Opinion Peace: Recent Episodes
Podcast for Un-Disciplined Scholars, hosted by Sladjana Lazic
Opinion Peace is a podcast created and hosted by Dr. Sladjana Lazic
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Over the last two-two and a half decades, scholars have produced a vast number and variety of works that grappled with international and especially European interventions in the Western Balkans in the spheres of state- and peace-building, post-war reconstruction, and reconciliation, EU enlargement, and Europeanization. A simple google search based on any of the terms I've just mentioned would trick you into wondering, what could have possibly been left unasked in this area of academic inquire?
My today's guest on the Opinion Peace Podcast, Dr. Vjosa Musliu from the Vrije University in Brussels points out that most of this vast literature, however, prioritizes structures, institutions, methodical processes, EU enlargement, acquis communautaire, etc., but does not delve much into broader, sociological aspects of Europeanization. That is why Vjosa's new book "Europeanization and Statebuilding as everyday Practices - Performing Europe in the Western Balkans " analyzes Europeanization and processes related to Europeanization through everyday, mundane acts, practices, and events that are performed across four Western Balkan countries - Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, and Albania. The book is forthcoming in May with Routledge Studies in Intervention and Statebuilding.
In this episode, you will learn:
- What gets revealed when we look at Europeanization through the lens of everyday performativity;
- How EUrope is performed, staged, simulated, and even fetishized in the WB.
- What is the purpose and who is the audience for these performative acts;
- What and who gets “other-ed”, silenced, and even erased because they “do not fit” these imaginings of EUrope and Europeanness. and many, many other things.
Dr. Vjosa Musliu is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, Free University of Brussels (VUB). Her research focuses on international interventions, EU external relations and the way the EU creates and maintains its relations with its ‘others’ and how such practices also creep into the academic work. Her research interests also include poststructuralism and decoloniality. At VUB she teaches on international conflicts, International Political Economy (IPE), and European History. Previously she has worked as a postdoc at Ghent University and a lecturer at Kent University – Brussels School of International Studies.
She is also a co-editor of the Routledge Studies on Intervention and Statebuilding Series.
Twitter: @VjosaMusliu; Email: vjosa.musliu@vub.be
One of the first episodes of the Opinion Peace in 2019 was a conversation with Annick Wibben about Piecing up Feminist Peace Research. Since then, several aspects and themes of feminist peace research and analysis have been discussed in the podcast episodes with Swati Parashar, Élise Féron, Heleen Touquet, Philipp Schulz, Jamie Hagen, and Daniela Lai. Today’s episode weaves those and many other threads of feminist peace research and analysis together to open a conversation about what peace research is and where it could and/or should go.
My guests on the podcast are editors of the soon to be published Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research: Tarja Väyrynen and Élise Féron from the Tampere Peace Research Institute in Finland, Swati Parashar from the School of Global Studies, at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and Catia Cecilia Confortini from the Wellesley College, in the US.
In today's episode, you will be hearing about:
- feminist approaches to questions of violence, justice, and peace;
- de-centering of peace research;
- feminist collective decision making and editing;
- slow and epistemic violence;
- feminist care and
- great reading suggestions.
For more about this episode visit: https://site.uit.no/opinionpeace/
The guests of the first Opinion Peace podcast in 2021 are Dr. Katarina Kušić and Dr. Jakub Zahora, editors of the open-access volume "Fieldwork as Failure. Living and Knowing in the Field of International Relations". Through thirteen chapters written by early-career researchers, the edited volume engages with fieldwork experiences and politics of methods in IR through the concept of failure. In their personal and analytical reflections, the editors and chapter contributors take the concept of failure from a personal and affective reaction towards epistemological, political, and structural points that the concept of failure reveals. They say failure can be productive. It can also present a resistance towards neoliberal hyper-productivity. Some failures, however, never turn into anything productive - and that is OK too. While they grapple with disappointments and feelings of failure that arise out of personal and structural expectations and images of ideal researchers, the authors of the chapters and the editors also acknowledge the joy of doing research through fieldwork and the value of community that they've built through vulnerability and intimacy in writing about fieldwork 'failure'.
As uncomfortable and hard as it gets, still admitting the failure and exploring it as an academic project is also a privilege. As Katarina put it: "To think about failure we have to have come out the other end quite well."
