The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson befor returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
Note: You can print the entire lesson by clicking on the "Print" link above.
During this course, we have introduced you to a variety of geographical concepts that have some bearing on intelligence, military operations, and human security. We started with foundational human geographic concepts such as space, place, and scale, then applied these to identity, nationalism, cultural landscapes, mobility, and migration.
We want to end this course by examining two things. First, we will examine how place and scale interact in the concept of home — by emphasizing its multiscalar nature, and by discussing domicide. In this part of the lesson, you might notice that all of the concepts that we’ve been working with so far become interwoven in a complex tapestry of space and meaning. Second, we want to consider what it means for home (at the broader scales) to be peaceful. To that end, we introduce geographies of peace. We examine different ways of characterizing peace and its presence or absence in the national curriculum in several nations worldwide.
Upon completion of this lesson, you will be able to:
If you have any questions now or at any point during this week, please feel free to post them to the GEOG 571 - General Discussion Forum. (That forum can be accessed at any time in Canvas by opening the Lesson 0: Welcome to GEOG 571 module in Canvas.)
This lesson is one week in length. Please refer to the Calendar in Canvas for specific time frames and due dates. To finish this lesson, you must complete the activities listed below. You may find it useful to print this page out first so that you can follow along with the directions.
Step | Activity | Access/Directions |
---|---|---|
1 | Read | The lecture notes can be accessed by clicking on the Lesson 10: Home II -Scaling Home link in the Lessons menu on this page. |
2 | Required Reading |
Ó Tuathail, G., and Dahlman, C. (2006). Post-domicide Bosnia and Herzegovina: Homes, homelands and one million returns. International Peacekeeping, 13 (2), 242-260. Institute for Economics and Peace. (2021). Positive Peace Report 2020: Analysing the factors that sustain peace [1]. 17-27. Note: Registered students can access the unlinked readings in Canvas by clicking on the Library Resources link. |
2 | Recommended Reading |
Bell-Fialkoff, A. (1993). A brief history of ethnic cleansing. Foreign Affairs, 72 (3), 110-121. Black, R. (2002). Conceptions of ‘home’ and the political geography of refugee repatriation: Between assumption and contested reality in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Applied Geography, 22 (2), 123-138. Sells, M. A. (1996). The bridge betrayed: Religion and genocide in Bosnia. University of California Press. Note: Penn State students can access the optional readings through the Penn State Libraries. |
4 | Complete the Lesson 10 Discussion Forum. | Post your response to the Lesson 10 Discussion Forum in Canvas and comment on classmates' responses. You can find the prompt for the assignment in the Lesson 10 Discussion Forum in the Lesson 10: Home II -Scaling Home module in Canvas. |
5 | Complete the Lesson 10 Written Brief. | Submit your written brief to the Lesson 10 Written Brief dropbox in the Lesson 10: Home II -Scaling Home module in Canvas. |
As we noted in lesson 9 (section 5), one of the important developments that has emerged from critical inquiries of home is the understanding that home is not limited to the highly localized scale of the dwelling or household.
In your own experience, you might refer to a neighborhood, community, municipality, state, sub-national region, or country as home. For example, when traveling or being stationed overseas, you might broadly think about the United States as home; the cultural elements shared by states that are otherwise quite different (for example, Texas and New York) might be enough to evoke a sense of familiarity or homeliness. Or, when you’re visiting friends in another state or region within the United States, you might think of the state or region (e.g., the Midwest) where you live, broadly, as home. Within a state, you might consider a particular city home. Even within a city, you might consider a particular neighborhood as home, noting some important difference between ‘your’ neighborhood and other parts of town.
As you can see, even in our everyday lived experiences, home exists at multiple scales. We actively rescale our sense of home based on the circumstances in which we find ourselves relative to other people and places. When in conversation with others, it seems, the more common geographic ground we have with our conversation partner, the finer the scale at which we think about home. The reverse seems to hold for people who have less familiarity with our places: we tend to refer to home in broader ways.
But this — that is, individuals recasting home at a different scale in moments of self-identification — isn’t the only way that home is scaled or rescaled. Home can also be discursively rescaled by powerful actors such as governments, mass media, national or international organizations, or suprastate organizations (e.g., the European Union). We see rescalings of home in academic, professional, legal, political, artistic and governmental discourses alike.
