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

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 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 relations become concrete, and the more challenging understanding that space shapes society 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 characteristics 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 placing knowing amidst spatialised relations and mobilising the key concept of ‘relationality’ 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 conceptualisations and operationalisation of space bear little similarity to dominant western political ontology, including the figures of the individual and the state. Moreover, sophisticated and dynamic Aboriginal conceptualisations of place and ‘spacetime’ exceed the limits of current spatial thinking in peace and conflict studies. The final section argues that despite the shortfalls identified in earlier sections, peace and conflict studies can address the current limits of its spatial theorising. It advocates for scepticism about existing dominant scholarly understandings and the standing of the sovereign knower while drawing out local and Indigenous peoples’ understandings of space and place and pursuing the emplacement of knowers in the Global North as well as ‘in the field’.

The overall argument advanced in this article is that the spatial turn must itself be ‘emplaced’, thereby countering long-standing patterns in dominant knowledge production and the pattern in nascent peace and conflict studies engagement with concepts of space and place. While the immediate and valuable benefits of the spatial turn include an expanded conceptual repertoire and correctives to the ‘tendency to take the nation-state for granted as the central unit of analysis on which analytical scales are defined as being located’ (Chojnacki and Engels, 2016: 34), this is not sufficient. Part of the issue is that the extant spatial turn continues to centre the ‘transformative capacity of agency’ (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, 2016a: 19; Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017) in ways that are rather too anthropocentric and Eurocentric. There is a need, then, to grapple with socio-political challenges in many complex and diverse societies, including those dealing with colonial and conflict legacies. In short, a serious spatial turn is more demanding than that undertaken in current efforts. It requires more moving beyond European challenges and political ontology into relation with diverse peoples’ places and their ontologies and configuring of socio-political order.

Two methodological caveats are necessary. Throughout the article, I refer to ‘European-derived’ and ‘Aboriginal Australia’ categories as heuristic fictions that are not able or meant to adequately represent either Europe or Aboriginal Australian peoples. They nonetheless serve as a useful and appropriate way of identifying key patterns in knowing and socio-political ordering. I also conflate space and place – as others have done and as some continue to do (see Malpas, 2018 [1999]) – while acknowledging that this will not satisfy some readers. Although debates about space and place and distinctions between them are no doubt important (see Agnew, 2011), the technical detail of these matters is both beyond the scope of this article and not especially relevant given my focus on differences between civilisational traditions rather than within the discipline of geography or the western canon.

Space, place and the relational challenge

In their edited survey volume, Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel (2016a: 1) follow the basic insight of spatial theorising by asserting that in the ‘dynamics of conflict and processes of peace’, space and human agency are ‘mutually constitutive’. As they clarify, ‘we understand peace and conflict located in place to be about a sociospatial relation that is always made and remade’ (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, 2016a: 2). This stance, uncontroversial among geographers, is accompanied by the laudable goal of advancing ‘a spatial approach to the study of conflict and peace’ (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, 2016a: 1). Yet this framing is also suffused with paradox because the turn to the spatial, and thus to place, is itself mobile and unmoored. The implication of the spatial turn, as with other such turns in IR scholarship, is that they are ripe for application by knowers who are unplaced or without place. Mobility is one implication of the notion of a ‘turn’; the knower is free to turn to apply spatiality to diverse ‘other’ sites of conflict and conflict processing (e.g. see Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017). In their overview of ‘the value of a spatial turn for peace and conflict studies’, Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel explain that ‘we can explore how places and sites are negotiated and how they shape people’s experiences, memories, feelings and interpretations’ without providing an account of how the collective knowing ‘we’ is placed (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, 2016a: 5–10).

The lack of an account of emplacement in the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies is more than a simple gap or oversight – and it does not represent a straightforward shortfall by Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel. Rather, it is part of a long-standing pattern, discussed in the Introduction, of dominant knowledge disconnecting from the relations – including colonial relations – in which it is enmeshed (Latour, 2004). The epistemological and ontological issues at stake can be discerned immanently (without resorting to critique from an external vantage point) by considering the 20th-century European philosophical context that gives rise to Lefebvre’s turn to space and to the key term ‘relational’ that is deployed in the peace and conflict studies spatial turn literature (e.g. Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017: 4). A wide range of philosophical interlocutors and counterpoints are important to the development of Lefebvre’s thought (Elden, 2004: 6–8, Chapter 2), but uniting these are Lefebvre’s ‘attempt to move philosophy beyond the purely speculative and into relation with everyday issues’ (p. 66). The resonant context for this effort is Continental philosophy’s grappling with the ‘subject’ – the knowing (observing) self who is set in contrast with the observed object. This subject-object distinction empowers the mobile and de-contextualised knower as the central figure of knowing in dominant knowledge.

