Representations Of Peace Research Articles

Peace through the lens of human rights: Mapping spaces of peace in the advocacy of Colombian human rights defenders

What kinds of peace do human rights defenders advocate? This question has become controversial in light of heavy criticisms raised against the scholarly paradigm that peace and human rights are co-constitutive universals. In this article, I explore how Colombian human rights defenders navigate potential tensions, erasures, and vested politics in their peace advocacy during the current peace process with the FARC-EP. I follow the trend in the geographies of peace literature to study the articulation of peace with human rights as situated and constitutive practices. My analysis of published activist statements maps out the discursivity of peace advocacy, that is, how human rights defenders articulate different political demands as interconnected conditions for peace and maintain a common activist space that cuts across the uneven geographies of violence in Colombia. The visualization of my results as discursive networks shows how activist practices open social and discursive spaces that integrate multiple understandings of peace, instead of obliterating differences in a single and homogenized, ‘local’ representation of peace. I further submit that elucidating how human rights defenders address peace beyond the end of guerrilla insurgency, the ambiguous role of the state, societal discrimination, and structural transformations helps us nuancing conceptual debates. We can learn from Colombian activists to move beyond rigid conceptual juxtapositions of human rights as either panacea or liberal fuel for conflict and to pay attention to how concepts are animated in political struggles to end violence.

Moving Images: Visual Metaphors of Peace in the Movie Mango Dreams

Visual metaphors stand at the border between text and image, as they are linguistic figures that visualize the spoken. Based on this assumption and on the existing knowledge on the discourse analytical method of metaphor analysis, Part One of the article develops a method of visual metaphor analysis (VMA). Part Two uses this method to examine the metaphors of peace found in the acclaimed movie Mango Dreams, the winner of the Peace on Earth Film Festival 2017. The film by John Upchurch tells a story of Dr. Amit Singh, whose family was killed by Muslims during the partition of India and who is suffering from the onset of dementia. In order to confront his fading memories and in pursuit of peace, he commences on a journey to his childhood home in what today is Pakistan. On his travel, he is aided by Muslim rickshaw driver Salim, whose wife was raped and murdered by Hindus. During the long journey across India in a rickshaw, the two form a close friendship and help each other find the peace they have been searching for. Based on our visual metaphor analysis (VMA) of the film, as well as an interview with the director, the article demonstrates how metaphors are employed to visualize a positive concept of peace, particularly HOME, JOURNEY, and BRIDGE, which has a specific temporal, spatial, and moral dimension. In contrast to much of the international relations research on visualization of peace and conflict, the conceptualizations of peace in Mango Dreams metaphorically envision positive peace, instead of the more familiar conceptualization of negative peace, through a representation of PEACE not only in terms of a place (HOME) or process (JOURNEY) but as practice (BRIDGE).

Peace Aesthetics: A Patchwork

This patchwork‐style article on peace aesthetics is based on the twin idea that it is possible to represent peace visually and that such representation can contribute to peace. Indeed, visual depictions of peace can be found across space and over time. However, they radically differ from one another and are not always easily recognizable as images of peace. The article identifies six problem areas with which visual peace research should engage: (i) representations of peace in the visual arts; (ii) photographic approaches to the aftermath of violent conflict, especially to the aftermath‐as‐event; (iii) peace photography as discussed and practiced in photojournalism; (iv) appropriation as a method in visual peace research; (v) digitization and machine–machine cultures; and (vi) the relationship between imaging and imagining. The analysis suggests that peace aesthetics, as a dissident practice, is both political and critical; it is interdisciplinary and based on an episodic understanding of the relationship between images and peace. It combines empirical, theoretical, and conceptual knowledge produced in the social sciences, art history, and media and communication studies, both with one another and with artistic practice.

Cripping Peace and Critical Hope

When I first began to write this essay, I was struck by a realization of just how fraught the relationship between disability and peace felt to me. Popular representations of peace often depict abl...

