Salutogenesis Beyond Health: Intergroup Relations and Conflict Studies

In this chapter, the authors ask how to broaden the salutogenic paradigm’s scope into an interdisciplinary framework and include other social concepts in its research. As one example of such interdisciplinary research, the authors review some new studies in conflict areas investigating intergroup relations. By relating to such areas of research, they try to address not only the “classic” question – who copes successfully and stays healthy – but also other salutogenic questions such as “who expresses more openness to the other?”

Social-Ecological Peace – A framework to analyze the transition from violence to peace in post-conflict areas, applied to Aceh, Indonesia

While the analysis of peace often stops with "negative peace" in conflict studies (Shields 2017), critical structural analyses of a transition towards peace risk to analytically emphasize how wartime structures extend into post-conflict times (see e.g. Lee 2020). In this article, by engaging with the two fields of conflict studies and political ecology, a framework is developed that allows a critical analysis of resilient structures and discourses from times of conflict, as well as of possible leverage points that could support a transition towards what is here conceptualized as "social ecological peace". The framework hence helps to understand in how far dimensions of prior violence have transformed into peace, and if certain dimensions of violence have continued, even though they manifest themselves in a different way. The framework builds on Galtung’s conceptualization of violence and peace, but realigns "cultural violence" with Pierre Bourdieu's "symbolic violence". Additionally, for extending the framework with an ecological dimension and historical dimension, the notion of 'slow violence' by Rob Nixon is introduced. Applying the framework to Aceh, Indonesia, shows how cultural peace allows individuals to narrate and act out of a new identity, and in this way, enables them to put into effect structures of a new era of positivesocial-ecological peace. At the same time, discourses that are inherited from wartime and transform into peace time structures risk to carry violence in them. It becomes important to lay open the structural effects of the very discourses that have supported Aceh’s autonomy, so that they may not further extend structural violence into peace times. This is likely to remain a challenge in a context that is described as still negotiating and struggling to enhance its autonomy (Setyowati 2020a).

A review of patterns and geographical distribution of human-wildlife conflicts in Indonesia

The unprecedented growth of human-dominated landscapes has led to population decline and the extinction of many animal species. A major paradigm shift that perceived wildlife as problem animals into threatened species that need protection triggered human-wildlife conflict studies. Although human-wildlife conflict incidences can be found globally, they have unique characteristics in each region of the world. However, little is known about the characteristics of human-wildlife conflicts in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia. There is a need for a comprehensive insight into human-wildlife conflict studies in Indonesia to understand past advancements and propose future priorities. This study examined the literature that provides the overall view of the human-wildlife conflict patterns in the country. The results showed that there was a comparatively small number of studies because this field was a relatively new subject in Indonesia. Furthermore, there were big gaps regarding animal species and the geographic distribution of study sites. A total of 35 species belonging to eight taxonomic groups experienced conflicts with humans. However, the studies heavily focused on three groups of animals and certain areas of the country. The predominant conflict sites were secondary forest, agroforestry, and farmlands. The conflicts in these areas unveiled the significance of local beliefs and social norms for formulating mitigation strategies.

Bridging the gap between cyberwar and cyberpeace

The conceptual debate around the term cyber warfare has dominated the cybersecurity discipline over the last two decades. Much less attention has been given during this period to an equally important question: what constitutes cyber peace? This article draws on the literatures in peace and conflict studies and on desecuritization in critical security studies, to suggest how we might begin to rearticulate the cybersecurity narrative and shift the debate away from securitization and cyberwar to a more academically grounded focus on desecuritization and cyber peace. It is argued that such a move away from a vicious circle where states frame cybersecurity predominantly within a national security narrative and where they seek to perpetually prepare for cyberwar, to a virtual cycle of positive cyber peace, is not only a desirable, but a necessary outcome going forward. We assert that this is particularly important if we are to avoid (continuing) to construct the very vulnerabilities and insecurities that lead to the prioritization of offence and destruction in cyberspace, rather than transformative, human-centred development in information and communications technology innovation.