The evolution of 20th-century European philosophical thought meant that the abstract non-emplaced knower was untenable for Lefebvre and his contemporaries. Emmanuel Levinas (1996: 19) wrote that the ‘history of the theory of knowledge in contemporary philosophy is the history of the disappearance of . . . the subject closed in upon itself and metaphysically the origin of itself and the world’. Instead, the ‘consistency of the self is dissolved into relations. . . . Concrete reality is man always already in relation to the world’. Lefebvre’s turn to space and the everyday is part of the philosophical critique of extant ways of knowing and thus a move away from the abstract subject to the subject-in-relation. This turn to relationality has fundamental and ongoing implications for scholarly inquiry that feminist scholars articulate rather strikingly. For political philosopher Adriana Cavarero (2016), for instance, the idea of the relational, and the knowing subject as relationally bound rather than self-subsistent, leads to a rethinking of personhood as ‘marked by exposure, vulnerability, and dependence’; as ‘inclined’ toward others rather than as uprightly independent (p. 11). And Elizabeth Grosz (1995, 2004, 2005) shows that the forces of nature – space, time and materiality – ‘have enabled rather than inhibited cultural and political production’ (Grosz, 2008: 2). The ‘forces of the earth (cosmological forces that we understand as chaos, material and organic indeterminacy)’ are generative provocations to the living rather than inert matter upon which the abstract subject asserts his/her will (Grosz, 2005: 51, 2008: 2).

Two key implications flow from the relational emplacement of human beings in the world that informs Lefebvre’s project. First, as Jeff Malpas (2018 [1999]) states, inquiry concerned with space and place should, for coherence, adopt an approach that ‘looks neither to a place where the subject is abstracted from the world, nor where the world is abstracted from the subject, but rather to the place in which we, the inquirers, already find ourselves’ (p. 37, original emphasis). It is ‘to this world, and to the place in which it unfolds, that our philosophical explorations must always be addressed, and to which they must always return’ (Malpas, 2018 [1999]: 214). Second, opening to the relational obliges us to explore and inhabit relationality to ask how far we can go – and what we might achieve – through unfolding relationally to the world, including to socio-political difference. The former implication, as already noted, is yet to be taken seriously in the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies. The idea of the relational is scattered throughout the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies (e.g. including reference to other literature, see Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, 2016b: 1, 8, 14) but in ways that evoke mutually constitutive categories and phenomena rather than with significant ontological import or force that would challenge dominant ways of knowing. Meanwhile, the relational challenge is especially pertinent to peace and conflict scholars (and many practitioners) because, as already noted ‘we’ are both often ‘out of place’ and engaging with socio-political difference in our processes of inquiry and knowing.

Of course, geographers are centrally concerned with space and place, and despite the discipline’s long-standing involvement with war and conquest (Koopman, 2017b: 4978), geographers have in recent decades gradually increased their engagement with peace (see McConnell et al., 2014; Megoran et al., 2016: 124–130; for an annotated bibliography see Koopman, 2017a). Recent literature on peace in geography has naturally enough highlighted the need to consider contextualised, pluralistic, everyday and distributed approaches to peace, while also challenging critical geography’s reliance on agonism by proposing a positive account of peace (Bregazzi and Jackson, 2018). However, while much geography literature invokes the relational, Doreen Massey is the geographer who deals most thoroughly with the philosophical challenge of the turn to relationality.

For Massey (2005), following Bergson and Deleuze, our very selves open out to space and time (pp. 127–128):

Conceiving of space as a static slice through time, as representation, as a closed system and so forth are all ways of taming it. They enable us to ignore its real import: the coeval multiplicity of other trajectories and the necessary outward-lookingness of a spatialised subjectivity (Massey, 2005: 128).

Beyond our tendencies for taming and control (see Brown, 2020), the implications of taking risks with space are striking. As Massey (2005) states, ‘[i]f we really think space relationally, then . . . [being] is the sum of all our connections, and in that sense utterly grounded’ (p. 365). For now, though, these themes have not taken hold in (critical) geography literature on peace or in the nascent peace and conflict studies spatial turn. Nonetheless, they are beginning to filter through to cognate IR scholarship, including Ty Solomon and Brent Steele’s (2016) examination of affect, space and time in everyday and ‘micro’ dimensions of IR scholarship.

