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GCSC KNL: "Wild Peace, Unruly Memories"

KNL "Wild Peace, Unruly Memories"; Organisiert von der RA1 im Kontext der GCSC-Tagung "Nothing to Remember?"

When

Jan 22, 2026 from 06:00 to 08:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC100)

Where

GCSC Conference Room

Contact Name

Attendees

Prof. Dr. Johanna Mannergren Selimovic

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My talk will centre on a (re)conceptualisation of peace and of memories of peace that I hope will inspire us to challenge more rigid and binary understandings of war and peace. I will suggest that we think of peace as a ‘spirit’ that is felt and expressed through a range of experiences, acts and events. In this conceptualisation, peace is embodied, corporeal and haptic. It is emplaced, and plays out in and through a number of informal and formal relations, charged with meaning and direction through narration and imagination. Peace emerges in low flickers or in sudden bursts. The ‘spirit’ of peace pulsates through societies and times – in peaceful times for sure, but also at times of war. Experiences, practices and acts of wild peace are conflictual, messy, difficult, sometimes overtly political, sometimes more subtle. Wild peace is agential and desired, and driven by the unexpected and the imagined.

Memories of wild peace are unruly. They can be uncomfortable or even dangerous for political power-holders. Memories of wild peace are often tamed and forgotten through top-down collective memory-making such as formal peace commemorations that serve the purpose of shaping hegemonic identity constructions. The remembering of wild peace, on the other hand, can be an act of protest and resistance, a site for imagination, and can take place in both formal and informal settings. The recognition of these unruly memories is at the same time also an expression of the ‘spirit’ of wild peace.

I will build the talk around several intriguing examples from my own empirical research in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel/Palestine, Belgium, and South Africa, mostly focusing on unruly memories of wild peace in these societies and the political implications of denying, erasing and activating these memories.

//Johanna Mannergren Selimovic is associate professor of Peace and Development Research. Her research concerns peacebuilding with a special interest in transitional justice, reconciliation processes, politics of memory, and gender politics.

She is currently engaged in several research projects that investigate memory politics in transitions from war to peace; the cultural heritage of war; and divided cities, urban violence and peacebuilding. For these projects she conducts fieldwork in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Jerusalem.

Johanna Mannergren Selimovic