For example, Blunt and Dowling (2006) present two pieces of 19th-century art depicting England as home. The first, a painting by George Elgar Hicks, is titled “The Sinews of Old England.” The image presents an idyllic and idealized portrait of domestic life in which the husband/father is clearly associated with things beyond the frame of the painting, while the wife/mother is focused on him. Behind her, the door to the cottage is open and items of daily use — cups, plates, and trays — are visibly displayed on the wall, marking the interior of the space as the wife/mother’s responsibility. The title of the painting and the scene depicted within it actively link the home to the nation. This painting provides an excellent example of Kaplan’s observation that the word domestic (in contrast to the word foreign) “has a double meaning that links the space of the familial household to that of the nation, by imagining both in opposition to everything outside the geographic and conceptual border of the home” (2003, p. 86).
The second, also from 1857, is a wood engraving titled “English Homes in India,” which was originally published in Harper’s Weekly on 21 November of that year. You can see the wood engraving by visiting the Sarmaya Collections page [4] or the Granger Historical Picture Archive [5] (you can click on the image to zoom in and pan around to see it in better detail). In the image, we see what looks like a sitting room in a Victorian English home, in which a woman sits on a divan, suckling an infant while a child sits beside her, reading an alphabet book. On the left side of the image, two swarthy men enter, one carrying a sword dripping blood and the other holding a blazing torch. Both bear menacing expressions. The image is a depiction of the Indian Mutiny of 1857-1858, which was an early rebellion by Indians against their colonizers. The image, as Blunt and Dowling argue, “depicts the vulnerability of English homes and families in the midst of a violent uprising” (2006, p. 142). It is not just the home itself, however, that is threatened here, but England’s colonial rule — and (from a nationalist perspective), England itself.
In both of the examples presented above, we see home upscaled in artistic depictions that reflect nationalist discourses: England-as-home is an idealized site of traditional gender roles; in this context, home without the presence of men is constructed as vulnerable to violent (and foreign) intrusion (that this “foreign” intrusion takes place in a colonial setting should is an irony that needs to be recognized here)
In this way, rhetoric or messaging that upscales home to the nation or country can be a rallying cry for nationalist expansion or a motivator for defense. Consider, for example, the litany of books dealing with international politics or homeland security that have the phrase “at home and abroad” in the title:
We see similar upscalings, with similar implications, in geopolitical discourses. Consider, for example, the creation of the United States Department of Homeland Security, which was founded in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. The department’s mission statement reads: “With honor and integrity, we will safeguard the American people, our homeland, and our values.” Notice here the use of homeland. This is an intentional upscaling: in conjunction with the rest of the statement, the term “homeland” combines the emotional force of home that you read about in Lesson 9 with the shared identity of the nation. The mission statement scales home upward to encompass both the nation (the American people) and the territory of the state.
Blunt, A., and Dowling, R. (2006). Home. Routledge.
Kaplan, A. (2003). Homeland insecurities: Some reflections on language and space. Radical History Review, 85, 82-93.
We’ve established how home can exist at multiple scales, and we’ve seen several examples of how home can be upscaled to refer to the nation (e.g., “at home” vs. “abroad,” and the use of homeland in geopolitical contexts). Now we want to turn our attention to the concept of domicide.
Coined by Porteous and Smith in their book Domicide: The global destruction of home, they define domicide as
the deliberate destruction of home by human agency in pursuit of specified goals, which causes suffering to the victims. In addition, we specify that the human agency is usually external to the home area, that some form of planning is often involved, and that the rhetoric of public interest or common good is frequently used by the perpetrators. (Porteous & Smith, 2001, p. 12)
So, domicide involves the deliberate and planned destruction of one or more homes to cause suffering to people in a move that is often presented as being for the common good.
Domicide is so effective, they argue, because “place is meaningful to people, and that the place called home is the most meaningful of all” (Porteous & Smith, 2001, p. 6). What’s more, Porteous and Smith recognize from the outset that home is multiscalar: “home is not simply one’s dwelling, but can also be one’s homeland or native region” (Porteous & Smith, 2001, p. 6).
