Peace in Motion: Rethinking Peace in Contexts of Forced Migration

Abstract

People who flee areas of armed conflict and other forms of violence do not automatically find peace upon leaving. Their lived experiences often involve continued violence across different stages and locations of forced migration, challenging conventional notions of what peace entails. Traditionally, peace is conceptualized in relation to armed violence and specific geographic areas within nation-states where such violence occurs. This article draws on geographic scholarship to reconceptualize peace within a transnational framework, challenging the state-centric perspectives that still prevail in peace research. The article is structured as follows: the first section explores how peace can be understood through the lived experiences of migrants in Europe, foregrounding their perspectives as a lens for rethinking conventional peace narratives. The second section examines key developments in peace and conflict research that provide a foundation for conceptualizing peace in transnational settings. The five shorter sections that follow introduce core arguments for conceptualizing peace in transnational settings: that violence does not necessarily end when war does; that peace, as a dynamic and ongoing process, must also be considered in contexts of so-called non-war violence; that peacebuilding goes beyond nation-building; that peace is an embodied experience; and that, in addition to the well-established spatial turn, peace studies would benefit from a temporal turn. The main contribution this article makes is that it reconceptualizes peace—through the transnational experiences of violence by migrants—as a dynamic, spatially and temporally entangled experience. It introduces temporal complexity, highlighting forms of violence that disrupt linear understandings of time.