emerged in my diary, I joined the loose constellation of scholars and activists with a background in sociology, urban planning and art named ARCH (Action Research Collective for Hospitality). The collective gathered information from the perspective of the migrants, helped volunteers develop better access to support and took part in the ongoing critical discussion regarding the development of the Northern Quarter. The project followed the ethics and normative goals of action research, meaning that the research focus was developed together with participants with the overarching aim of positive transformation (ARCH 2019). It sought to always access the embodied, emplaced experience of the migrants, with their positionality as a point of departure. Certainly, the relationship between migrants and researchers as well as between researchers and volunteers hold various dimensions of asymmetries of power. However, the borders between positionalities in this research process were not always clear-cut, as some migrants who decided to seek asylum in Belgium also work as volunteers, and some researchers have migrant backgrounds themselves as well as volunteer experience, meaning that the ARCH endeavour was defined by numerous intersectional positionalities (see Tervonen and Anca Enache 2017).

Three focus groups as well as six individual, longer interviews were conducted during May and June 2019. All the direct quotes in this text come from these occasions and were gathered by me.³ About 40 people participated in the focus groups, most of them young men.⁴ Some had only arrived in Europe a couple of weeks earlier, others had been in the EU for years, living lives ‘under the radar’ in Italy or Greece. Mapping of social space was another key method that was developed by some members of the group, as further explicated in Bosmans, Daher, and d’Auria (2020). The mapping was partly conducted during the focus groups, as participants drew geographical maps of their social worlds. This practice allowed them to construct and direct the research and provided a deeper understanding of the social uses of space as ‘mapping allows researchers to gain an understanding of spatial agency and resistance’ (Forde 2019, 140).

The combination of methods generated a rich material from which the empirical illustrations below have been selected.⁵ The next section discusses how the migrants’ experiences of violence play out; the ways, sites and times of violence. It is followed by a section that brings forth encounters with care.

Encounters with streams of violence

Following patterns in other European cities, many migrants arrive by train in Brussels and cluster around the Gare du Nord railway station in the Northern Quarter of the city. The mode of arrival thus ‘shap[ed] the geographies of refugee presence in cities’ (Obradovic-Wochnik 2018, 69). The Northern Quarter has for many decades been a multicultural area of the city. Parts of the old quarters were demolished in the 1960s to make way for high-rise business buildings which now rub against run-down housing estates and winding streets dominated by small shops and food bars as well as sex shops. Brussels is a dense city, so the fairy-tale tourist areas of expensive chocolatiers and the shimmering Grand Place, as well as the European institutions’ quarters, are within easy walking distance. But these spaces are mostly unknown to the migrants. The geography of the city for the migrants emerges as a mesh of more or less dangerous spaces. In response to a question about dangerous spaces, a focus group participant asked for a piece of paper and drew a triangle on it. The points of the triangle were three places considered to be relatively safe: the help centre ‘Hub Humanitaire’ (located at the Gare du Nord the time of the research); Parc Maximilien, a couple of blocks away from the station where many migrants meet, hang out, play football and receive food hand-outs, and where many also sleep during the warmer months; and the shelter Porte D’Ulysses, a derelict office building some kilometres into the suburbs where a couple of hundred beds and meals are provided every night through the volunteer network. In between these points, violence takes place.

The danger mainly comes from the police. The migrants’ testimonies of violence showed an ongoing harassment by the police, mostly intended to keep them on the move by intimidating them. The railway station Gare du Nord was a particularly violent site. Many sleep in the underground disused waiting halls and culverts, where foam mattresses, old blankets and pieces of cardboard form long rows. Most participants in focus groups and interviews bore witness to police waking them, harassing them and beating them, with the intention to make them move. The most common types of violence included being kicked when sleeping, pushing and verbal abuse. This violence is a type of migration policy that reaches deep into cities as states employ inner border practices in order to deter or intimidate migrants and can be understood as ‘micro-level bordering practices’ (Jagetic Andersen, Klatt, and Sandberg 2012). The migrants are perceived as bodies out of place and the task of the police is to push them out of visibility. However, they return to the station as they have nowhere else to go and the violence will recur in an ongoing cycle: ‘They tell us to move, but there is no place we can move to.’ Migrants are continuously searching for safer spaces and resist the bordering practices through laying claim on the usually overlooked and unrecognized in-between micro-spaces: the park, culverts, spaces under viaducts that do not have a designated function in the cityscape. The lines between danger and security can be very fine as adjacent spaces can be safe or dangerous, separated by invisible borders that are vital to grasp and navigate for those living migrant lives. Hence, going beyond the triangle and entering into other parts of the city comes with risks. A couple of the migrants said that they had ventured beyond the defined nodes of security, in search for literature in a public library, to admire Grand Place, or just to walk down the road like ‘everyone else’, but most said they had not moved beyond the triangle.