Temporality and contextualisation in Peace and Conflict Studies: The forgotten value of war memoirs and personal diaries

This article contributes to debates on appropriate levels of analysis, temporality, and the utility of fieldwork in relation to Peace and Conflict Studies (PCS), and International Relations more generally. It observes a recentism or privileging of the recent past in our studies and a consequent overlooking of the longer term. As a corrective, the article investigates the extent to which wartime memoirs and personal diaries (specifically from World War I and World War II) can help inform the study of contemporary peace and conflict. In essence, the article is a reflection on the epistemologies and methodologies employed by PCS and an investigation of the need for greater contextualisation.

What is an emancipatory peace?

There has been frequent reference to the concept of an emancipatory peace in the critical academic literature on peace and conflict studies in IR, much of it rather naive. It has developed an ecosystem of its own within debates on peace without drawing on wider disciplinary debates. Terms such as ‘emancipation’ and its relative, ‘social justice’ are widely used in critical theoretical literature and were common parlance in previous ideological eras. It was clear what such terms meant in the context of feudalism, slavery, imperialism, discrimination, a class system, nuclear weapons and racism over the previous two centuries. Now it is less clear in the context of changing peace praxis.

Beyond Agency as Good: Complicity and Displacement after the Siege of Sarajevo

Forced migration scholars have increasingly documented the agency of displaced persons. However, this scholarship has attended primarily to the positive or constructive dimensions of agency, documenting migrants’ capacities for resilience, resistance, and problem-solving. In this paper, I argue that forced migration scholarship should extend to recognize the darker dimensions of agency, such as complicity in acts of violence. Drawing on emerging work on ‘complex victimhood’ in conflict studies scholarship, which grapples with the difficult simultaneity of victimhood and complicity, I begin to articulate a figure of the ‘complex migrant’. As a case study, I draw on fieldwork with Bosnian Serb women who were part of the 1996 displacement of Serbs from Sarajevo, when the divided city was re-unified following nearly four years of siege by Bosnian Serb forces. Against the figure of the ideal refugee/victim, I outline the numerous deviations that made Serbs illegible as refugees. I also demonstrate how my interlocutors asserted the qualities of the ideal victim in their narratives to make their losses legible. I argue that a complex victimhood framework is useful for analysing other understudied retributive displacements. I also suggest that it can work to gradually disempower discourses that blame migrants when they fail to live up to the ideal of the good victim.

Wars in Review: Subaltern Methodologies in Conflict Studies

This essay reviews four disparate studies on war narratives: ‘Right to Mourn’ by Suhi Choi (2019), ‘Fly Until You Die’ by Chia Youyee Vang (2019), ‘Soldiers in Revolt’ by Maggie Dwyer (2018), ‘Breaking the Binaries in Security Studies’ by Ayelet Harel-Shalev and Shir Daphna-Tekoah (2019). The studies take a ‘view-from-below’ approach and build new theoretical frameworks that not only expose ‘the price of war’, but also investigate how ‘subaltern subjects’ subjects view their place and participation in the conflict and resist over-arching homogenous interpretations. The studies respectively focus on post-war remembrance in South Korea, oral histories of Hmong pilots, mutinying in West African states, and the experiences of female combatants in the Israeli Defence Forces. Although dissimilar in terms of geographic spaces, actors and even methodology, the authors all commonly challenge established binaries within conflict studies that assume a separation of the ‘military’ and the ‘civilian’, the prevalence of power-hierarchies within armed forces, and the supposed passiveness of powerless actors in conflict. This essay reviews these books as not individual publications that contribute to the literature of their own disciplines, but as interactive theoretical frameworks that not only dispute prevailing theories of war but also present new understandings on how these narratives interrelate.

The Everyday, Circuitry, and Scalability

This chapter unpacks two concepts that lie at the heart of the book: the everyday and circuitry. In order to understand everyday peace, it seems sensible to unpack the notion of the everyday and illustrate why the hyperlocal level is relevant to how peace is embodied and enacted. The chapter defines ‘everyday peace’ and discusses the ‘local turn’ in peace and conflict studies before going on to discuss how we might see the local level in comparison with other scales such as the national, the international, the transnational, and all levels in between. It is here that the chapter uses the notion of biological and electronic circuits as a way of explaining the multi-scalar nature of peace and conflict and the messy connectivity between them. In its final substantive part, the chapter considers how everyday peace might be scaled up and thus become more significant than local-level actions and stances. Important here is the notion of scaling out, or the horizontal spread of civility. This leads us to think about how there can be multi-speed and multilevel peace.