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Between 2011 and 2021, political reforms and renewed peace efforts significantly reduced violence in many of Myanmar’s conflict-affected regions. Despite this, people living in these areas did not agree that they enjoyed peace; rather, this period is described as a continuation of the war’s many injustices, marked by discrimination, marginalization, and fear. This chapter argues that a relational analysis of peace can enable us to make sense of this gap between drastically different assessments of peace and conflict. The analysis draws on focus group discussions, interviews, and participant observation with local civilians, civil society activists, and members of non-state armed groups conducted in 2019 in two regions, Kayah and Mon States. A relational perspective uncovers the fact that the fundamental logics of key conflict relationships, between the Myanmar state and ethnic minority groups and communities, have not been transformed by the peace process but instead manifest themselves in new ways, whereby armed violence has been replaced by other forms of domination, underpinned by inequality, non-recognition, and distrust. Exploring these relational dynamics enables us to pinpoint areas and issues that prevent the emergence of a sustainable and legitimate peace, and demonstrate the importance of relational aspects for people’s experiences of everyday peace.

This article adds to the emerging ‘temporal turn’ in peace studies by addressing methodological questions about how temporality can be captured and explored in empirical studies. Developing our methodological tools for exploring time and temporality, we argue, is critical to move beyond the supposed linear temporality of peace processes, and make visible alternative temporal frameworks that shape everyday experiences and contestations around peace in conflict-affected contexts. Drawing on a study of two conflict-affected areas in Myanmar, we contribute towards this aim through a discussion of how life history diagrams helped us trace temporal conflicts between overarching narratives of political transition and everyday experiences of insecurity. This facilitated a deeper understanding of how relationships between war and peace, and between past, present and future, were manifested and made sense of in people’s everyday lives. Our use of life history diagrams revealed temporal conflicts between the dominant, linear temporality of the Myanmar transition, and more complex and cyclical temporal frameworks people used to describe their realities. Life history diagrams also facilitated narratives that troubled an events-based temporality focused on macro-political shifts such as ceasefire agreements and elections, and instead foregrounded everyday experiences of continuous insecurity and struggle.

In 2009, the war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam ended through a military victory for the government. Features of the post-war peace - including persistent militarization, strengthened nationalism, and communal violence - have commonly been attributed to a failed attempt at liberal peacebuilding followed by an authoritarian backlash. In contrast, this study shows how the post-war peace has been shaped by historical processes of state formation aimed at consolidating the Sri Lankan state. The article takes a long-term approach to analysing peace in Sri Lanka through the lens of state formation. The analysis centres on four key aspects: (1) post-war security, (2) state–minority relations, (3) socio-economic aspects, and (4) electoral politics. We conclude that there are currently few signs of any substantial state reform that would accommodate the continuous demand for social justice and minority rights that has spurred violent conflicts in Sri Lanka.

Conventional assumptions locating peacebuilding temporally after violence have largely prevented exploration of how peacebuilding is practiced amidst conditions of ongoing violence. This article addresses this gap by analysing how Myanmar women's activists have devised strategies in pursuit of peace, amidst ongoing armed conflict, from the 1990s and onwards. The findings demonstrate that women's inter-ethnic cooperation contributed to transform conflict divides long before the initiation of formal national peace negotiations in 2011. Further, theorizing these peacebuilding practices, the article provides new insights into the dynamics of women's peace activism of relevance beyond the case of Myanmar.

This article draws on feminist perspectives on the everyday to explore women’s everyday experiences of peace in Kayah state in Myanmar. We locate the daily practices women engage in to maintain life and minimise violence, making visible women’s contributions to everyday peace. In addition, we examine the ways in which women are disproportionally affected by war and prevented from benefitting from post-war changes. Our findings demonstrate that practices of care and silence are key avenues for women’s everyday peacebuilding, through which women sustain peace, ensure survival, and minimise violence in their families and wider communities. At the same time, however, these practices are conditioned by and may contribute to gendered insecurity and marginalisation for women. Through this focus, our analysis shows how women’s positioning in gendered relations of power may both enable their agency in peacebuilding and reinforce their gendered inequality and marginalisation in the post-war period. We conclude that while everyday peace practices may hold the potential for positive change, these can also contribute to the reproduction of inequality, oppression and structural violence.

