Dear Critters,



A CFP for a panel at this year's IBG, supported by the Historical Geography Research Group:



Historical Geographies of Peace and Non-Violence



2016 marks the bicentenary of the Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace’s founding, an event widely seen by historians as the beginning of the modern peace movement. Originally centred in London, UK, the Peace Society soon had affiliated auxiliaries dispersed widely across the country in Edinburgh, Newcastle, and Southampton (Ceadel, 1996). The occasion of this bicentenary encourages a deeper consideration of the entwined histories and geographies of war and peace and, indirectly, the prominence that the former has until recently held over the latter in geographical scholarship. This session will explore ways in which historical geographical approaches can enrich emerging literatures concerning the geographies of peace.



While geographers have been adept at conceptualising and critiquing the spatiality of modern and late-modern war, “our understanding of what peace looks like, and how to research it, remains under-developed” (Williams and McConnell, 2011: 297). A number of researchers have consequently begun to consider geographical approaches to peace and non-violence (e.g. McConnell, Megoran, and Williams, 2014; Megoran, 2011; Loyd, 2012; Springer, 2014; Williams, 2015). These approaches each recognise the need to rethink peace as more than just the absence or cessation of war, but rather as a precarious socio-spatial process, something that is made and remade across different sites and scales (Koopman, forthcoming). Peace is now increasingly conceptualised as spatially and temporally contingent, meaning different things to different people and groups at different times and places. This conceptualisation invites us to explore the potential contributions of historical geography to the burgeoning geographies of peace literatures. Historical geographers have repeatedly examined and critiqued the intimate connections between geography, and war (e.g. Heffernan, 1996; Godlewska and Smith, 1994), and the tools of historical geography similarly offer a great deal towards deepening our understanding of peace and non-violence across different times and places.



Potential topics could include, but are not restricted to,



•       Anarchism, non-violence, and anarchist geographies

•       Spaces of feminist and anti-racist movements

•       Anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism

•       Peace, realism, and classical geopolitical theory

•       Feminist and alter-geopolitics

•       Religion, spirituality, and theology

•       Everyday peace and peacebuilding

•       Peace societies and (trans)national peace activism

•       Personal, structural, and cultural violence, and their relation to peace and non-violence

•       Resistance and justice

•       Conceptions of peace in the ‘geographical tradition’

•       Federalism, internationalism, and their relation to liberal/democratic theories of peace





Convened by Matthew Scott ([log in to unmask]) and Nick Megoran ([log in to unmask]) at Newcastle Geography, and Ben Houston ([log in to unmask]) in Newcastle History. Please submit abstracts to any of the convenors by February 11.







References



Ceadel, M. (1996) The Origins of War Prevention: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1730-1854. Oxford: Clarendon Press.



Godlewska, A. and Smith, N; eds. (1994) Geography and Empire. Oxford: Blackwell.



Heffernan, M. (1996) ‘Geography, Cartography and Military Intelligence: The Royal Geographical Society and the First World War’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 21 (3): pp.504-533.



Koopman, S. (forthcoming) ‘Peace’, Entry in the forthcoming AAG Encyclopaedia of Geography.



Loyd, J.M. (2012) ‘Geographies of Peace and Antiviolence’, Geography Compass 6 (8): pp.477-489.



McConnell, F; Megoran, N; and Williams, P; eds. (2014) Geographies of Peace. London: I.B. Tauris.



Megoran, N. (2011) ‘War and Peace? An agenda for peace research and practice in geography’ Political Geography 30 (4): pp.178-189.



Springer, S. (2014) ‘War and pieces’, Space and Polity 18 (1): 85-96.



Williams, P. and McConnell, F. (2011) ‘Critical geographies of peace’, Antipode 43 (4): pp.927-931.



Williams, P. (2015) Everyday Peace? Politics, citizenship and Muslim lives in India. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.