They note that while domicide often happens in the course of war, it can also happen in everyday contexts, though often at a more localized scale. Initiatives that carry the weight of the law (or the right of eminent domain) behind them, such as urban redevelopment, economic restructuring, the creation of new infrastructure such as roads and airports (but also dams, reservoirs, or Olympic stadiums), and even the creation of national parks, can result in domicide. This may be a less violent or extreme form of domicide than what we see in wartime contexts, but it is domicide all the same.
The effects of domicide can be devastating. Beyond depriving someone of a place to live, domicide has a variety of potential consequences that strike at the intangible and psychological:
the destruction of a place of attachment and refuge; loss of security and ownership; restrictions on freedom; partial loss of identity; and a radical de-centring from place, family, and community. There may be a loss of historical connection; a weakening of roots; and partial erasure of the sources of memory, dreams, nostalgia, and ideals. If home has multiple, complex meanings that are interwoven, then so does domicide. (Porteous & Smith, 2001, p. 63)
Thus domicide can be a powerful tool, or a powerful weapon — one that knows no geographic limits. There have been examples of domicide throughout the world, from the destruction of separatist Eritrean villages in the early 1960s in Ethiopia, to the redevelopment of Shanghai between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. The United States itself is no stranger to domicide, especially for marginalized communities. Fullilove (2004) documents case studies in Black neighborhoods in three US cities where urban renewal resulted in domicide (though she never uses the term), and domicide via the mass removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands to reservations in the 19th century is a major part of US history (see, e.g., Porteous & Smith, 2001, pp. 77-80).
As you can imagine, like home, domicide is something that can unfold at a range of scales — from a single dwelling to an entire ethnic homeland. Think back to the two pieces of art we mentioned in section 10.3. In the second (“English Homes in India”), we see an example where the threat of domicide for a single home can be interpreted as a threat against the nation itself.
In the reading by Ó Tuathail and Dahlman (2006), we see domicide as a central part of the ethnic cleansing perpetrated against Bosnian Muslims during the Bosnian War in the 1990s. In their assessment of domicide, they note that the destruction of home extended beyond houses and into communities. In this context, the destruction of home was linked directly to the desire to create a pure ethnoreligious homeland; there is a kind of twisted scalar inversion in which the attempt to create a (broad-scale) homeland meant destroying other’s homes at the scale of the building and the community.
Yet this is just one interpretation with regard to home and scale in an instance of domicide. The Bosnian War and the centuries of history that preceded it are intricate and complex, and the post-domicide results have proven to be equally so. As you read Ó Tuathail and Dahlman, pay close attention to the ways that home and scale interact — but also to the ways that cultural landscapes, identity, nationalism, and mobility tie into these for both pre- and post-domicide Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Ó Tuathail, G., and Dahlman, C. (2006). Post-domicide Bosnia and Herzegovina: Homes, homelands and one million returns. International Peacekeeping, 13(2), 242-260.
Bell-Fialkoff, A. (1993). A brief history of ethnic cleansing. Foreign Affairs, 72(3), 110-121.
Black, R. (2002). Conceptions of ‘home’ and the political geography of refugee repatriation: Between assumption and contested reality in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Applied Geography, 22(2), 123-138.
Sells, M. A. (1996). The bridge betrayed: Religion and genocide in Bosnia. University of California Press.
Porteous, D., and Smith, S. E. (2001). Domicide: The global destruction of home. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001.
Fullilove, M. T. (2004). Root shock: How tearing up city neighborhoods hurts America, and what we can do about it. One World.
We spend a lot of time in this course discussing conflict, security, and the military. And to be fair, the focus of many disciplines, including but not limited to communication, history, and geography, are often focused on a more violent or war-driven rhetoric, paying little attention to nonviolence and peaceful rhetoric. Megoran (2011) specifically states that “geography is better at studying war than peace.” History books tend to focus on wars and conquest, and not peace. Often, peace is discussed as a result or the conclusions of those wars. Is this a self-fulfilling prophecy? Is it because the majority of our academic and media-based experiences are filled with these images that they become the norm and peace or nonviolence is the exception?