Within peace and conflict research, the study of peace has received far less scholarly attention than the study of war and violence (Gleditsch et al., 2014). Moreover, among the studies that pay particular attention to peace, a negative peace conception, which equates peace with the absence of direct violence between formerly warring parties, has generally dominated. Consequently, peace itself is underconceptualised. Existing conceptions of peace do not provide analytical tools that can systematically describe, compare, and explain how peace varies across contexts. By way of illustration, the peace in Sri Lanka is evidently different from the peace in South Africa or the peace in Cambodia, and peace in all of these contexts has also evolved in different ways over time. Postwar processes of peacebuilding and development are complex and messy, and the outcomes are both unpredictable and highly diverse. This situation has prompted recent calls for the development of new theoretical frameworks, analytical tools, and methodologies that can enable nuanced empirical analyses and assessments of peace across empirical cases (e.g., Davenport et al., 2018; Diehl, 2016; Höglund & Söderberg Kovac, 2010; Jarstad et al., 2019).

This special issue, titled Exploring Varieties of Peace, responds to these calls and seeks to advance conceptual understandings as well as empirical analyses of peace that provide new insights into the ways in which peace is manifested, experienced, and understood. The special issue originates from the Varieties of Peace research programme and network, which was launched in 2017 at Umeå University, Sweden, with support from the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences.1 Several of the contributions were discussed at the Varieties of Peace Asia Conference, which was organised in Jakarta, Indonesia, October 22–24, 2019, in cooperation with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

This article explores processes of place-making and space-making around the erection of the Aung San statue in Kayah state in Myanmar and draws out the competing visions of peace that are articulated through them. The raising of the statue unleashed widespread public protest, which was largely met by repression by the Myanmar authorities. Drawing on interviews, focus groups, and documentary sources, we argue that the statue constitutes an attempt to establish a post-war political order centred on the reassertion of government authority in ethnic minority areas and the creation of unity through the imposition of one national identity. However, the statue has also been appropriated as a key site for the articulation of alternative visions of peace and development. The conflict around the statue thereby makes visible ongoing struggles over the meaning of peace and shows how these post-war struggles are fought on and through space and place.

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.

This article explores the gendered dynamics of Myanmar’s post-war economic reforms through an analysis of women’s experiences of development in Kayah (Karenni) state. In Myanmar, ceasefires and a reduction of armed violence combined with state-driven economic liberalization reforms are conditioned by, but also contribute to remake, gendered relations of power, privilege and marginalization. While new land legislation and development projects have contributed to loss of land and livelihoods among rural populations in general, our study demonstrates that women living in conflict-affected border areas are disproportionally affected. Drawing on interviews and participant observation, we show how this is directly related to an overarching gendered political economy defined by legacies of conflict, discrimination and uneven processes of development, which positions women as particularly vulnerable to new forms of insecurity, dispossession and depletion generated by post-war economic transformations. We argue that the political and economic legacies of war in the state has produced a gendered division of labor that positions women as responsible for unpaid and underpaid informal and social reproductive labor, weakens women’s access to land, and results in physical, material, and emotional depletion. Through this focus, our study adds to research on development and economic restructuring in post-war contexts in general, and to emergent scholarship on Myanmar’s economic reforms in particular.

This special edition highlights how notions of peace, as well as institutions, practices and relationships that can foster peace, are shaped by and need to be anchored in their specific context of implementation. All three articles show that the experience of peace differs between people in the same location along axes of inequality and difference such as gender, ethnicity, and religion. In exploring how peace varies, we thus need to attend to variation across space and place as well as to variation between differently positioned individuals and groups within society. Shedding new light on these issues in their respective empirical settings, these three articles constitute important contributions to an ongoing research effort aiming to provide a fuller picture of what peace is, how it is manifested, experienced, and understood, and how this varies.