Conceptually, this paper is about the becoming of states and how such states are a socially constructed spaces, imagined and performed by those who perceive themselves as belonging to that state. It ...asks through what imaginaries and performative practices does a state come into being? More specifically, the paper investigates how the state is imagined and performed in times of war and peace hoping to offer insights to the co-constitution of war or peace and the state. The analysis of the fledgling state and suspended state-making process makes visible the emplaced imaginary and performative quality of every state. It may also shed light on the constitutive relationship between war-making on one hand and state-making or state-breaking on the other, as it explores an embryotic process of crafting a state in the midst of war. Empirically, this paper investigates the state-making process of Republika Srpska (RS) through the conceptual lens of state becoming. Here RS figures both as an empirical state-making process, and as an example of an imagined and performed state to be conceptually explored. In particular it reads the irredentism of RS to justify its territorial claims on the basis of real or imagined historic or ethnic affiliations within the context of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the parallel state-making projects that remade the Western Balkans. Thus, this paper adds to the interdisciplinary debates on becoming a state as well as to imagined and performed statehood.
This article explores the EU’s efforts to reunify and reconstruct Mostar through the seminal experiment of EUAM (1994-1996), which combined peacebuilding with urban reconstruction in an innovative ...way. The aim is to identify lessons to be learned from the experiences of EUAM that can assist the EU to adjust its peacebuilding approach to better address post-conflict divides in cities where the EU currently is engaged. Cities divided by violent conflict tend to freeze the conflict, as they remained divided regardless of a conflict settlement, and they become serious obstacles to peace and a challenge to peacebuilding. Far too little is known about the role of urban space in building peace in ethno-nationally contested cities. By marrying critical urban studies with critical peacebuilding literature this article brings novelty to EU-studies and advances our understanding of the EU’s role in peacebuilding as well as in the Western Balkans.
Everyday international relations Björkdahl, Annika; Hall, Martin; Svensson, Ted
Cooperation and conflict,
06/2019, Volume:
54, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The connection between the everyday and the international has received growing attention in the field of international relations (IR) in recent years. To rethink the international in terms of the ...everyday, the mundane and the ordinary has brought attention to neglected spaces of the international and turned the everyday into a site of IR analysis. As many of the contributors to this special issue of Cooperation and Conflict note, the everyday has until now not been satisfactorily theorised in relation to IR. It seems clear, however, that to pay attention to the everyday is an attempt to decentralise notions of the international. By drawing on critical approaches to IR, the articles in this special issue unpack the notion of everyday IR and thus provide new and broadened understandings of what IR denote, and how we can make sense of the everyday as a generative site for these relations.
Space for Peace: A Research Agenda Björkdahl, Annika; Buckley-Zistel, Susanne
Journal of intervention and statebuilding,
10/2022, Volume:
16, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
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.
Mainstream transitional justice and peacebuilding practices tend to re-entrench gendered hierarchies by ignoring women or circumscribing their presence to passive victims in need of protection. As a ...consequence we have limited knowledge about the multifaceted ways women do justice and build peace. To address this lacuna we conceptualize and unpack the meaning of gendered agency, by identifying its critical elements and by locating it in space and in time. The conceptual work that we undertake is underpinned by empirical mapping of the transitional justice spaces in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina, where we point out instances of critical, creative, and transformative agency performed by women that challenge or negotiate patterns of gendered relations of domination. We collect women’s oral narratives and explore new sets of questions to capture women’s unique experiences in doing justice. Such research enables us to engage with the subjects of post-conflict peacebuilding and transitional justice processes directly and in their own spaces. This article thus renders women’s agency visible and attempts to grasp its contributions and consequences for transformations from war to peace.
Abstract
With the aim of understanding how the International Criminal Court (ICC) affects peace processes, this article examines the Colombian peace and justice processes through the lens of ...friction. It investigates frictional encounters between the Colombian judicial system and the ICC, in order to reveal the tensions in this relationship. First, we disaggregate the concept of friction and propose three different types of frictional encounters – conceptual, normative and jurisdictional – in transitional justice processes. Second, we investigate different responses to these frictional encounters, such as compliance, adaptation, co-option and resistance. Finally, we find that responses to frictions generate hybrid judicial outcomes, such as a hybrid, intersubjective understanding of justice, a hybrid sanctioning regime as well as hybrid complementarity. The article concludes that the ICC influenced the Colombian peace process, while the Colombian judicial system complied with the requirements of the ICC thereby demonstrating agency, flexibility and innovation and ensuring its judicial sovereignty.
Introducing Space for Peace Björkdahl, Annika; Buckley-Zistel, Susanne
Journal of intervention and statebuilding,
10/2022, Volume:
16, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Space for Peace is a Special Issue that advances the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies. It brings to the fore the purchase of using space as an analytic category by advancing spatial ...theorization and providing empirical case studies. This introduction draws out the main tenets of spatial approaches and responds to the question: Why space? Moreover, it outlines the chapters in the Special Issue and provides some thoughts about future research.
The Creation of Transnational Memory Spaces Björkdahl, Annika; Kappler, Stefanie
International journal of politics, culture, and society,
12/2019, Volume:
32, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In the age of globalization, local memories of past violence are often dislocated from their material places as remembrance is transpiring in transnational memory spaces. Historical events and ...commemorative memory practices increasingly transcend national boundaries and change the way memories of historical violence, atrocity, and genocide are represented in the transnational memoryscape. This article explores how the professionalization and commercialization of museums and memorials of genocide and crimes against humanity are modes of “making the past present” and “the local global”. Furthermore, professionalization and commercialization are processes through which local memories are translated into global discourses that are comprehensible to and recognizable by a global audience. In this article, we disentangle local memory places (understood as material, physical sites) from transnational memory spaces (understood as immaterial, ideational spaces) in order to investigate the transformation of local places of memory into transnational spaces of memory. At the same time, we show that, while these processes are often understood interchangeably, professionalization and commercialization are separate mechanisms and tend to be used strategically to translate memory discourses to specific audiences. These two processes can be seen as producing a standardized memorial site and a homogenization of memory in the transnational memory space. The article illustrates this theoretical reasoning with empirical findings from fieldwork in South Africa, where we zoom in on Robben Island outside Cape Town, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, where we focus on the Galerija 11/07/95 in Sarajevo, which commemorates the atrocities committed in Srebrenica in 1995.
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