Forum: Thinking Theoretically in Unsettled Times: COVID-19 and Beyond

This collection of essays seeks to theorize the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic in international relations (IR). The contributions are driven by questions such as: How can theorizing help us understand these unsettled times? What kind of crisis is this? What shapes its politics? What remains the same and what has been unsettled or unsettling? In addressing such questions, each of the participants considers what we may already know about the pandemic as well as what might be ignored or missed. Collectively, the forum pushes at the interdisciplinary boundaries of IR theorizing itself and, in so doing, the participants hope to engender meaningful understandings of a world in crisis and encourage expansive ways of thinking about the times that lie beyond.</jats:p

Studying the Postwar City Through Urban Conflicts over Peace(s)

This chapter theorises the postwar city in order to enable its study. It first theorises the postwar as not the given and linear transition from war to a universal and objective peace, but rather as permeated by conflicts over peace(s) in which heterogeneous and subjective peace(s) strive to socio-politically order society in diametrically different ways. The city is then theorised as constituted by heterogeneity, density, openness and permeability, and centrality within its wider socio-political context while functioning through mixing, conflict, accommodation, creativity, and fragmentation. This unique combination makes it a research object—in the sense that it affects the nature of whatever research foci might be of interest—as well as gives it potential to both transcend and reinforce continuities of war in peace. The postwar city is subsequently theorised as a city where war is over yet the socio-political ordering of society remains contested through urban conflicts over peace(s)