In this presentation, Visualising Peace student Margaux de Seze discusses some of the scholarship she has been reading about the relationship between peace and place. She also reviews an article about ‘peace’ in Sri Lanka, as a ‘peretrator’s peace’, experienced as ongoing oppression and violence by many. Margaux offers some reflections about the value of cross-disciplinary reading as we continue to deepen our understanding of different kinds of peace and peace-building. Below the video, you can find a summary of the publications she discusses. These are also available in our Visualising Peace Library.
Auge ́Marc (2009) Non-places: An introduction to supermodernity. London: Verso.
Marc Augé’s book directly challenges the ways we visualise our reality. He encourages us to think of place and space as something that is different from the straightforward idea we normally have of it. Usually, we do not give places a second thought. But I am sure that all of us have noticed in the past certain eerie details about how radically different spaces contain surprisingly similar details. Thinking from that feeling, Marc Augé expresses his theory of non-places. For him, places are made both of the symbolic and the material aspects of place which interact together to create a place that makes perfect sense to the people existing within that culture. This initial thought then leads him to question various places that we take for granted in order to show us how some spaces actually become non-places. Non-places are those locations or environments that have only been created to serve a specific end (e.g.: an airport) and create a unique individualist relationship between the people and the space. In these non-places, Marc Augé argues that identities seem to disappear, putting the individual in a strange spatiotemporal existence made of solitude and individuality.
That is Marc Augé’s theory. But it is best understood when compared to our shared human experience. To understand non-places, picture the last time you were in a train, in a plane, an airport or a bus station. Could you then relate to the feeling of simultaneously being there and not being there at all? Travelling spaces are excellent examples of non-place because the transitional aspect of it robs you of your individual culture and identity; you are not at home, but you are not away from home either. You are nowhere, whilst being somewhere extremely specific and for a very specific purpose.
To me, Marc Augé’s theory really a core human feeling, making us reflect on the places in which you exist and what they mean to you as well as the people around you. I believe that Marc Augé’s conceptualisation of non-places could be stretched to other environments and feelings to understand people’s relationship with certain environment. Relating this to peaceful places particularly could help us understand which places hold meaning and why and what processes (non-physical) can contribute to destroy or restore these meanings.
Kavoori, A. (2016) “The most peaceful place on Earth,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 18(2), pp. 116–118. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616672674.
This piece is a short autoethnographic description of the author – an adopted Cambodian child who grew up in Southern America – coming back to a memorial place and remembering the violence of the Khmer Rouge during the war.
His way to understand the past, this very painful history, is through place, and more specifically through the trees. Indeed, the way the trees are positioned, the marks their trunks and roots contain of the past and the history they tell lead him through an emotional journey; as he repeats many times “the trees tell the story”. Here, there is the tree of killing, where the atrocities and shocks can be seen on the irregular bent trunk. Here is the tree of sound, keeping in the noises of the past. Here an evil tree, here a line of shallow pits, there fruit trees, contrasting in their smoothness the history they encompass. He reads and feels and hears the history of Cambodia in these trees. But, curiously, there is also a tree that holds a memorial and that tree seems not to belong there. It does not correspond to Cambodian history, culture, identity. In fact, it is solely here for the visitors, to make the place “consumable”.
Through this piece and the ethnographer’s reflections, we can explore the question of what a memorial is, what the place it contains means and where it stands in relationship to peace. I find the conclusion Kavoori comes to fascinating and challenging. Indeed, after going passed his initial frustration about that tree that stands in memory – but against the local culture – he recognises the Cambodian attempt to own their history and violent past into a construction of their future. By reshaping past places into memorials, the new shapes seem to format and manifest what the future is expected to be. This is an understanding of place and owning of violence that I find truly fascinating to understand memorials on a wider scale.
Vindhya Buthpitiya (2022) In Sri Lanka, a perpetrator state demands non-violence, The Urban Violence Research Network. Available at: https://urbanviolence.org/perpetrator-state.
In this short piece, Buthpitiya is introducing an extremely interesting nuance in Conflict Resolution. There is a tendency for people to think that peace automatically has positive meanings and implications. In the case that she presents, the authors exemplify how peace can actually be extremely problematic in the context of what she calls ‘the perpetrator’s peace’. She describes the situation in Sri Lanka currently, where the state (entwined with and representing the Sinhalese majority) ‘won’ the recent civil war against a ‘rebel’ Tamil minority. This victory has resulted in continuity, rather than change, because those in power (who committed atrocities in the past) remain in a position to oppress the Tamil minority. Inevitably, this means that no post-conflict justice has been secured, no reparations granted, but instead continued oppression.
The Tamil people, who lost so many loved ones during the Civil war (ending in 2009), have shown extreme fortitude and resilience as well as organizational capacities. In fact, since the end of the war, despite being forbidden to mourn, families have kept on coming out with the pictures of their disappeared family members asking for answers and recognition. And this has not stopped. Despite increased violence, they keep on coming back, challenging the state security forces to make their voices and experiences of violence heard. These protests are also forcing the government to address the issues they are raising, even if it is through violence, which distracts them from taking care of the rest of the country – or rather shines light on the automatic use of violence to take care of the country, which raises critical socio-economic problematics.
What this analysis shows is that no matter the outcome of a conflict, if there is no justice, no answers, no recognition – no matter the winner of the loser – the peace cannot hold. It can only be a perpetrator’s peace, and nothing more.