Reflections on Bordering, Micropolitics and Everyday Life in Peacebuilding Processes: Revisiting the Lingering Legacy of the 1949 Armistice Agreements

Abstract

This article analyzes the United Nations mediated 1949 Armistice Agreements that initially drew the borders of the state of Israel and continue to be at the center of contentions concerning those boundaries. We highlight the potential of a micropolitics of peace that engages with the material effects of conflict and bordering in everyday life. We argue that while such interventions alone may not be sufficient to address the complex dimensions of an ongoing conflict comprehensively, they are a tool for challenging the manifestations of state power continuously reinforcing identities sustaining discord, especially around borders, and a necessary step for building peace. We review the diplomatic process that led to the 1949 Agreements to acknowledge their abiding significance as well as their limits. We employ the contributions of the local turn in peacebuilding scholarship and the borderlands and borderscapes literature to explore how strategies of peace-making may occur through everyday engagements. We focus particularly on how autoethnography has explored such encounters along conflict borders in East Jerusalem. We conclude by highlighting emerging quantum social science scholarship and Massumi’s affect theory to underscore the abiding political relevance of micro-practices of emotional recognition and narrative shifting for building peace (Barad 2007; brown 2017; Massumi 2002; Zanotti 2018).