“Peace is made in the village, under those trees. I learned from women and men that peace is when they wake up, work their fields across the border, return home, and rest without worrying about the next day.”
- Long-time peace practitioner
At our Mershon Monday panel on September 15, we brought together four experts on Conflict and Peacebuilding. While each speaker approached the theme through distinct disciplinary and regional perspectives, their insights collectively underscored the difficulty of demarcating eras of conflict from post-conflict. Instead, they demonstrated that reconciliation and peacebuilding are an ongoing series of processes, rather than a single event.
In his presentation, Bruno Cabanes emphasized how within his own discipline, military historians have come to treat war and peace as part of a continuum rather than a black-and-white break. He noted that even in interwar periods, societies remain mobilized in certain ways, employing military parades and traditions which keep the memories of conflict alive and help veterans make meaning of their experiences. He also stressed how there has been a recent scholarly turn towards studying war through the lived experiences of individuals, with particular attention to their cultural and social contexts. Cabanes discussed the importance and the challenges of shifting between these levels of analysis in his own work, moving from bottom up perspectives up to a broad, state-centered view. His insights offered an illuminating look at the evolving methodologies and interpretative frameworks shaping military history.
Drawing on her research on Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Anneliese Schenk insightfully identified several understudied areas following times of conflict and mass violence. Historically, she noted that much of the research on mass violence is less attentive to women’s experiences. This includes understanding that female victims and perpetrators alike may face specific barriers to sharing their experiences during transitional justice processes and when reintegrating into their communities. Similarly, she noted that the majority of scholarship focuses on urban areas, and there is a need to research the experiences of rural people. Her dissertation, which focuses on the production of cultural collective memory and the role of post-conflict education, fills this gap.
Teri Murphy’s presentation, focusing on post-agreement reconciliations in Northern Ireland, offered insightful reflections on the enduring complexities of reconciliation processes long after peace agreements are signed. She is currently working on a project comparing Northern Ireland, Colombia, and the Basque country. Her work invites a deeper interrogation of what reconciliation truly means—beyond disarmament and diplomacy—to encompass social recognition, human rights, and the lived realities of those still navigating the shadows of conflict. Despite being hailed as a landmark peace process, years after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, tensions still linger and evolve to become mapped onto new dimensions of polarization. Through vivid examples such as provocative bonfires, sectarian parades, and exclusionary murals, Murphy illustrated how reconciliation remains contested and uneven, especially in communities where historical grievances and spatial segregation endure.
Nick Nyachega offered a powerful reflection on peacebuilding and security processes in the Zimbabwe–Mozambique borderlands. Drawing from years of ethnographic fieldwork and oral histories, he highlighted how local borderlanders including villagers, traditional leaders, healers, and prophets, among other practitioners, play a central role in co-producing everyday peace and security. Nyachega introduced the concept of “village intelligence,” a localized form of knowledge production and surveillance, through which communities organize cultural festivals, healing rituals, community courts, and cross-border ceremonies. He argued that peace in these regions is not merely the absence of violence, but kugarika (to live well), a concept encompassing spiritual, economic, and social wellbeing. Nyachega’s talk called for a rethinking of security and peacebuilding frameworks by recognizing borderlands as spaces of innovation, resilience, and collaborative knowledge production.
The subsequent discussion raised additional areas for the study of conflict, including how later generations understand, recount, and memorialize wars or mass violence they themselves did not experience. The panelists also emphasized the importance of bottom-up rituals, performances, and security for reconciliation to be meaningful to those who have been affected by violence. As a long-time peace practitioner interviewed by Nyachega observed, “Peace is made in the village, under those trees. I learned from women and men that peace is when they wake up, work their fields across the border, return home, and rest without worrying about the next day.”
Blog by Nicholas Nyachega, Helen Murphey, and Julia Marino.