Peace can take many different forms and be expressed in a myriad of different ways that go well-beyond “peace as the absence of war”. Though recent scholarly contributions within this vein of research acknowledge the empirical reality of a variety of “peaces”, we are yet to understand how – methodologically – researchers can go about the endeavor of developing tools that allow us to describe and classify varieties of peace.  Our effort in this paper addresses this knowledge gap. We bring attention to different methods for empirically capturing varieties of peace when peace is approached as a situation, as a relationship or as an idea. Though our purpose is to illustrate a “smorgasbord of methods” for analyzing varieties of peace, we also argue that any effort to approach such an analysis ought to be based on theoretically coherent sets of types. This is so because it will allow the researcher to provide a more nuanced picture of different varieties of peace.

In the peace and conflict literature, a ceasefire is often conceived as an event or an outcome of an armed conflict. In this paper, I argue that we can gain a better understanding of ceasefires by approaching them as dynamic processes of change and by exploring patterns of interactions and changing relationships in the context of ceasefire. I use this approach in a case study of the ceasefire between the government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in Mindanao. I suggest that the Mindanao ceasefire can be conceptualized as a form of “coexistence ceasefire,” and I trace the development of the particular ceasefire structure and interactions to features of the armed conflict, including its territorial dimension and the presence of multiple sources of violence. The paper contributes a new and more nuanced way of studying ceasefires that provides a better understanding of their characteristics and dynamics and of how they shape and in turn are shaped by the broader conflict landscape.

While previous research has focused on the conflicts and division in Mitrovica, Kosovo, the present article explores how peace and conflict are intertwined in the post-war city by focusing on sites where communities live side by side in an otherwise segregated city. A key finding is that the most conflictual residential areas in northern Mitrovica also are places where what we call peace acts, peace issues and peace perceptions are found. Our research suggests that even in spaces in the city where a history of violence is entrenched, the situation can seldom be reduced to be seen only as purely conflictual; rather, these ‘hotspots’ often prove to be spaces where reproduction of peace – however quotidian – also occurs at the same time. This points us to the complexity of the realities of peace, where remnants of war and potential for a co-existing peace often overlap and are sometimes intrinsically intertwined.

For decades, peace and conflict studies have devoted more attention to conflict than to peace, and despiteits centrality, peace itself has been under-conceptualized. In this paper, we propose a theoretical frameworkand methodologies to make peace beyond the absence of war researchable. The framework is designed to capture varieties of peace between and beyond dichotomous conceptions of positive versus negative peace, or successful versus failed peace processes. To capture the complexity of peace in its empirical diversity, our framework approaches peace in three different ways: as a situation or condition in a particular locality; as a web of relationships; and as ideas or discourses about what peace is or should be. These approaches provide different avenues for researching peace, and taken together they provide a fuller picture of what peace is, how it is manifested, experienced, and understood. We argue that this framework provides a way forward in advancing conceptual understandings and empirical analyses of peace that can facilitate systematic, comparative, qualitative analyses while at the same time accounting for the complex, multifaceted nature of peace.

The concept of resilience is currently making its way into the field of peace and conflict studies, but it is a concept with different meanings and implications. The argument advanced in this paper is that in order to make the most of resilience thinking, the field should not conceive of resilience merely as the ability to bounce back to an original state after a disturbance, a conceptualization usually referred to as “engineering resilience.” Instead, it should engage with “ecological resilience,” which refers to the amount of disturbance that a system can absorb before being pushed across a threshold from one stable state to another. I also relate these different types of resilience to another distinction between specified resilience to anticipated disturbances and general resilience to unknown ones. Finally, I consider a few other implications of resilience thinking for research on peace and conflict.