This roundtable explores infrastructural approaches to peace work. Building on socio-material, affective, and relational theories in politics, International Relations, and sociology and across cognate fields, the participants are invited to reflect on what an infrastructural approach offers to the field of peace studies.
Infrastructural frameworks have the potential to capture latent, enduring, and structural processes and relationships, and to develop an analysis of how global fields get activated, mobilised, and re-ordered, as well as how knowledge is produced and disseminated through materially-grounded iterative processes. While making inroads in related fields, when it comes to the study of peace, the contribution of such infrastructural approaches has yet to be articulated beyond its formulation within early scholarship on the so-called local turn, and beyond a recent turn to post-humanism that focuses mainly on physical materiality of conflicts and peace.
The event aims to further advance this emerging research agenda, explore the methodological and epistemological implications of an infrastructural turn, invite reflections on the productive power of infrastructures from a relational and socio-material perspective, and articulate the promise of infrastructural approaches for navigating a series of core paradoxes in peace studies.