Responding adequately to the relational challenge, then, requires, first, placing our knowing amidst spatialised relations rather than attempting to step aside from them by ignoring or bypassing them. The spatial relations among which it makes sense to position oneself are of course those that are geographically proximate. The immediate constellation of relations for me, as a peace and conflict scholar-practitioner of a settler-colonial country, are those of the ongoing conflict between Indigenous and Settler peoples – between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the descendants of Anglo-European settlers who have shaped the dominant socio-political order of Australia. In this context, place calls me (Johnson and Larsen, 2017), as do the relations that I have in Australia and through my work. This does not mean that an emplaced approach is ineluctably local, or that emplaced thought is unsystematic, as kinship and other networks extend beyond the human, relating not only people to other people both near and far, but also people with the non-human world and the cosmos (Cajete, 2000). In Massey’s (2005) terms, if ‘we really think space relationally, then . . . our connections . . . may go round the world’ (p. 365).

The second necessary response, beginning from the relations in which one is embedded, involves facing the challenge of how far it is possible to go with relationality. Indigenous-feminist scholar Vanessa Watts (2013) brings out the depth of possibility of Indigenous-relational theorising in a sharp and clear way. Watts (2013) describes the cosmological foundation of her knowing, based in her Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee personhood, as ‘Place-Thought’ (p. 21). For Watts (2013) (Indigenous thought cannot be generalised precisely because it is emplaced), Indigenous theorising is not distinct from, or conducted in the absence of space, nor is it simply thought-in-place. Rather, Place-Thought involves understanding the world through physical embodiment (pp. 22, 21). Human beings do not exist apart from land and other-than-human species. Instead, humans are extensions of agentic lands and relatives of other-than-human species. People communicate with and are obliged to relatives and to land. For Watts (2013), this cosmology condenses in the ontogenetic spiritual figure of Sky-Woman who fell to earth and landed on the back of a turtle to become land and ‘the designator of how living beings will organize upon her’ (p. 23). Her power and influence pervades all of existence, manifesting herself not only into place, species and their inter-relationships but also ‘writing herself into our flesh’ (Watts, 2013: 33).

This twofold relational response represents a first order challenge to most critical as well as mainstream peace and conflict studies scholarship and practice. The use of the term ‘relational’ in extant scholarship tends to be somewhat anaemic rather than ontologically thoroughgoing, in part because the spatial turn initiated by Lefebvre and others that is picked up in peace and conflict studies represents the working through of a conceptual and analytical problem – the neglect of space and place – on European terms. One result is that the working through of these issues leaves scholarship tied to dominant political forms, especially the individual and the state. Meanwhile, other peoples may not have the problem of neglecting space and place, and may have modes of political being and institutions other than those that appear common sense from a European viewpoint. For instance, where Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel (2016a) foreground the human by calling attention to ‘the performative practice of agency in constituting space’ (p. 18, see also Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017), Watts (2013) shows how land and other-than-human species are central agents. While the innovations introduced by peace and conflict scholars such as Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel are no doubt valuable and important, seeking to apply the working-through of European conceptual challenges to other peoples through the export of a mobile system of knowledge partly forged through colonialism is untenable. Instead, it is necessary to engage more fulsomely with how diverse peoples approach space and place.

Indigenous peoples: already relationally emplaced

To engage adequately with diverse people’s spatial understandings is more demanding than suggested by the initial moves in the recent peace and conflict studies uptake of concepts such as space, place, scale and vernacular and ontological security. Engaging adequately requires facing diverse peoples as holders of their own theorisations of space and place rather than as sites for the implementation of a recent European-derived social science/IR turn. Only this challenging path promises to engage diverse peoples as intellectual interlocutors rather than as sites for experimenting with efforts to grapple with European-derived conceptual and analytical problems. The case of Aboriginal Australia demonstrates that some peoples have embedded concerns with space, place and scale as well as relationality and cognate concepts at the heart of their political order making over thousands of years. These constructions escape the bounds of most contemporary discussions of place and space and accompanying conventional social science/IR ontology. Without presuming to speak authoritatively about or for Indigenous people, engagement with Indigenous Australian political ordering demonstrates that people can and do operate aside from conventional European-derived political ontology. Place-derived Aboriginal Australian political ontology confounds the central figures of the individual and state, highlighting that the dominant political ontology that tends to be retained in the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies is inadequate for engaging diverse peoples and political orders, especially so given recent scholarship on hybrid peacebuilding and the local turn.