For more visit: https://site.uit.no/opinionpeace/
“The Companion to Peace and Conflict Fieldwork” - recently published volume edited by Roger Mac Ginty, Roddy Brett, and Birte Vogel - takes a reader through a life cycle of fieldwork. Through 33 chapters written in the first person, the Companion offers honest, thought-provoking, and imbued with humility accounts of practical, emotional, and ethical aspects and dilemmas of fieldwork as "a corrective to the under-reporting of what might go wrong in fieldwork and the Indiana Jones syndrome”. The editors and the authors emphasize that research is a personal, sensory, emotional, and relational experience and the importance of writing the Researcher back into the fieldwork process.
For more about this episode and our guests' research check our webpage bit.ly/391XdkT
"The Struggle for Redress. Victim Capital in Bosnia and Herzegovina" a book by Jessie Barton Hronesova explores the varieties of recognition, redress, justice, and victimhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina through a within-country comparative analysis. She asks under which conditions domestic authorities are willing to recognize a particular group of victims, and who is "worthy of redress". Meticulously researched, insightful at both empirical and analytical level, and skilfully written, the book centers the concept of victim capital through which Jessie analyses the dynamics of redress and asks what is it within the power of the victims and where/when do the limits of structural factors kick in.
In today’s episode, you’ll be hearing about:
- the victim capital and its three key elements: international salience, moral authority, and mobilization resources;
- terminology and agency: victims, survivors, and victims-survivors; responsibilities and dilemmas that come with fieldwork in overresearched contexts;
- academic research, international salience, and policy implications of the book;
- and last, but definitely not least, you'll hear what Jessie's been reading these days.
For more about Jessi Barton Hronesova's work check our webpage https://bit.ly/391XdkT
This conversation draws upon two recently published articles written by Heleen Touquet and Philipp Schulz: "Navigating vulnerabilities and masculinities: How gendered contexts shape the agency of male sexual violence survivors", Security Dialogue and "Queering explanatory frameworks for wartime sexual violence against men" in International Affairs.
In today's episode, you'll be hearing about:
- the necessity to break the binaries and keep in mind the messiness of the lived experiences;
- survivors’ agency is shaped and conditioned by different opportunity structures;
- binary strategy/opportunism categorizations imply broader unintended political consequences & further marginalize those acts of sexual violence that fall outside the dominant scripts;
- the importance of working in collaboration and in a trauma-informed way;
- queering knowledge production about conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence - how do we read testimonies and how does our own positionality in terms of gender and sexuality influence how we see the world and interpret testimonies;
- and (as usual), some good reading suggestions.
In her book "Socioeconomic Justice: International Intervention & Transition in Post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina", Daniela Lai follows how experiences of socioeconomic violence turn into socioeconomic justice claims and social justice struggles, and by doing so she shows how socioeconomic justice acts as a bridge between transitional justice and broader social justice struggles. Drawing upon empirical cases of post-war and post-socialist towns of Zenica and Prijedor, and 2014 social mobilization in Bosnia and Herzegovina, she defines socioeconomic justice as the redress of violence rooted in the political economy of conflict, and transitional justice as a political process that involves forms of contestation and social mobilization.
"If the boundaries of justice processes are set in such a way that marginalizes experience of socioeconomic violence, bringing socioeconomic justice into the discussion and seeking redress will necessarily involve political contestation and struggle.” (Lai, 2020 p.35)
In this conversation with Dr. Daniela Lai you'll be hearing about:
- socioeconomic justice as the redress of violence rooted in the political economy of conflict;
- the role and responsibility of international interveners;
- the need to conceptualize transitional justice as a political process that involves forms of contestation and social mobilization;
- cases of Zenica and Prijedor and 2014 social mobilization in Bosnia and Herzegovina;
- transitional justice in light of the current moment in the US
On today’s episode with Dr. Jamie J. Hagen you’ll be hearing about: - How the inclusion of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities opens up and complicates ideas of peace, security, and violence; - Solidarities and different ways of seeing gender justice; - Tensions between globalized conceptions of rights-seeking struggles and localized, context-specific understanding of queer and trans lives; - What does it mean to look at queer and trans communities from a place of possibilities and abundance instead of from a place of repression; - Quite a few fantastic reading suggestions; - Main takes from Jamie’s work for a) scholarship and academic community; b) policymakers; and c) practitioners: “Remember, not all women are straight. And we all have sexual orientation and gender identity.”