While this is the predominant rhetoric, I’m certain at least a few individuals who promote a more peaceful rhetoric come to mind, including (but certainly not limited to) the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., and His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
But, before deep diving into this dichotomy and what it means, we must start with the simple question: what does peace even mean? If we go back to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, peace is:
“A state of tranquility or quiet”
This tranquility; however, should not simply be seen as the absence of war or violence as is often insinuated. Peace can be both positive and negative in nature (Institute for Economics and Peace, 2021; Megoran, 2011). This absence of war or violence is “negative peace.” Positive peace, on the other hand, is more about cooperation and “the integration of human society” (Galtung, 1964). The Institute for Economics and Peace (2021) describe eight aspects of positive peace, which include:
Thus peace isn't as simple as describing the lack of war or violence. Megoran (2011) maintains peace as a process, fragile, ever changing, and potentially easily broken. It is something that must be maintained and continuously worked towards, as enumerated in Megoran’s article. These notions of a definition of peace beyond the lack of war are not often discussed or researched, and thus is perhaps a research area that geographers should invest more heavily in.
Institute for Economics and Peace. (2021). Positive Peace Report 2020: Analysing the factors that sustain peace [1]. 17-27.
Institute for Economics and Peace. (2021). Positive Peace Report 2020: Analysing the factors that sustain peace [1].
Megoran, N. (2021). War and peace? An agenda for peace research and practice in geography. Political Geography, 30, 178-189.
Attempts to quantify peace often fall into the negative peace category: “peace as a lack of war or violence.” One such quantification attempt is the Global Peace Index (GPI), which is maintained by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), and does ascribe to that definition. The GPI takes into account 23 weighted indicators based on this concept of negative peace. The 23 indicators fall into three broad categories, which include ongoing domestic and international conflict, societal safety and security, and militarization. For an exhaustive list of the indicators and their weights, please feel free to review the methodology appendix of the report [6].
Rank | Country |
---|---|
1 | Iceland |
2 | New Zealand |
3 | Denmark |
4 | Portugal |
5 | Slovenia |
6 | Austria |
7 | Switzerland |
8 | Ireland |
9 | Czech Republic |
10 | Canada |
Rank | Country |
---|---|
163 | Afghanistan |
162 | Yemen |
161 | Syria |
160 | South Sudan |
159 | Iraq |
158 | Somalia |
157 | Democratic Republic of the Congo |
156 | Libya |
155 | Central African Republic |
154 | Russia |
While the preponderance of the GPI takes into account negative peace, IEP also calculates a Positive Peace Index (PPI). The PPI empirically takes into account what IEP deems the eight pillars of positive peace discussed above. While the IEP doesn’t enumerate the country rankings explicitly for PPI as it does for GPI, one of the interesting aspects is the comparison of the ranks of GPI to the PPI to help predict potential violence in countries. The IEP categories countries with either a positive peace deficit, a positive peace surplus, or stable. If a country is 20 places higher in GPI than PPI, it is considered to have a positive peace deficit. If the converse is true, the countries are considered to have a positive peace surplus. Countries are considered stable if they have a difference of less than 20 places between the GPI and PPI rankings. The IEP (2021) maintains that the peace experienced by countries with a positive peace deficit generally will not last (though there are some exceptions to this). These indices are certainly an interesting quantification of peace and the interplay between positive and negative peace constructs.
One interesting example is the case of Norway. Norway is often seen as a “peace nation,” as evidenced by Skanland (2010) deep dive into Norway’s peace discourse, engagements, and national identity. When looking at the IEP’s 2021 GPI, this moniker would not be apparent, with Norway’s ranking being 14, behind several other nations. However, when you consider the 2020 PPI rankings, Norway’s ranking is 1. When compared, the difference between GPI and PPI rankings for Norway is 13, placing it in IEP’s “stable” category. While even in terms of GPI Norway is considered to be one of the top nations, it is also important to consider its ranking in terms of positive peace as well. These nuances are important to consider when thinking about peace.
What do you think is lost in the attempts of the IEP to quantify positive and negative peace?
What do you think this approach does well? What do you think it does poorly?
In your exercise for this lesson, you’ll examine the role of scale in some of the quantifications. So be thinking about how these indices can change with scale.
Institute for Economics and Peace. (2021). Global Peace Index 2021: Measuring peace in a complex world [6].