To engage with Indigenous Australian political ordering is to be cast amidst an ongoing international conflict between original and newcomer peoples of the Australian continent. Several hundred original peoples have had their existence, including their political systems, decimated, damaged or disrupted by the variable effects of colonialism across the Australian continent. Colonialism continues to subject and govern Australian Indigenous people through apparently non-negotiable settler-liberal sovereignty. Because settler-liberal governance is intransigent and yet creates myriad and pervasive opportunities for Indigenous participation on settler terms, contemporary Indigenous approaches to politics are diverse and contested. They include many claims made through western political ontology as well as claims that steadfastly refuse, against the exercise of sovereign power, dominant terms of reference and instead work at recuperating Indigenous political ontology and systems (e.g. Watson, 2012, 2015). Here I discuss those approaches to space and place that connect with original people’s political ontology rather than the colonial overlay. I do so because Australian Indigenous peoples have continually articulated their place-based approach to politics. In 1880s Queensland, for instance, amidst resolute colonial control, a deeply disenfranchised Aboriginal woman in adverse circumstances articulates to white officials her claims to her particular place by mapping her movements through landscape (Mar, 2012: 185). Furthermore, there is no evidence, despite continuing colonial sovereign power, that Aboriginal people will stop making distinct claims to place and associated forms of political ordering until some measure of justice and meaningful dialogue is achieved with colonisers. At the same time, as I noted in the Introduction, the representation of Australian Indigenous conceptualisations of place provided here is inevitably a heuristic fiction that cannot encompass the diversity of Aboriginal approaches to place and governance.

For Aboriginal Australian people, the ‘Land is the source of the Law’ (Black, 2011; Graham, 1999). As with Place-Thought (Watts, 2013), landscape is both sentient and powerfully charged, with relations embedded in landscape that serves as a template for socio-political ordering. Aboriginal Australian philosopher Mary Graham capitalises ‘Land’ to indicate its generative and sentient capacities: ‘Land has thrown us up into the world with the imaginative ability to create society and culture; it helps us (continually) to form society and keeps us alive and creative through its resources, its changes and enabling capacities’ (Mary Graham, personal communication). Land becomes ‘Country’ through the ‘Dreaming’, a phenomenon which sees the ongoing embodiment in landscape of spirit or totem ancestors who came out of the earth, moved across it, and re-entered (Munn, 1970; Swain, 1993: 32). This generates an original yet ever present force that participates in a reciprocal relation with human beings (Arthur, 1996: 119–120; Stanner, 1979: 23–30), bringing humans and all of existence into being (Stanner, 1979: 23–24). Ancestor beings are capable of multiple metamorphoses and play an ongoing role in affairs of land and people. They are both creators of the landscape people inhabit and embodied by and as individual people through totemic identification: ‘I am [or s/he is] X (tree, bird, or animal)’. The land is thus generative; it is the text of Aboriginal ontogenesis (Fischer, 1995). Country and Dreaming in turn generate Law, providing both a poetic ordering framework and everyday guidance for managing relations among people and securing socio-political order.

The phenomenon ‘Land-as-Country’ shows how space and place, as Grosz (2005) points out, are generative provocations to the living. For Aboriginal people these provocations are also foundational for one’s very being and possibilities of political order. Mary Graham explains that, in contrast to the dominant European worldview, one is not a conscious isolate whose being is affirmed through identitarian thought. An Aboriginal equivalent of Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ might be ‘I am located therefore I am’ (Mary Graham, 2018, personal communication). Kenneth Liberman (1978) similarly explicates links among ways of thinking, selfhood and ordering among Australian Aboriginal desert people by describing key ideas associated with the self. Instead of a notion of ‘mind’, the ‘metaphor for thought and memory is the ear’, with thinking ‘kulira’, a type of passive ‘receptivity to thoughts which occur’ (pp. 159–160). People have a strong sense of personal autonomy and individualism, but because thought itself is relational, they do not stand apart from others or Country. Order arises through individuals bound with Country and other-than-human relatives, and in this relational mode they do not make their personal selves conspicuous in public interaction and discussion, or ‘draw excessive attention to the personal self of another’ (Liberman, 1985: 27). One result is that ‘innovations, formulations and decisions are dis-individualized’. In other words, ‘[d]iscussions take place and conclusions are reached without an egoistic concern for the persons involved – it is as though the social objectives are the exclusive dynamic’ (Liberman, 1978: 161).

In contrast with place-derived Aboriginal approaches to being, the reproduction in the nascent peace and conflict spatial turn of a mobile agentive individual of conventional political ontology misses both the philosophical importance of the call to move away from abstract Cartesian forms of subjectivity and risks continuing to bypass people who figure selfhood and produce social order in different ways. This in turn reproduces the self-subsistent identitarian individual as the key figure of socio-political ordering, perpetuating dominant European understandings of politics and obscuring other ways of ordering. The spatial turn in peace and conflict studies has not yet entertained that selfhood might be linked fundamentally to space and place. Instead, by casting individuals as meaning-making beings who produce place from space, the spatial turn tends to continue to invest in the conventional figure of a mobile and agentive self who is set apart from the world. It centres and reinforces anthropocentric human agency despite theorising the mutual constitution of space and agency (Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017: Chapter One). There are exceptions, of course. Occasionally space is given some type of agency (e.g. see Hackl, 2016) but this tends to be the exception that highlights the overall pattern, and even in Hackl’s work, the accent is on space as made and appropriated by human agents rather than on space/place having agency in the thoroughgoing way that it does for Indigenous people.

