The spatial-relational challenge: Emplacing the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies

Date01 December 2020
DOI10.1177/0010836720954479
Published date01 December 2020
AuthorMorgan Brigg
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836720954479
Cooperation and Conflict
2020, Vol. 55(4) 535 –552
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836720954479
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The spatial-relational
challenge: Emplacing the
spatial turn in peace and
conflict studies
Morgan Brigg
Abstract
The nascent spatial turn in peace and conflict studies is a promising development that expands
conceptual resources and offers useful correctives to existing scholarship. However, the turn to
space and place tends not to adequately emplace itself (including on its own European-derived
terms) or sufficiently engage the socio-spatial difference of diverse peoples. Instead, a de-
contextualised knower is invited to apply a new set of mobile scholarly tools in various settings
without seriously considering diverse peoples’ conceptualisation and operationalisation of place
in socio-political ordering. Long-standing Aboriginal Australian approaches to place, meanwhile,
indicate the diversity and sophistication of approaches to space and place. They furthermore show
that western political ontology – including the figures of the individual and the state embedded
in much dominant scholarship – may not be relevant in many settings in which peace and conflict
scholarship is undertaken. Realising the full potential of the spatial turn requires grappling with
the relational emplacement of the knowing subject and the varied ways in which place configures
socio-political order both for diverse peoples ‘in the field’ and in the centres of dominant forms
of knowing in the Global North.
Keywords
Aboriginal Australia, indigenous people, place, political ontology, relationality, spacetime
Introduction
Recent peace and conflict studies interest in questions of spatiality, as well as cognate
concepts including place, scale and vernacular and ontological security, have promise for
progressing peace and conflict scholarship and practice. There is little doubt, as one
recent edited collection amply demonstrates (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, 2016b), that
this ‘spatial turn’ offers access to underexploited analytical concepts. The spatial turn is
also a useful bulwark against the notion that space and place do not matter in a globalised
Corresponding author:
Morgan Brigg, The University of Queensland, 4072 Australia.
Email: m.brigg@uq.edu.au
954479CAC0010.1177/0010836720954479Cooperation and ConflictBrigg
research-article2020
Article
536 Cooperation and Conflict 55(4)
and borderless world (Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017: 13). These developments take on
additional salience amidst current attempts, evinced in ideas of hybrid peacebuilding and
turns to the ‘local’ and the ‘everyday’ (e.g. see Autesserre, 2014; Björkdahl et al., 2019;
Richmond and Mitchell, 2012; Roger Mac Ginty, 2014), to recognise and engage those
who are typically excluded from the dominant circuits of peace and conflict resolution
knowledge, policy and practice. The basic insight that space is the site where social rela-
tions become concrete, and the more challenging understanding that space shapes soci-
ety as society also shapes space (Lefebvre, 1991; Soja, 1989), promises to both expand
peace and conflict scholarship and engage more deeply with everyday people. Such
engagement can open channels for exchange with peoples who have been subject to the
expansion of the global states-system over the past few centuries and its consolidated
hold over socio-political life. Deploying space and associated concepts thus promises
more catholic, ethical and nuanced understandings of conflict dynamics, and hence
access to a more diverse and effective repertoire of options for peacemaking and
peacebuilding.
Yet, to realise the promise of a spatial turn in peace and conflict studies, this article
argues that it is necessary to proceed cautiously, and not only by engaging the work of
geographers who have been concerned with peace and space for some time. In particular,
it is necessary to redouble efforts to engage socio-political difference in the deployment
of the suite of spatial and related concepts. Conceptual ‘turns’ are by now commonplace
in international relations (IR), and yet the introduction of still more turns raises questions
about how much innovation is really on offer, and whether previous turns are being
repeated – perhaps necessarily given that earlier turns may have ossified and become
partially ineffective (e.g. see McCourt, 2016). In one heavy critique, such turns are also
part of an extended ‘confidence trick’ that dominant European-derived knowledge plays
on the world (Muecke, 2009: 405–406). By disconnecting itself from what is ‘out there’
in the world, dominant knowledge does not give a full account of how it knows and yet
continues to claim authority even as it constantly shifts the ground on which it stands
through yet more turns. It tricks those outside its own networks – not only governments
and funders but, also, and more seriously, unsuspecting peoples who become objects of
study as their knowledges are bypassed and thereby diminished (Latour, 2002: 2–9).
The spatial turn in peace and conflict studies exhibits the same problematic charac-
teristics of much European-derived dominant knowledge: It tends not to give a full
account of itself (even on its own terms) as it does not fully emplace itself, and it tends
not to engage the socio-spatial difference of diverse peoples other than through its own
political ontology. In response, this article first considers the 20th century European
philosophical context that gives rise to the turn to space and place to discern the issues
at stake. It argues that addressing the accompanying ‘relational’ challenge requires plac-
ing knowing amidst spatialised relations and mobilising the key concept of ‘relational-
ity’ much more fulsomely than is currently the case. Both require, for this article,
engaging with Indigenous peoples and, in turn, first order critique which challenges any
subservience to unjust power structures embedded within conceptions of sovereignty
and connected to the state. The second section engages with how diverse peoples may
approach space and place by considering how Australian Aboriginal people draw upon
land as the source of socio-political ordering. Long-standing and relational Aboriginal

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