Mundane Peace: A Research Agenda

Peace has been approached in research mainly in abstract and theoretical terms. It has been abstracted from its everydayness, and therefore from its visibility too. Peace has become an elusive concept which has been deployed to “bludgeon humanity with its extraordinariness, forever out of reach, illusive by definition, a dream too flatteringly sweet to be substantial” as Rose Mary Shinko (2008, 489) describes the problematique. This paper seeks to establish a research agenda that allows re-theorizing peace in ways which defy the non-situatedness and abstractness of peace. The paper argues that the commitment to living with a certain kind of vulnerability is the litmus test of peace. Encountering vulnerability creates moments of accountability, recognition and acknowledgement where the peace ethos of the community is created. The moments of contact with vulnerable bodies are understood as material and symbolic time-place events that are ultimately political and, hence, bear relevance to peace ethos. Within such a framework, peace is not a property or structure of a given society, but rather something that becomes expressed, takes place, through acts and points of contact between variously situated bodies, namely in corporeal events where accountability, recognition and acknowledgement unavoidably emerge.