While the police are present as a danger in the migrant lifeworld, migrants also seemingly paradoxically suffer from a lack of policing in their lives, as they are subject to crimes, and in this sense they are doubly vulnerable (see Obradovic-Wochnik 2018). The in-between spaces that they claim are also spaces for different types of violent encounters. This largely undocumented violence was pointed out as the most consistent threat apart from the police violence, and they were afraid of ‘drug-dealers, drunk people and thieves’. Several had been beaten up, cut by knives and had things stolen from them, the culprits being both migrants and others. There were ‘bad people’ among the migrants that threatened others, and women migrants said that some of the men protected them, and some abused them. To lose a mobile phone was the worst thing that could happen – unfortunately not an uncommon event. Several also reported that clothes, shoes and sleeping bags had been stolen from them. In addition to physical threats and violence, ordinary passers-by would occasionally direct racist, verbal slurs against them. Migrants’ lives are thus spatially defined by shifting micro-borders of security and danger in the city, with some islands of more stable, relative safety.

There is also a temporal dimension to the production of security and danger. The transient existence of migrant lives follows its own rhythm but is also lived in tandem with the rhythm of the rest of the city – the quiet of the night, the early morning buzz of commuters in the station. It is a temporal rhythm that both contains a strange predictability in that the state of liminality is enduring – seemingly without end – yet at the same time it is a rhythm that is constantly shifting, moving from sudden outbursts of violence and activity into indeterminate waiting and queuing: queuing to get help at the help centre, queueing at food handouts. ‘We never know which time of day is dangerous or safe. The police have a different schedule that keeps changing.’ Food and sleep are grabbed whenever possible, although the lack of schedule is a challenge. ‘We never sleep properly, just a couple of hours, then change. We keep watch and share.’ ‘We try to sleep in a group, and never go fully to rest.’

There is another circular rhythm to their lives that has to do with the fact that Brussels is a temporary stop on the journey from their conflict-riven countries towards the UK. They venture time and time again from the transit space in recurring loops. Dangers occur when they get on trains (without tickets) to go to Calais, or try to sneak into trucks bound for the UK. ‘It’s a full-time job! We call it “trying”. And so we do trying once a week.’ ‘Trying’ includes preparing, getting the right clothes, finding information about trucks that are on their way to the UK that they may hide in, locating the trucks, waiting, hiding. Often, they do not get further than Calais, where they may be discovered, thrown out, chased by police. They then return and wait for the next opportunity to ‘try’ again. Several of the people I accompanied to health clinics that accepted undocumented migrants had wounds from this dangerous ‘work’: one had an arm broken by police, one had crushed ribs from hiding and being squeezed in a truck. One had an infected wound from barbed wire.

As I noted in my diary, the ongoing conversations I was able to have with migrants when doing volunteer work became a space for partaking of partial life narratives that differed from the more hands-on information provided in the action research focus groups. The more intimate private expressions of fear and grief unravelled in the informal conversations and I was often struck by how they all narrated their bodily wounds as an outcome of a spatial and temporal stream of violence. A quote from one of the focus groups can illustrate this general theme: ‘[I]t is the same violence as in Somalia. Then I was scared the military would take me, now I am scared of the police.’ They carried memories of enforced conscription, displacement, guerrilla attacks, losing family, missing family, hunger, incarceration, torture. These traumas informed their everyday lives as they were always thinking about family at home, and the micro insecurities of their existence in Brussels were informed by the macro level of (in)security that catapulted the migrants into the precarious migrant situation to begin with. They sought transformation but the closed doors of Europe kept them in a limbo which also made it hard to move temporally from the traumatic past: ‘We cannot work, cannot evolve, we have no life. The years pass by and nothing changes.’

