Unfinished Peace, Unfinished Memory: Theorising Feminist Peace With Northern Ireland’s Contemporary Art

Abstract

The critical engagement with everyday lived experiences and the politics of memory are key dimensions in Feminist Peace Research. They help us theorise feminist peace not as a singular state or moment in time that comes after conflict, but rather as a non-linear process that exceeds conventional binary logics at the core of mainstream approaches. Yet we need a better understanding of how to conceptualise the fluidity, contested nature and plurality of meanings peace might take in a specific context. While much of the feminist peace literature focuses on lived experiences and narratives as an approach to complicate the conflict/peace binary, in this paper, we pursue a less explored trajectory. The paper proposes art and aesthetic methods as an epistemological approach through which to unravel binary imaginaries associated with conflict/peace, revealing peace as necessarily ‘unfinished’. We develop this contribution through an analysis of two contemporary art exhibitions in Post-Good Friday Agreement Northern Ireland which, as we illustrate, creatively embody contestations around the boundaries of peace and the memorialisation of conflict. We trace how the artwork’s imaginative practices destabilise conventional narratives and oppressive binaries, enfolding the legacies of the ‘Troubles’ in wider histories and struggles for gender liberation and social justice. Engaging with the exhibitions as productive thinking spaces enables us to sense, feel and experience peace as an open-ended process of rich emotional tapestries, fragility and in-betweenness. The paper contributes to ongoing feminist, queer and other critical research in IR that questions binary and linear understandings of peace, proposing alternative ways of knowing to unsettle existing boundaries between conflict/peace.