Mission Statement
The blog is part of the vertically integrated project Visualising Peace. The project aims to investigate how the concept of peace and its implications are studied and imagined across the range of academic disciplines. This blog analyses how international relations and literary studies intersect in studying the formation of post-conflict identities, and the role of this process in the peace-making process.
Thomas Frost’s essay, entitled “James Hogg as Peacemaker”, argues for the place of the 19th century Scottish writer James Hogg within the tradition of practical peace-making, by referring to recent scholarly and practical work in relation to narrative and storytelling as peacebuilding practices. Thomas is currently in the fourth year of an English MA at the University of St Andrews.
All other essays in the blog have been written by Shengyuan Ji, who is currently studying for a degree in International Relations and Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. Shengyuan’s section introduces contemporary examples of peace-making processes and uses the theory of human security to explain the rise of violent extremism and terrorism in some post-conflict areas and is made up of three essays. The first focuses on uncertainties relating to the definition of terrorism. It examines on how various governments, international organisation and scholars have defined terms such as radicalisation, extremism, violent extremism and terrorism, and how some institutions have connected these terms with Islam or have stigmatized them. His second essay introduces the theory of human security and uses it to explain the failure of the peace-making process in Bosnia. It goes on to describe how this failure led to the rise of violent extremism and terrorism, and how its failure to establish common identity led to violence. His last essay firstly analyses how elites and people establish different post-conflict identities in Tajikistan and how we can understand it from the human security perspective to assess the importance of cohesive post-conflict identity in the peace-making process.