Making Geographies of Peace and Conflict

This book illustrates the diversity of current geographies, ontologies, engagements, and epistemologies of peace and conflict. It emphasizes how agencies of peace and conflict occur in geographic settings, and how those settings shape processes of peace and conflict.

The essence of the book’s logic is that war and peace are manifestations of the intertwined construction of geographies and politics. Indeed, peace is never completely distinct from war. Each chapter in the book will demonstrate understandings of how the myriad spaces of war and peace are forged by multiple agencies, some possibly contradictory. The goals of these agents vary as peace and war are relational, place-specific processes. The reader will understand the mutual construction of spaces and processes of peace and conflict through engagement with the concepts of agency, the mutual construction of politics and space, geographic scales, multiple geographies, the twin dynamics of empathy/othering and inclusivity/partitioning, and resistance/militarism. The book discusses the intertwined nature of peace and conflict, including reference to the environment, global climate change, borders, technology, and postcolonialism.

This book is valuable for instructors teaching a variety of senior level human geography courses, including graduate-level classes. It will appeal to those working in political geography, historical geography, sociology of geographic knowledge, feminist geography, cultural and economic geography, political science, and international relations.

Colin Flint, a geographer by training, is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Utah State University. His research interests include geopolitics and world-systems analysis. He is the author of Introduction to Geopolitics (Routledge, 2022), Geopolitical Constructs (2016), and co-author, with Peter J. Taylor, of Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality (Routledge, 7th edition, 2018). He is editor of The Geography of War and Peace (2004) and co-editor (with Scott Kirsch) of Reconstructing Conflict: Integrating War and Post-War Geographies (2011). His books have been translated into Spanish, Polish, Korean, Mandarin, Japanese and Farsi.

Kara E. Dempsey is Associate Professor of Geography at Appalachian State University. She studies ethnonational conflicts, consolidation of state and regional power, international forced migration, and peace-building processes. She is the author of The Geopolitics of Conflict, Nationalism, and Reconciliation in Ireland (Routledge, 2022), and co-editor (with Orhon Myadar) of Making and unmaking refugees: Geopolitics of social ordering and struggle with the global refugee regime (Routledge 2023). She currently is serving as the president of the Political Geography Specialty Group, American Association of Geographers (AAG) and the AAG Honors Committee.