Encounters with streams of peace

From the above we can see that migrants experience constant insecurity in the present, living in transient states, working hard to find ways of (re)making a life, surviving with no money, little sleep and random and shifting circumstances. Navigating through these risks and dangers they weave a fragile fabric of nodes of security built upon interactions with others. Human networks are the most important form of protection: ‘The police cannot take us if we are all together and stay together. But one alone in a café the police can just take us.’ ‘I came one week ago, I arrived at the station, I didn’t know anything, I saw some people that looked Eritrean or Ethiopian and they say come, come.’ Safety also has a material dimension. Having no money, no home, the few things they do possess take on a huge meaning. The clothes they were able to get through the help centre were not only to keep warm, but important tools to succeed in their journey. In the beginning I was surprised that despite cold winter rains many discarded heavy, warm boots and instead competed to get hold of light sneakers – which made more sense to them as they were more useful when running to escape arrest. Having a sleeping bag not only meant being able to keep warm but also to have a space to hide valuables such as shoes and phone while sleeping: ‘It is safer if you can zip your sleeping bag to guard your things … . I feel safer when I have a sleeping bag. I can put my things inside and guard them.’ Most important in order to keep safe was the mobile phone, and secondly, access to Wi-Fi. Without a phone and Wi-Fi they cannot communicate with others in their situation, build networks and find out information about routes to take on their perilous journeys (see Dempsey 2020). ‘What we need most is information. All we know comes from social media … It is very important to find places to charge our phones. …  Information is the most valuable we have.’ To be able to keep in touch with family and loved ones at home instilled a sense of purpose and calm, which could be vital for survival.

Corporeal experiences were thus understood as expressions of specific knowledge and expertise and migrants developed numerous strategies for managing insecurities and strengthening their ‘peace mobility’. Nevertheless, notwithstanding their expertise, migrants’ agency is ‘fractured’ in that their move to leave and set out on the migrant journey is usually undertaken as a last resort; they flee from something (Vaughan-Williams and Pisani 2018) and one should not overestimate their agential power. Their fractured agency can however be strengthened in encounters with people willing to support them along the route. In fact, many inhabitants of Brussels are willing to help ameliorate their precarious situation. As migrants started to arrive in large numbers in 2015–16, the Parc Maximilien close to the railway station Gare du Nord became a place where makeshift tents and food distribution were set up (Depraetere and Oosterlynck 2017). From the beginning these efforts happened on an ad hoc basis, but as time went on various help initiatives developed in a more and more organized way. In 2019, at the time of the action research project, there was a network of hospitality organizations in place that are now partly supported by Brussels city, thus having developed into semi-permanent structures including the shelter and the help centre mentioned above (Plateforme Citoyenne 2020). The basic protection of migrants’ human rights has thus been allocated to civil society – yet another example of an ‘NGOization’ of basic welfare provisions in Western Europe (Trehan 2009; Tervonen and Anca Enache 2017).

Parc Maximilien retains its status as a transient urban space for support and for socializing, produced through shifting encounters between migrants and activists and defined by temporariness and precarity (see Nordling et al. 2017, 190). The urban may be understood as a prerequisite for such supportive practices. In an article on the French ‘Sans Papiers’ (paperless) movement, McNevin argues that it is a struggle that was born out of the spaces of the city – a struggle ‘in, of and for the city’ (cited in Obradovic-Wochnik 2018). A place like Parc Maximilien, in the general discourse perceived as an unsafe and scary place, is actually identified by the migrants themselves as the ‘safest place in Brussels, even in all of Belgium’. There is a complex interaction between the formal control of the urban space and the agential resistance of the migrants against this control, which creates some degree of safety, albeit shifting and transient.

