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From handshakes on the White House lawn to Picasso's iconic dove of
peace, the images and stereotypes of peace are powerful, widespread
and easily recognizable. Yet if we try to offer a concise
definition of peace it is altogether a more complicated exercise.
Not only is peace an emotive and value-laden concept, it is also
abstract, ambiguous and seemingly inextricably tied to its
antithesis: war. And it is war and violence that have been so
compellingly studied within critical geography in recent years.
This volume offers an attempt to redress that balance, and to think
more expansively and critically about what peace means and what
geographies of peace may entail. The editors begin with an
examination of critical approaches to peace in other disciplines
and a helpful genealogy of peace studies within geography. The book
is then divided into three sections. The opening section examines
how the idea of peace may be variously constructed and interpreted
according to different sites and scales. The chapters in the second
section explore a remarkably wide range of techniques of
peacemaking.This widens the discussion from the archetypical image
of top-down, diplomatic state-led initiatives to imperial boundary
making practices, grassroots cultural identity assertion, boycotts,
self-immolation, ex-paramilitary community activism, and
'protective accompaniment'. The final section shifts the scale and
focus to everyday personal relations and a range of practices
around the concept of coexistence. In their concluding chapter the
editors spell out some of the key questions that they believe a
geography of peace must address: What spatial factors have
facilitated the success or precipitated the failure of some peace
movements or diplomatic negotiations? Why are some ideologies
productive of violence in some places but co-operation in others?
How have some communities been better able to deal with religious,
racial, cultural and class conflict than others? How have creative
approaches to sharing sovereignty mitigated or transformed
territorial disputes that once seemed intractable? Geographies of
Peace is the first book wholly devoted to exploring the geography
of peace.Drawing on both recent advances in social and political
theory and detailed empirical research covering four continents, it
makes a significant intervention into current debates about peace
and violence.
The collapse of the USSR wrought dramatic changes in Eurasia, both
in terms of the structure of state power within the region, and the
ways in which Western states and international organisations
engaged with it. Analyses of conflict in this region remain rooted
in supposed 'global models', often assuming that patterns of state
failure are due to resistance to the liberal model of
peacebuilding. This book sets out a challenge to these assumptions
and framings. It not only questions but resolutely dismisses the
notion that the peacebuilding methods favoured by Western states
remain the most salient in Eurasia. Instead, it develops a
framework that seeks to conceptualise the ways in which non-liberal
actors contest or transform globally promoted norms of conflict
management and promote alternative ones in their place.
Authoritarian Conflict Management (ACM) consists of an ensemble of
norms and practices in which non-liberal actors attempt to exert
sustained hegemonic control over the local discursive, economic and
spatial realms in a given territory. With case studies ranging from
Afghanistan to Uzbekistan, Xinjiang to the Caucasus, the chapters
shed light on the ways in which local and regional actors enact
practice of ACM in order to impose stability in conflict-prone
localities, thereby challenging the Western-led consensus known as
the 'liberal peace'.
The collapse of the USSR wrought dramatic changes in Eurasia, both
in terms of the structure of state power within the region, and the
ways in which Western states and international organisations
engaged with it. Analyses of conflict in this region remain rooted
in supposed 'global models', often assuming that patterns of state
failure are due to resistance to the liberal model of
peacebuilding. This book sets out a challenge to these assumptions
and framings. It not only questions but resolutely dismisses the
notion that the peacebuilding methods favoured by Western states
remain the most salient in Eurasia. Instead, it develops a
framework that seeks to conceptualise the ways in which non-liberal
actors contest or transform globally promoted norms of conflict
management and promote alternative ones in their place.
Authoritarian Conflict Management (ACM) consists of an ensemble of
norms and practices in which non-liberal actors attempt to exert
sustained hegemonic control over the local discursive, economic and
spatial realms in a given territory. With case studies ranging from
Afghanistan to Uzbekistan, Xinjiang to the Caucasus, the chapters
shed light on the ways in which local and regional actors enact
practice of ACM in order to impose stability in conflict-prone
localities, thereby challenging the Western-led consensus known as
the 'liberal peace'.
Over the past three decades, Uzbekistan has attracted the attention
of the academic and policy communities because of its geostrategic
importance, its critical role in shaping or unshaping Central Asia
as a region, its economic and trade potential, and its demographic
weight: every other Central Asian being Uzbek, Uzbekistan's
political, social, and cultural evolutions largely exemplify the
transformations of the region as a whole. And yet, more than 25
years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, evaluating
Uzbekistan's post-Soviet transformation remains complicated.
Practitioners and scholars have seen access to sources, data, and
fieldwork progressively restricted since the early 2000s. The death
of President Islam Karimov, in power for a quarter of century, in
late 2016, reopened the future of the country, offering it more
room for evolution. To better grasp the challenges facing
post-Karimov Uzbekistan, this volume reviews nearly three decades
of independence. In the first part, it discusses the political
construct of Uzbekistan under Karimov, based on the delineation
between the state, the elite, and the people, and the tight links
between politics and economy. The second section of the volume
delves into the social and cultural changes related to labor
migration and one specific trigger - the difficulties to reform
agriculture. The third part explores the place of religion in
Uzbekistan, both at the state level and in society, while the last
part looks at the renegotiation of collective identities.
The republics of Central Asia re-emerged as independent actors in
the global interstate system in the wake of the collapse of the
Soviet Union, their varied histories and geographies offering many
different possible opportunities and course of action. In order to
explain their often confusing and complicated foreign policy
alignments, many analysts have turned again to the theories of Sir
Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), the British geographer who is widely
regarded as the founding father of geopolitics. This book brings
together historical geographers and political scientists to explore
this remarkable renaissance of Mackinder's thinking. It charts his
own engagement with the region, in both his writings and his visit
to Central Asia as a British envoy in the aftermath of World War I.
It outlines and evaluates how his ideas have been used by Central
Asian, Russian, and American scholars to explain the region's
international relations, and it traces how his writings actually
reached Central Asia and the manner in which they have been
dynamically reworked by scholars 'in transit'. The book is thus an
important contribution not only to theorising the international
relations of Central Asia, but also to our understanding of the
historical geography of how ideas are ex- changed and reworked in
the process.
Nick Megoran explores the process of building independent
nation-states in post-Soviet Central Asia through the lens of the
disputed border territory between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In his
rich "biography" of the boundary, he employs a combination of
political, cultural, historical, ethnographic, and geographic
frames to shed new light on nation-building process in this
volatile and geopolitically significant region. Megoran draws on
twenty years of extensive research in the borderlands via
interviews, observations, participation, and newspaper analysis. He
considers the problems of nationalist discourse versus local
vernacular, elite struggles versus borderland solidarities,
boundary delimitation versus everyday experience, border control
versus resistance, and mass violence in 2010, all of which have
exacerbated territorial anxieties. Megoran also revisits theories
of causation, such as the loss of Soviet control, poorly defined
boundaries, natural resource disputes, and historic ethnic clashes,
to show that while these all contribute to heightened tensions,
political actors and their agendas have clearly driven territorial
aspirations and are the overriding source of conflict. As this
compelling case study shows, the boundaries of the The Ferghana
Valley put in succinct focus larger global and moral questions of
what defines a good border.
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