Other key concepts taken up in the peace and conflict spatial turn also tend to reproduce conventional political ontology. Consider scale, for instance. Scale is predominantly mobilised to move beyond prioritising the state as the core unit and level of analysis, or beyond thinking about space as a simple container for human activities (see Chojnacki and Engels, 2016: 30–35). Both moves are valuable developments that extend our knowledge (e.g. see Bubandt, 2005; McDowell et al., 2015; Selimovic and Strömbom, 2015). However, they also continue to reference dominant western ontology in three interrelated ways. First, by invoking local, regional and global, or ‘trans-scalar’ flows and currents beyond the state, these moves reference and reinforce the primacy of the state. Second, space(s) tend to be seen as static and tied to particular sites as compared with the dynamism of time; relations change though time but space does not. Finally, in line with a wider pattern in the spatial turn, discussions of scale imply a core concern with terrestrial places that are made culturally meaningful; the human agent is centred once again (Munn, 1996: 465).

Considerations of scale in the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies, innovative as they may appear from conventional IR perspectives, risk closing out other far more dynamic and challenging ways of thinking about scale, including those that hold space to be dynamic. Because Land-as-Country generates being for Aboriginal people, the ‘space of the body’ has ‘magico-symbolic relations’ with the space(s) of the earth (Gil, 1998: 232). Space is not static because the ‘earth is not limited by a border that has precise contours tailored to the needs of the military, administration, customs, taxation, or politics’ (Gil, 1998: 232). Rather, the ‘earth is the magical territory perceived in the extension of the community body in its relation to the ancestors’ (Gil, 1998: 232). Stephen Muecke (1999) explains that many Aboriginal Dreaming stories ‘culminate in metamorphoses, beings turning into trees, stars or tracks’ (p. 14). These transformations across scale and time are not just stories; they are ritualised in ceremonies in ways that bring about ‘actual transformations’ in the ‘bodies of the participants’ (Muecke, 1999: 14). Such transformations can, inter alia, be used to cleanse and to resolve conflict (Brigg and Tonnaer, 2008: 9–10). The spaces of the human body ‘unfold’ to the world, scaling up to various generative ‘features of the country’ (Muecke, 1999: 14) that emerged during the Dreaming and continue to order contemporary existence. Scale in this cosmology is both spatial and temporal.

This fundamentally relational arrangement brings about a ‘complex kind of relative spacetime’ (Munn, 1996: 449). People embody certain places in their being through the Law with the result that individuals (or groups) can enact a moving spatial field as they carry the authority of sacred places and totems embedded in their being (Munn, 1996: 451–453). At the same time, places also act as agentic moving spatial fields (they recognise people, for instance) through uncertain and ambiguous reach, with their powers usually radiating from an identifying centre (Munn, 1996: 453). The latter makes sense because places themselves are the ‘remnants of the centered fields of ancient actors’; the ‘situated bodies’ of ancestors in ‘particular stances or states, such as lying down, sitting, dancing, . . . or scattered into fragments from a fight’ (Munn, 1996: 454). The ancestors do not leave behind their bodies in a fixed sense but rather ‘momentary forms taken by their action fields at that location’ (Munn, 1996: 454, original emphasis). Nor do the ancestors become ‘timeless’ in a western sense. Instead ‘the time index shifts from the relative transiency of actions to a duration indefinitely extended into the future beyond that of the original ancestral occurrence’ (Munn, 1996: 455). It is for this reason that Stanner (1979) refers to the Dreaming as an ‘everywhen’ (pp. 23–24). Because people inhabit Country and the Dreaming, space and time interact. For example, people may travel between places in ceremony, or become mobile centres of authority moving between places such that ‘the ancestral Law’s power of spatial limitation on movement becomes directly embodied in a centered mobile field apart from any fixed, enduring center’ (Munn, 1996: 461).

