A spatial approach to peace to better understand post-war cities
Résumé
There are important arguments that question the clear separation between times of peace and war in cities. The “post” of the post-war city is a problematic prefix because until when remains a city “post” (Bonte 2017, Houssay-Holzschuch, n.d.)? To deal with this conceptual challenge, this paper proposes an approach to peace that breaks with the rather linear way of representing peace still common in political science: as a political process or transition from war to peace. According to this representation, peace is a matter of time. However, too many post-war situations are still qualified several decades later as post-war, as is the case of the city of Brčko (BiH), where the war came to an end, but peace was never really attained. More geographical approaches to peace that focus on its spatial aspects call this linear representation of peace as time into question, pointing out that during war peace is being made in certain spaces through e.g. care practices (Vaittinen, 2019) and that after war certain spaces continue to operate according to the war logic of separation, militarization, hypermasculinity (Edenborg, 2021) etc. This paper presents the contours of what a spatial approach to peace looks like in the context of Brčko.