Práctica cultural y construcción de paz. Algunas reflexiones para Colombia

¿A qué nos referimos cuando hablamos de dimensión cultural en la construcción de paz? ¿Cuál es el papel de las y los ciudadanos en el cambio cultural? ¿Qué son las prácticas culturales y cómo contribuyen a la paz sostenible? El presente artículo explora algunos tópicos que pueden dar luces sobre estas cuestiones, haciendo alusión al caso de Colombia. En el esfuerzo por aproximarse a una noción de práctica cultural favorable a la paz, el artículo introduce algunas reflexiones sobre los imaginarios y representaciones de paz, violencia, conflicto y poder de cambio, inscritos como lenguaje en los procesos históricos; por otra parte, sugiere que las prácticas individuales y colectivas a escala micro introducen variaciones de sentido que pueden constituir ejercicios de poder transformador de las estructuras sociales.

The mother and the partisan: a representation of peace and war in the Czechoslovak Communist Party press (1964)

The mother and the partisan: a representation of peace and war in the Czechoslovak Communist Party press (1964)

Memories of War: Exploring Victim-Victimizer Perspectives in Critical Content-Based Instruction in Japanese

This article presents a language specialist’s content analysis of four topics related to the memory of World War II. The purpose of the analysis is to develop critical content-based instruction (CBI) in an advanced Japanese language course that will be implemented at a Canadian university. These specific topics are: Atomic bombs (A-bombs) in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Canada’s involvement in the development of the A-bombs, the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, and representations of peace and war in language arts and history textbooks used in Japan. I identify higai and kagai [suffering from harm vs. causing harm] relations in various materials including articles, literature, textbooks, and films, while demonstrating how these victim-offender relations reflect complex international and domestic relations of power rather than a simple binary. Such intellectual engagement will enable learners to gain multiple perspectives for ethical understandings of historical events in the target and in their own societies. Some examples of materials and activities are presented.

Geographies of war and the putative peace

What kinds of peace do human rights defenders advocate? This question has become controversial in light of heavy criticisms raised against the scholarly paradigm that peace and human rights are co-constitutive universals. In this article, I explore how Colombian human rights defenders navigate potential tensions, erasures, and vested politics in their peace advocacy during the current peace process with the FARC-EP. I follow the trend in the geographies of peace literature to study the articulation of peace with human rights as situated and constitutive practices. My analysis of published activist statements maps out the discursivity of peace advocacy, that is, how human rights defenders articulate different political demands as interconnected conditions for peace and maintain a common activist space that cuts across the uneven geographies of violence in Colombia. The visualization of my results as discursive networks shows how activist practices open social and discursive spaces that integrate multiple understandings of peace, instead of obliterating differences in a single and homogenized, ‘local’ representation of peace. I further submit that elucidating how human rights defenders address peace beyond the end of guerrilla insurgency, the ambiguous role of the state, societal discrimination, and structural transformations helps us nuancing conceptual debates. We can learn from Colombian activists to move beyond rigid conceptual juxtapositions of human rights as either panacea or liberal fuel for conflict and to pay attention to how concepts are animated in political struggles to end violence.

War and peace as social representations: Cues of structural stability.

The present study explores the structural stability of peace and war concepts, adopting a social representation approach. A word association task to the stimuli conflict, peace, and war was submitted to 206 Italian university students in 2004 and 2005. The data were explored through correspondence factor analyses and the analysis of frequency and rank of association. The results show that the social representation of war focuses chiefly on images of death and blood. Peace, on the contrary, is represented in terms of ideals, interpersonal relations, and metaphors. In 2005, new elements functional in peacebuilding, such as respect and cooperation, enter the representation, but the representation of peace is still not as stable and strong as war. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Peace and War as Social Representations: A Structural Exploration with Italian Adolescents

The present paper illustrates the potentialities offered by the Social Representations approach to the exploration of peace and war concepts. Free associations tasks to the stimuli War and Peace were given to 112 students in order to assess contents and structures. Differences related to gender, age and school grade were investigated. Attention was devoted to the role of peace education activities. Results indicate a dramatic representation of war, based on death and destruction. The representation of peace is based on intimate and positive emotional experiences. It appears weaker and polyphasic, with cues of change. Respondents involved in peace education show greater complexity of contents and more features related to positive approaches to peace, thus underlining the relevance of these activities