With socio-political life ordered through an integrated system in which Land-as-Country is foundational for being, the source of the Law, and the platform for the operation of a type of mobile scalar spacetime, Aboriginal people have no need for a state to secure political ordering. A flexible yet ordered universe supports individuals and simultaneously invites them to gauge and regulate their selves in relation to the Law, Dreaming and their accompanying relational responsibilities to Country, kin and other-than-human beings. Each individual ‘is his or her own law-bearer’ (Graham, 1990). Each person is highly autonomous, in contrast to assumptions that Aboriginal people are group oriented (Myers, 1986: 431). Individuals enact autonomy as a social capacity, as occurs among other Indigenous peoples (Overing, 2003: 305–306). Because people are grounded in space and place with the responsibilities that entails, there is no need for an apical body or force, such as a state, exerting command-obedience power relations. Place is the source of the Law and socio-political order.

The case of Aboriginal Australia demonstrates that Indigenous peoples, and likely other peoples around the globe, have developed sophisticated conceptualisations of space and place over extended periods. These cosmologies exceed or escape the bounds of extant peace and conflict studies theorising. Such schema may operationalise space and place as sources of socio-political ordering in ways that bear little or no similarity to, or have no need for, dominant western political ontology, including conventional figures of the individual and state that remain intact in the spatial turn as thus far applied in peace and conflict studies. Indeed, if the individual and state are not the dominant categories and vehicles for achieving social and political order then much dominant IR and political science founders. Concepts such as scale, meanwhile, can be brought into service, but the case of Aboriginal Australia shows that space and time tend to remain separated in dominant approaches to space and place in comparison with sophisticated Aboriginal concepts and operationalisation of a form of spacetime. In these circumstances, the application of spatial turn concepts to diverse peoples and contexts risks disavowing local cosmologies and facilitating the installation of western counterparts in their stead. Researchers may inadvertently facilitate and support the displacement of sentient landscapes by engaging meaning-making agents ripe for a political relationship with a colonial modernising state, thereby facilitating contemporary colonialism. Such ontological violence, though, is not predetermined, and the spatial turn can be a basis for engaging with rather than disavowing and displacing diverse peoples’ forms of political ordering.

Extending the spatial turn: towards emplacement

The spatial turn in peace and conflict studies provides a starting point to begin conceptualising space and place for analysis of the dynamics of conflict and peace. But as with other European-derived dominant social science/IR knowledge, the spatial turn tends to exhibit ethno-specificities that become parsed as universal in the global circuits of professional knowledge production. One result is that the nascent spatial turn in peace and conflict studies represents the working through of a European conceptual and analytical problem that other peoples simply may not have. Aboriginal Australian peoples, for instance, do not share this problem. Aboriginal Australian approaches to space, place and scale secure highly sophisticated forms of socio-political order through complex forms of relationality grounded in landscape. This approach to space, place and scale enables long-term and ‘emplaced’ security. Adjectives such as ‘vernacular’ and ‘ontological’ hardly seem necessary, though are clearly in play. Aboriginal emplaced security can be nothing other than vernacular and the precept ‘You are not alone in the world’ (Graham, 1999: 105) evokes the way an individual is always already thoroughly connected through an integrated network of kin, ancestors, Country and totems. Even when an individual might be remote from one’s own immediate Country, a heaving continent-wide network of life is present and provides the resources for people to connect and be ‘ontologically secure’ (for the origins of the ‘ontological security’ concept see Giddens, 1991; Laing, 1965).

The existence of Aboriginal Australian and other peoples’ understandings of space, place, scale and cognate concepts demonstrate that peace and conflict scholarship and practice need to engage with diverse peoples as serious intellectual interlocutors rather than as sites to apply dominant European-derived categories. An obvious possibility for beginning this work, signalled in the previous section, is to draw upon anthropological knowledge. Ethnographies can provide remarkably rich and detailed information so are an obvious and important resource. Histories are another obvious resource. But the anthropological record may be incomplete, and there is a need to be somewhat wary of the tendency for some anthropological knowledge to present reified understandings of cultural difference. Moreover, peace and conflict hybridity scholars show that many political orders are already hybridised or in processes of hybridisation. Certainly the influence of liberal and western forms of political ordering is felt in most parts of the globe, and cultures of political ordering are often in a state of flux and change, especially so in conflict and post-conflict environments. Conventional social science/IR knowledge approaches that hold out the promise of more complete knowledge of diverse peoples are unlikely to be the full extent of a viable strategy for engaging with diverse peoples’ local conceptual schema and forms of political ordering because such knowledge is unlikely to be available in conflict settings.

