We often think about peace in relation to conflict; but peace is also something that we experience – and can build – in our ordinary, everyday lives, both near and far from conflict.
This is something that Visualising Peace student Joe Walker reflects on in a series of museum entries about peace and/as transcendence. As he discusses, we can find a sense of escape (self-transcendence) and inner peace even in the mundane – through being present, practicing everyday mindfulness and introspective writing (among other techniques). You can read about his own ‘steaming soup’ moment of peace in ‘Peace and Transcendence: Mundane Experiences’.
As our research team has discovered, paying attention to ‘everyday peace’ and ‘everyday peacebuilding’ can be both empowering and inclusive. It amplifies local voices (see e.g. P. Firchow (2018) Reclaiming Everyday Peace: local voices in measurement and evaluation after war, CUP), so-called ordinary people (R. Mac Ginty (2021), Everyday Peace: How so-called ordinary people can disrupt conflict, OUP), even young people and children (Berents, H. & McEvoy-Levy, S. 2015. “Theorising youth and everyday peace(building)”. Peacebuilding, 3(2): 1-14, and Berents 2018, Young People and Everyday Peace, Routledge).
The Everyday Peace Indicators project has underlined how different people’s understanding and experience of ‘everyday peace’ can be in different contexts – and the importance of paying attention to these differences, rather than imposing one-size-fits-all models as part of peacebuilding. This led some team members to explore how people define ‘everyday peace’ in their home towns, including our university town of St Andrews. As we discovered, many people connect peace to both physical and conceptual spaces – places that matter to them.
We have also researched the value of photography in both exploring and expressing concepts of everyday peace (e.g. T. Fairey et al. Photography and everyday peacebuilding in Colombia: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21647259.2023.2184099, and https://warpreventioninitiative.org/peace-science-digest/photography-in-war-torn-communities-as-a-tool-for-peace-a-project-by-everyday-peace-indicators/). This has combined with our wider research on ‘peace photography’, which has resulted in a photography exhibition and some more creative work on ‘picturing peace‘.
Building on all of this, Visualising Peace student Robert Rayner investigated ‘Everyday Peace’ through the lens of amateur photography. He canvassed an international and interdisciplinary group of St Andrews students, asking them to send in photos from their camera roll that looked like peace to them. You can see a collage featuring the results below, and read Robert’s reflections here. Robert Rayner and Alice Konig wrote an article about this for PRISMA Photography Magazine, which you can read here.