Taking Love and Care Seriously: An Emergent Research Agenda for Remaking Worlds in the Wake of Violence
Krystalli, Roxani, and Schulz, Philipp. 2022. In International Studies Review 24 (1)
In this article, Roxani Krystalli and Philipp Schulz explore the practices of love and care that sit alongside the experiences of harm in armed conflicts. They build on interdisciplinary literature while they conceptualise love and care as practices that shape how people survive and make sense of violence as well as enact their lives in its wake. From their respective research in Colombia and Uganda, they argue that paying attention to love and care expands scholarly understanding of political work in contexts of armed conflict. Thus, they expand the conventional International Relations (IR) theoretical narrative about conflict by emphasising how people fall in love, forge social and intimate relationships, and act in caring ways for one another in the midst violence and suffering.
With respect to this library, I see the potential for IR theory to widen its scope to include the often-overlooked civil actors whose voices are essential in the peace-building processes in armed conflicts. Summed up, this article proposes an emergent research agenda that shines an important light on the practices that enable people to enact the process of remaking a world in the wake of violence.