This time on Opinion Peace, Dr. Elise Feron from TAPRI Peace Research and I tackle one of, until recently, overlooked dimensions of sexualized conflicted related violence: sexual violence against men. This conversation is based on Elise Feron’s book “Wartime Sexual Violence against Men: Masculinities and Power in Conflict Zones” (2018, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield). Drawing upon several years of fieldwork and more than 80 in-depth interviews conducted in the Great Lakes region (DRC, Burundi, Rwanda), Northern Ireland, and asylum-seeking centers, Elise Feron looked at the patterns of sexual violence against men in different contexts. She sought to reflect upon what triggers this type of violence, why such violence has been neglected, what are its effects on survivors, etc..
On today’s episode with Dr. Elise Feron, you will be hearing about:
Sexual and gender-based conflict-related violence is wider than (strategic) wartime rape; Call for uncovering the silences and queering approaches to sexual violence in conflict; Wartime sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is performative and deeply embedded in patriarchal values that sustain the conflict dynamics themselves. Continuum of violence and intersectional analysis. Sexual violence is not a stand-alone category, it is of great importance to take into consideration the broader context of conflict and relate sexual violence with patterns of other types of symbolic and structural violence that are taking place during, but also before and after, the conflict.
Three main takes from the book for a) scholarship and academic community; b) policymakers; and c) practitioners.
For more head to http://site.uit.no/opinionpeace/
. In his newly published book, Florian Bieber focuses on emergence of nationalism and its historical evolution. In taking a global perspective, Bieber reflects upon main themes in existing scholarship, and sheds light on some of the contemporary issues found in new nationalism of today - debates about migration, diversity and authoritarian politics. Besides discussing the origin of his new book, challenges of writing about and researching nations and nationalism, and asking what makes nations and nationalism so durable, this episode of Opinion Peace also touches upon the role and the rise of the (nation) state in the current crisis and the potential impact(s) of the current pandemic on nationalism.
China's rapid economic development and its rise to great-power status have sparked increasing research and political interests. Both policymakers and scholars are often divided over whether the ascent and modernization of China and its competition with the US could have a significant impact on or even present a direct threat to the international system. In this episode of Opinion Peace podcast, Sladjana Lazic spoke with Marc Lanteigne about some of the themes laid out in the fourth edition of his book "Chinese Foreign Policy - An Introduction". In the book, Marc Lanteigne provides an in-depth analysis of China's engagement in global politics and its foreign policy-making process. The main argument laid out in the book is that not only that Chinese foreign policy interests have broadened, but that simultaneously we are witnessing expansion and reconstruction of Chinese foreign policymaking that is supposed to provide a better fit for dynamic changes of the international system and China's rising power within that system.
Besides discussing China's foreign policy behavior patterns, this episode also touches upon China's activities in regard to peacekeeping, international climate politics, Belt and Road initiative, COVID-19, as well as China's relationship with the United States.
This is episode is a recording of the keynote lecture given by Swati Parashar for the second day of "Studying Peace from Below" conference held at the CPS, 5-6 September 2019. The title of Swati Parashar's keynote lecture was: "Rescuing 'Local' from its 'Global' Enthusiasts: A Postcolonial Reading of 'Peace from Below'."
This episode is a recording of the keynote lecture by Roger Mac Ginty that was delivered at the closing session of the first day of the Critical Interdisciplinary Conference on Studying Peace from Below. The conference was held at the Centre for Peace Studies (CPS) UiT- The Arctic University of Norway, 5-6 September 2019
"The Ukrainian Conflict: Prospects for Peace?" - conversation with Volodomyr Dubovyk by Podcast for Un-Disciplined Scholars, hosted by Sladjana Lazic
Feminist Peace Research - conversation with Annick Wibben by Podcast for Un-Disciplined Scholars, hosted by Sladjana Lazic
Quality Peace - conversation with Peter Wallensteen by Podcast for Un-Disciplined Scholars, hosted by Sladjana Lazic
This recording was made on 14/12/2018 at the Result Studio UiT. Recording engineer: Per Frank Hansen