Everyday Resistance, Everyday Peace: Engaging Spaces of Encounter in Conflict Affected Societies

This paper presentation identifies and analyses unexpected and often overlooked spaces where peace, or coexistence are practiced in deeply divided, conflict affected societies. Amid intense polarisation and entrenched identity boundaries, spaces – such as sporting events and workplaces with moments of shared distress or collective joy – offer insight into how ordinary people resist inherited divisions through everyday interaction and relational creativity. Identifying peace not as the absence of conflict but as the everyday resistance to division, this paper offers a hopeful and empirically grounded contribution to reimagining relational possibilities in deeply divided societies. Instead of seeking universal indicators of peaceful space, the project embraces the individuality and local meaning of each site, foregrounding the artistry, irreverence, humour, compassion, indifference, and moral imagination that allow people to imagine themselves in a “web of relationships that includes their enemies” (Lederach 2005). This paper engages three core elements. First, it centers everyday practices at the interpersonal, local level as a crucial site for social change. As two Peace and Conflict Studies scholars we recognise our discipline has traditionally focused on institutions and macro processes. We therefore adopt a critical lens, and by examining cross community encounters in mundane settings we illuminate how identity, attitudes, and relational possibilities are shaped through “everyday enactments.” Such encounters also contribute to what Mac Ginty (2014) describes as “grudging coexistence,” and engages human focused, solidarity-driven research that seeks to be attentive to lived experience in divided societies. Second, the paper draws on and contributes to the spatial turn by analysing where peace as resistance occurs. Through an interdisciplinary lens influenced by feminist human geography, politics, and social psychology, the paper will examine spaces of encounter that sit between, beyond, and in spite of the state, international actors, and formal peacebuilding structures. We believe that studying these everyday geographies broadens current understandings of peace to include unplanned, improvised, and grassroots relational practice. Third, the project investigates how individuals affected by conflict’s deepest cleavages nonetheless choose to share space, identity, emotion, across division. In this paper we will draw specifically on research within a manufacturing factory in Bosnia Herzegovina to illustrate how people resist division and conflict legacies by constructing a unique micro space of encounter outside normalised patterns of separation.