A more valuable and somewhat paradoxical first move for extending and emplacing the spatial turn is to adopt a sceptical stance about existing scholarly understandings of space, place, scale and cognate concepts of vernacular and ontological security – even while taking them as a tentative and valuable reference and starting point. In the context of underappreciated diverse conceptualisations of space and place alongside the overconfidence of scholars trained in the dominant circuits of European-derived knowledge production, ‘understanding’ of space and place come all-too-easily to scholars and peace practitioners. As has been the case with notions of ‘development’ and ‘security’, dominant understandings all-too-readily become registered and authorised as definitive knowledge. Against this pattern, this article has shown that European-derived framings of space and place do not apply for some peoples and that diverse peoples’ understandings can be more capacious and sophisticated than those of their European counterparts. For these reasons, a key accompanying task is to break open understandings of space, place and related concepts rather than attempting to consolidate them. Of course, existing anthropological and other social science knowledge can be a valuable resource for this work. In some cases, existing literatures document the place-based ontologies of peoples or groups of peoples, and these are ripe for useful deployment in combination with concepts drawn from the spatial turn. (See, for example, Higgins, 2020.) However, it remains crucial to recognise that this knowledge is unlikely to be sufficient, and to mobilise it alongside scepticism about European-derived understandings of space and place.

A complementary second move lies with the deployment of the straightforward notion of ‘elicitive’ practice, popularised in peace and conflict resolution scholarship and practice by John Paul Lederach (1995). Lederach shows the value of drawing out Indigenous and local understandings of phenomena. ‘Elicitation’ does not prescribe a particular methodological toolkit – one can pursue it through participant observation, workshops and in other ways. It can also involve the pursuit of ‘near enough’ or ‘good enough’ rather than confident and (perhaps) definitive knowledge in western social science/IR terms. These means extend upon the task of breaking open dominant social science understandings of concepts such as space, place and security, and relationality and scale. Perhaps most importantly, elicitation puts those trained in the dominant circuits of knowledge production into conversation and exchange with interlocutors from diverse traditions, thereby increasing the possibilities for developing more locally derived and locally informed understandings of concepts such as place, security and scale as well as greater collaboration in knowledge production (see Brown, 2020). The latter, when taken to its logical conclusion, can produce exciting innovations. A group of human geographers and Aboriginal people research and write, for instance, as a relational collective in partnership with Country – with place (see Bawaka Country et al., 2016). (This innovate scholarship is part of a wider recent engagement with Indigeneity in the geography discipline. For example, see Hunt, 2017.)

Taken together, the foregoing moves simultaneously demote the figure of the western social science/IR knower and expand knowledge of space, place and cognate concepts in peace and conflict studies in collaboration with diverse peoples. Actively questioning knowledge developed through circuits of professionalised western knowledge production invariably impacts upon a key source of legitimacy relied upon by international researchers and experts. The figure of the professional knowledge worker both centres the knower as a sovereign subject and prioritises reason over activity, theory over practice and intellectual over non-intellectual (Poster, 1984: 59). Questioning this form of knowledge and turning to the emplaced knowledge of Indigenous and local peoples involves professional knowledge workers foregoing at least some of the authority conventionally afforded them by becoming more relational and less sovereign knowers (Brigg, 2016). The value in demoting the conventional figure of the western social science knower lies in extending the impulse driving the spatial turn in European philosophy and expanding emplaced knowing for peace and security in the peace and conflict studies spatial turn instead of reauthorising dominant and likely disconnected European-derived forms of knowing.

The second key implication of the arguments developed in foregoing sections concerns the possibility for folding the spatial turn back upon dominant knowing in peace and conflict studies. The suggestion that knowledge gains can be made by demoting the figure of the sovereign knower and emplacing knowledge already suggests implications for dominant knowing. But it may be that readers see Indigenous and local approaches to space and place as idiosyncratic and too far from thinking about these matters in contemporary IR and political science. Such misgivings, though, are part of the pattern by which European-derived knowledge seeks to survey the world authoritatively while obscuring the ethno-specificity of the tools it deploys to do so (Latour, 1993, 2002). Consider, for instance, earlier discussion of how Aboriginal people’s bodies can unfold to the world in ceremony, scaling-up to Country and the order-producing features of the Dreaming. These and similar phenomena preclude the need for a state to secure socio-political order. A similarly remarkable scaling-up is part of the development of European ideas of enduring sovereignty with the medieval notion of the king’s ‘two bodies’ allowing that the King’s physical body may die but the king’s rule be sustained in public and corporate orders (Kantorowicz, 1957). The difference lies in the reception and authorisation of such notions. European-derived knowledge tends to neglect the idiosyncratic origins of its key categories – or their perpetuation through phenomena including attributing power to the dead as part of nation-state ceremonies (Muecke, 1999) – and to focus instead on diverse others as objects of cultural interest and idiosyncrasy.