By hanging out together in the ‘Park’, playing games, chatting, doing ordinary things, a sense of well-being is created, if only for fleeting moments of time. It is also a space for intimate, caring encounters between migrants and people supporting them. The ARCH collective explored and discussed several such encounters, for example the intimacy developing through doing gymnastics in the park together or getting haircuts from one of the migrants who set up a mobile ‘barber shop’ in the park. It is important to stress that these encounters and engagements took place across vast power asymmetries, and that they did little to change the overarching exclusions of EU border politics, as sharply expressed by one focus group participant: ‘We don’t care about football, about playing games. You think that will make us happy? No, that is nothing. We want freedom, we want a job.’ Most participants in the focus groups argued that such activities still provided essential restorative spaces and moments and generated shifts from violence and distrust to unexpected friendships and bonds, notwithstanding asymmetries in material and physical security. From a volunteer’s perspective, one of the members of the collective ARCH describes the process of building bonds of care:

During summer 2018 Mohamed was sleeping outside next to the building where I live. He was sheltered from the rain, under a slope. One afternoon, he sat there with a big smile on his face when we talked for the first time … A few days later, when I came by with my bicycle again Mohamed was sitting at the same spot. We had a second chat, ‘I am ok, thank you’. I asked him if he wanted to have a shower or if he needed some food. He said that he would like to have a shower. A few days later we had dinner together … A few days later he washed his clothes. We became friends. Three months after we met for the first time, he wrote me saying ‘I am in the UK’. I was glad he made it, his dream came true.

This narrative of an embodied, emplaced encounter provides a lens of intimacy regarding an act of care in all its simplicity, seeing to basic needs and communication. In the everyday practices of sharing a meal, washing clothes, chatting, a social world opens up that has a transformative effect on both parties. These encounters have to do with respect and restoration of dignity that at least for the moment replaces fear and suspicion, as lives become entangled with other lives in the intimate everyday (see Al-Mohammad and Pelusi 2012, 4). In this way, the encounter recounted above and others similar to this one also reconfigured spatial experiences of the city. The migrants were able to experience the city with less fear, the residents became aware of invisible but violent micro-borders, and in-between spaces that were perceived as threatening became at least temporarily productive of care and friendship.

Given the migrants’ daily experience of violence, being ‘bodies out of place’ in Brussels just as they were when fleeing violence in the first place, one may then suggest that such encounters with others are productive of peace, understanding with Väyrynen (2019, 1) that peace is produced through corporeal encounters in the mundane. The above observations suggest that emplaced, embodied encounters can, however fleetingly, contribute to making possible the ‘deeply human practice’ of migration. Mohamed was able to continue to exercise his agential mobility and in the end reach his goal. The network of more or less organized strategies to support migrants, providing shelter, food and medical help as well as the more subtle but still transformative relational encounters, are direct responses to streams of violence flowing from the original violence. Together with the migrants’ agency to move from the violent conflict, these acts of care form streams of peace.

Dividends for peace and conflict research? Concluding reflections

In this article I have analysed embodied, emplaced encounters with violence and care experienced by migrants in the city of Brussels, asking whether they can fruitfully be read as manifestations of war and peace. I have argued that violence against migrants in societies not at war is a morphed manifestation of the violence in the conflict-affected home context of the migrants. The wound is mobile, carried in and by bodies, and migrants themselves understand the violence suffered in Brussels to be part of a ‘stream of violence’ that they narratively construct as beginning in their place of origin, unfolding through different emplaced experiences, one as a consequence of the other, in a chain of spatiotemporal moments.

The article has further made visible how lives lived in peace and in violence take place side by side, bringing forth the unequal production and distribution of violence and peace in the Western European city. There are micro-borders between security and violence that crisscross the everyday lives of migrants, often, curiously, at the same time both in and out of sight for other inhabitants of the city. The transient existence of migrants shaped by a constant navigating between fear and trust is little known by those whose lives in the city are defined by permanence, routines and predictability. What is productive of violence and insecurity for undocumented migrants – police presence and surveillance, for example – may create a sense of security for residents (see Vaughan-Williams and Stevens 2016). Likewise, liminal spaces – culverts and parks at night-time that may seem unsafe for residents – have been claimed by migrants as spaces for care.

