Histories of/Ideas in Geography for Peace

CHAIR

Federico Ferretti

CO-CHAIR

Marcella Schmidt Di Friedberg

DESCRIPTION

In the last couple of decades, a bourgeoning literature has addressed the need for geographical scholarship to shift from the traditional geography that serves “to make war” to different understandings of the discipline's strategical uses. Geography, critical scholars argue, should rather serve for what Peter Kropotkin defined as “building feelings more worthy of humanity” than colonialism, warfare and statist geopolitics. Current “geographies of peace” and “pacific geopolitics” include social and pacifist movements from below among their key interlocutors. Yet, geography carries heavy historical legacies of collaboration with colonialism, nationalism and warfare. This session aims at further discussing questions that were often raised by scholars without finding a definitive response: can a discipline that was structurally born to serve armies, states and colonisers use its very intellectual tools for the opposite aims? At what conditions can it be relevant for peaceful social agendas?

To further respond to these questions, we welcome contributions on (but not limited to):
• Early pacific, peaceful and antimilitarist geographies and histories
• Disrupting colonialist, statist and militarist geographies through historical research
• Disrupting colonialist, statist and militarist geographies through new geographical ontologies and/or epistemologies
• Geopoetics and geo-narratives of peace and opposition to war and colonialism
• Counter-geopolitics and other histories of armies, states and colonial institutions
• Feminist, queer and LGBTQIA+ contributions to geographies and geopolitics of peace
• Peace, environment and sustainability, past and present
• Subaltern, antiracist, decolonial and anticolonial contributions to geographies and geopolitics of peace
• Geographical internationalisms, transnationalisms, cosmopolitanisms and multilingualisms as devices for geographies/geopolitics of peace
• Geographies of conscientious objection, desertion and d