The spatial turn, then, should be ‘emplaced’ not only in the diverse settings ‘away from home’ or ‘in the field’ in which peace and conflict scholars most often undertake research, but also in individual knowers’ centres of living and knowing in the Global North. Considering the emplacement of European settler-descendants on the Australian continent, for instance, is necessary to address long-standing conflict in order to achieve peace and security on the Australian continent. Similar challenges face scholars based in other settler-colonies including Canada and the United States of America (see Byrd, 2011). European scholars, meanwhile, are increasingly called to examine the emplacement of European-derived scholarship in the production of political categories and schema that frame and influence, often in distorted and detrimental ways, conflicts in many parts of the world (see Hobson, 2012; Muppidi, 2012). Conceptualising the key category of the state as a self-contained entity, for instance, neglects its emergence though place-based relations, including imperial social formations (Barkawi and Laffey, 2002). Only by making more thoroughgoing relational-ontological moves toward emplacement can the spatial turn respond adequately to the original philosophical relational challenge set by 20th-century philosophy and to the challenge to enter into exchange with diverse peoples of the world evoked recently in peace and conflict studies by ideas of hybrid peacebuilding and the ‘local turn’.

Conclusion

The move to engage with space, place and cognate concepts in peace and conflict studies is a laudable and welcome development that promises new and innovative analyses while correcting for notions of a globalised and borderless world. Yet there is a risk, as is often the case with such ‘turns’, that enduring patterns of knowing authorised in the dominant circuits of knowledge production remain obscured and are perpetuated. In this pattern, superficial critique and innovation proceed alongside continued subservience to dominant institutional forms and approaches to political order. Thus far, the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies has not engaged thoroughly with the challenge of the relational emplacement of knowing subject in terms of either European philosophy or diverse peoples’ conceptualisation and operationalisation of place in socio-political ordering. The latter challenge is particularly striking because while Europeans began to grapple with the disconnection of the knowing subject – and thus dominant knowledge – from space and place in the 20th century, some peoples have thoroughly embedded innovative and sophisticated understandings of space and place in their socio-political ordering for thousands of years. The case of Aboriginal Australia, for instance, shows that diverse peoples’ conceptualisation of space and place can be strikingly rich and innovative, constituting a first order critique of European counterparts. To effect a serious and thoroughgoing spatial turn, peace and conflict scholars need to engage with these matters by pursuing the ‘emplacement’ of knowers and knowing, both ‘in the field’ and ‘at home’, rather than simply seeking to apply a new set of mobile scholarly tools in diverse settings.

The first of two key implications for the pursuit of relationally emplaced knowing is that diverse local peoples should be taken as serious interlocutors in the elaboration of the ways in which space and place feature in socio-political ordering and in the processing, management and resolution of conflicts. By demoting the sovereign knower and conventional European-derived social science/IR concepts that are authorised in global circuits of professional knowledge production it becomes possible to engage diverse peoples’ approaches to space and place both through elicitive methodologies and the extant scholarly record. Engaging with such approaches extends knowledge and promises to mitigate persistent inequalities in scholarship in line with peace and conflict studies normative commitments. Equally importantly, developing more locally informed understandings of concepts such as place, security and scale in peace and conflict analysis promises, as highlighted by scholarship on hybridity and the local turn, more effective ways of managing conflict and sustaining peace in local settings.

The second key implication of the argument developed in this article is that peace and conflict studies should pursue the relational emplacement of scholarship not only through engagement with others ‘in the field’ but also in its centres of knowing. In my case, this means I emplace my knowing in the Australian settler-indigenous settler conflict and pursue knowledge from this place. This does not mean that the analysis developed is inescapably local because, as I have made clear throughout, located knowledge resonates and concatenates across places and scales. Indeed, part of what is at stake is showing how the spatial turn provides an opportunity to challenge European-derived ethno-specific approaches to socio-political ordering that have become, through colonialism and globalisation, parsed as universal in the global circuits of professional knowledge production. If scholarship is able to move beyond the effects of this domination, we may ultimately come to conclude, for instance, that the ontology that foregrounds the individual and the state as key political categories is somewhat idiosyncratic in the scheme of the world’s peoples, or at least far less dominant than we currently suppose. At minimum, the emplacement of the spatial turn by peace and conflict scholars, both ‘in the field’ and in the centres of dominant forms of knowing in the Global North, promises the development of more capacious, ethical and engaged understandings of space and place.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article: The author received funding from The University of Queensland for a workshop that assisted in the development of this article.

ORCID iD

Morgan Brigg

Author biography

Morgan Brigg is Associate Professor in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. His research expertise is in conflict resolution, peacebuilding, governance and innovative approaches to cross-cultural relations and the politics of knowledge. Morgan’s work facilitates exchange between Western and Indigenous political philosophies and socio-legal orders as part of a wider exploration of the politics of cultural difference, governance and selfhood.

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