The lifeworld of migrants is thus defined by fractured agency and is always under threat. Nevertheless, migrants have developed expertise in countering this violence and increasing their own security, through various strategies as detailed above. I have discussed how through interactions with residents they build networks of care and support that strengthen their ‘peace mobility’. I have also pointed to the networks of care that have developed more or less informally in the city, which in fact are forms of resistance against internal border politics. Volunteers’ engagement in supporting migrants materially and emotionally is a disruption of the present violent order and possibly a step towards transformation to a more peaceful order. The city here emerges as a space that opens up for such encounters and networks that function beyond formal structures and in fact benefit from the in-between spaces of the city (see Bădescu 2022). One may add that while the city is important to study as productive of both violence and care, there are other spaces that likewise deserve close inspection. Many migrant routes go through rural landscapes – for example, relatively isolated communities in mountain passes – and it would be interesting to also study this space.

Theoretically, the proposed shift in how we spatially and temporally imagine war and peace has been possible through a corporeal reading, focusing on embodied, emplaced encounters. Humans are embedded in relations of responsibility that weave a social fabric and the corporeal perspective makes us see both the intricate knots in the social fabric produced by constructive and relational encounters as well as the violent tears produced by destructive and brutal encounters. I have argued that the ordinary agency employed by migrants and residents are expressions of a relational ethics of care practised in the intimate everyday. The emplaced, embodied encounter may thus potentially heal the mobile wound. It holds meaning beyond the fleeting moment, however incomplete and brief it may be. With inspiration from Dempsey’s conceptualization of streams of violence, I suggest that the relational strategies and encounters illuminated in this article produce streams of peace, originating from the moment the migrant uses their agency to move from violence towards peace.

By focusing on the everyday and informal spaces and practices, the article has not only engaged in a re-spatializing of peace and conflict research, but also contributed to a re-scaling. Diverging from many other studies of migration, it has neither mapped structural constraints in urban planning, nor unpacked the politics of migration in Belgium, nor studied migrant routes, nor discussed EU migration policy. What it has tried to do is contribute with a different but crucial perspective; departing from the subjectivities of the migrants themselves and their experience of embodied, emplaced encounters, it has sought to demonstrate how mobilities of war and peace play out in practice. This work has illuminated the benefits of close and detailed ethnographic analysis that is made ethically possible through the principles of action research and underpinned by practices of knowledge-sharing and trust-building.

The corporeal perspective on peace, war and migration developed in the article thus contributes to the literature on the everyday and peacebuilding that over the last decade or so has provided a powerful critique on how war and peace is experienced and practised. As peace and conflict researchers we may want to think further on how such micro-perspectives on mobilities of war and peace relate to failures of state-bound peacebuilding. The migrants in focus for this article all come from conflict-affected societies where peacebuilding activities and interventions have in various degrees failed. Richmond and Mac Ginty (2019, 618) argue that ‘governance for peace, development, security and rights, needs to move with their subjects rather than constrain them’. The insights of this article regarding streams of violence and streams of peace have been generated through closely ‘moving with the subjects’. The normative imperative of critical peace research prompts the discipline to continue this work and trace and analyse the production of violence and peace beyond war-affected states.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by FORMAS: [Grant Number FR-2016/0004].

Notes on contributors

Johanna Mannergren Selimovic

Johanna Mannergren Selimovic is Associate Professor in Peace and Development Research at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden, with an interest in everyday peace, memory politics, and transitional justice.

Notes

1 The material in the diary notes is completely anonymized. None of the direct quotes in this text come from these informal conversations and the material is foremost used as a documentation of my own phenomenological experiences as a volunteer and my growing insights into the living conditions of the migrant community.

2 www.metrolab.be

3 The quotes have been published in the 2019 ARCH volume Whose Future is Here? Searching for Hospitality in Brussels Northern Quarter. The quotes in the text are not individually referenced in this article as they can all be found in the report. The participants chose to take part in these events in order to share their expertise and experiences as participants in the action research, and they have given their consent to be anonymously quoted.

4 The number is not exact since at the request of the participants one of the focus groups took place in Parc Maximilien, and during the course of the discussion some people left and others joined. Attempts to organize an all-women focus group failed. Several separate interviews were made with women and in my volunteer work I also spent a lot of time with women, providing information and insights that fed into my ‘field diary’. So, while most migrants in Brussels are male, women’s particular experiences have also been taken into consideration.

5 In addition to the volume, the outcome of the work included an exhibition and two days of seminars. Please read more at https://www.facebook.com/archbrussels/