Suchergebnisse

Chapter 1: The Postwar City -- Chapter 2: Studying the postwar city through urban conflicts over peace(s) -- Chapter 3: Three approaches to urban conflicts over peace(s) -- Chapter 4: Contesting postwar Mostar -- Chapter 5: Contesting postwar Mitrovica -- Chapter 6: Contesting postwar Belfast -- Chapter 7: Conclusions.

Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Prologue -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- List of Figures -- Chapter 1: The Postwar City -- 1.1 The Research Problem -- 1.2 Research Contributions -- 1.3 Situating the Book -- Opening Up Peace Research -- Critical Attentiveness Towards Different Forms of War and Peace -- 1.4 Structuring the Book -- Urban Conflicts over Peace(s) -- The Concepts Used -- Insights from Belfast, Mitrovica, and Mostar -- 1.5 A Note on Methods -- Semi-structured Interviews with Open-Ended Questions -- Participant Observations -- Unanticipated Conversations -- Selecting Interviewees, Sites, and Conversations -- 1.6 Outline of Chapters -- References -- Chapter 2: Studying the Postwar City Through Urban Conflicts over Peace(s) -- 2.1 The Postwar as Conflicts over Peace(s) -- The Continuities of War in Peace -- War and Peace as Antitheses -- The Continuities of War in Peace -- The Postwar as the Transition Between War and Peace -- The Contestation, Heterogeneity, and Subjectivity of Peace(s) -- Consequence 1: The Unavoidable Continuities of War in Peace(s) -- Consequence 2: (Re)defining War and Peace -- War = Peace? -- War ≠ Peace -- Peace as an Order of Things -- Consequence 3: The Postwar as the Conflict over Peace(s) -- 2.2 Theorising the City as a Research Object -- What Is the City? -- The City's Constitution -- The City's Functioning -- The City as a Research Object -- The City's Transcending Potential -- 2.3 The Postwar City as Permeated by Urban Conflicts over Peace(s) -- The Postwar City -- The Limits and Distinctiveness of the Postwar City -- The Limits of the Postwar City -- The Distinctiveness of the Postwar City -- Studying the Postwar City Through Its Urban Conflicts over Peace(s) -- References -- Chapter 3: Three Approaches to Urban Conflicts over Peace(s) -- 3.1 Entry Point 1: The Acted City -- 3.2 Entry Point 2: The Governed City.

Postwar cities demonstrate the most persistent continuities of war in peace. This effectively forces people into divided and politicised lives, undermines city-wide urban dynamics, and hampers wider peace processes that these cities are part of. It, however, also goes against what can be and historically is expected of the city – namely to transcend divides, bridge communities, and foster co-existence. This thesis asks the question of how it is so that continuities of war in peace are reinforced rather than transcended in the postwar city. To this end it uses extensive fieldwork in the postwar cities Belfast (Northern Ireland), Mitrovica (Kosovo), and Mostar (Bosnia-Herzegovina) as well as engages in novel theorising on the postwar city and the urban conflicts over peace(s) that permeate it. The ensuing argument is that the continuities of war in peace in the postwar city are reinforced rather than transcended for two mutually enhancing reasons. On the one hand, because urban conflicts over peace(s) undermine the defining aspects of the city that give it transcending potential while reinforcing the defining aspects of the city with destructive potential. On the other hand, because the postwar city as a city reinforces the urban conflicts over peace(s) that in turn undermine its transcending and reinforce its destructive potential.

The world is urbanising rapidly and cities are increasingly held as the most important arenas for sustainable development. Cities emerging from war are no exception, but across the globe, many post-war cities are ravaged by residual or renewed violence, which threatens progress towards peace and stability. This collection of articles addresses why such violence happens, where and how it manifests, and how it can be prevented. It includes contributions that are informed by both post-war logics and urban particularities, that take intra-city dynamics into account, and that adopt a spatial analysis of the city. By bringing together contributions from different disciplinary backgrounds, all addressing the single issue of post-war violence in cities from a spatial perspective, the articles make a threefold contribution to the research agenda on violence in post-war cities. First, the articles nuance our understanding of the causes and forms of the uneven spatial distribution of violence, insecurities, and trauma within and across post-war cities. Second, the articles demonstrate how urban planning and the built environment shape and generate different forms of violence in post-war cities. Third, the articles explore the challenges, opportunities, and potential unintended consequences of conflict resolution in violent urban settings.

How can attention to spatial dynamics improve our understanding of where, how, and why conflict-related violence (CRV) concentrates within postwar cities such as Mitrovica? Like many other postwar cities, Mitrovica – one of Kosovo's largest cities – remains affected by violence connected to the preceding war. This violence is not equally distributed across the city but rather concentrates to certain flashpoints while other sites are comparatively calm(er). To date, however, research on postwar cities has not fully explained such patterns, partly due to limitations in microlevel data. In this article we rely on novel georeferenced data on CRV, in combination with in-depth fieldwork, to map CRV in Mitrovica and explore the causes for its spatial clustering. Using this approach, we show that CRV concentrates at Mitrovica's Main Bridge and explore this concentration using relational space as an analytical lens. The analysis contributes new insights into patterns of violence in Mitrovica, demonstrates the value of combining systematic data on the patterns of CRV with in-depth exploration into its underlying dynamics, and contributes to existing research on Mitrovica as well as on postwar cities and postwar violence more broadly.