Peace and Politics

I joined the Vertically Integrated Project on “Visualising Peace” in my second semester of uni. Alongside gaining a variety of new perspectives on issues surrounding peace, one of the new inputs I received was an increased sensitivity towards language in connection to peace building and keeping efforts. I’m very interested in how peace manifests in political discussion, which aspects of it are over- and underlit in that context and why that is the case. Furthermore, I am intrigued by the democratic mechanisms that facilitate the possibility to influence perspectives of peace through elections. Hence, I have decided to conduct my research using political manifestos.  In analysing manifestos, I have aimed to seek out diverse approaches to peace and to see whether political parties make the effort to diversify our understandings of peace or adhere to dominant perceptions. This was done through language analysis in the form of word searches and subsequent classification through context. This project aims to shed light both on which areas and perceptions of peace are prioritised within our current political discourse, as well as which perspectives are seen as “the public view of peace” by political parties.