Description
Peace Studies scholars tend to agree that the field has a normative agenda. To work towards or build peace. But how we imagine peace has changed over time, and as our imaginaries of peace have evolved, so have the paradigms, approaches, and practices within the field. Two recent examples of such shifts include the Women, Peace, and Security agenda after the passage of 1325 and the decolonization agenda more broadly attempting to address exclusionary peace theory and practice. Both responded to shifts in how we imagine peace. However, an 8-year project including over 150 interviews with academics, practitioners, and others working across ‘the field’ raises the question of whether we can (or should) have set imaginaries of what peace is at all. While the field has long recognized the dangers of utopian thinking, and the idea of heterotopias was introduced more than a decade ago to introduce the possibility of multiple imaginaries of peace, I argue here that we need also to imagine peace as something constantly changing. As the last few years have evidenced, the challenges to peace are constantly and swiftly evolving. Such a ‘mutopian’ conception of peace can help us guide action, even from within this flux.