Skanland, O. H. (2010). ‘Norway is a peace nation’: A discourse analytic reading of Norwegian peace engagement. Cooperation and Conflict, 45(1), 34-54.
While we recognize that peace and peace studies are often absent from or make up small portions of curriculum, is this true globally? Education and curriculum writ large often serve to convey to a new generation societal norms and beliefs, but how much of that is geared towards peace? Standish and colleagues have attempted to analyze this for primary and secondary education using a mixed methods approach in a project called Peace Education Curriculum Analysis Project (2014-2017). This project focuses on national level curriculums and determining to what extent these curriculum delve into peace education. Several studies have been conducted and published in peer reviewed journals, including analyses of New Zealand, Sweden, Scotland, and Mexico (Kertyzia and Standish, 2019; Standish and Nygren, 2018; Standish and Joyce, 2016; Standish, 2016). On their project’s website, they also post “report cards” for countries that they have analyzed, as well as a description of that score. The highest score of the ten countries with report cards is a C+, which for any student is probably a pretty disappointing grade. That said, it is telling that even the countries that score relatively high on GPI and PPI by IEP standards may still be lacking in the inclusion of peace-driven curriculum at the national level. That said, it doesn’t mean that countries are not attempting to incorporate topics that they feel will reduce violence into their curriculum. Recall from Lesson 5 that the Saudi Ministry of Education has implemented programs in schools that “seek to educate students about the dangers of terrorism and aim to promote nationalism” (Boucek, 2008). The integration of a more peace-related curriculum may be highly beneficial world-wide.
Higher education is not exempt from these critiques either, including the discipline of Geography. Megoran (2011) encourages geographers to find examples of geographies of peace, study them, provide lessons learned, and devise methods to apply them to current situations. This includes peace geographies at a variety of scales (a common theme throughout this course).
While this section is not intended to be a comprehensive review of the literature related to peace education, it is certainly an interesting cross section. Megoran (2011) also reminds readers that peace is a process that needs constant work and can be quite fragile. As a process that needs constant work, world-wide education from early childhood education to secondary education to the collegiate level could likely benefit from a greater integration of peace-related curriculum. This is certainly an area that could benefit from a greater research emphasis.
Kertyzia, H., and Standish, K. (2019). Looking for peace in the national curriculum of Mexico. International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, 11(1), 50-67.
Megoran, N. (2021). War and peace? An agenda for peace research and practice in geography. Political Geography, 30, 178-189.
Standish, K., and Nygren, T. (2018). Looking for peace in the Swedish National Curricula. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 4(2), 92-106.
Standish, K., and Joyce, J. (2016) Looking for peace in the National Curriculum of Scotland. Peace Research, 48(1-2): 67-90.
Standish, K. (2016). Looking for peace in national curriculum: the PECA Project in New Zealand. Journal of Peace Education, 13(1): 18-40.
You are an analyst at a non-governmental organization (NGO). You are tasked with analyzing the Global Peace Index (GPI), comparing where the United States ranks in relation to other nations. You are also tasked at analyzing the role of scale in the index by assessing the spatial patterns within the United States Peace Index. What are the spatial patterns? What role does scale play? Using what you have learned about peace, what are some strategies the United States can employ to improve their GPI ranking and have more equitable Peace Index scores in the 50 states?
Remember the elements of a written brief introduced to you in Lesson 8.
Review the Global Peace Index map and rankings [7] on the Vision of Humanity website.
Note: you can change the year by clicking on the “Year.” If you click on the country, you can see a country’s overall ranking, index score, and scoring on individual components.
Review the United States Peace Index map and rankings [8] on the Vision of Humanity website.
Note: The map interface is similar to that of the GPI. Notice that the latest data for the US is from 2010. Consider comparing it to the GPI for the United States in 2010.
Within your written brief, you must provide:
Your brief should:
When you have completed your written brief, return to the Lesson 10: Home II - Scaling Home module in Canvas and look for the Lesson 10 Written Brief dropbox. The dropbox has instructions for submitting the assignment.
This week synthesized many of the concepts we’ve discussed throughout the course to discuss the multiscalar nature of home. In this way we examine domicide and its effects. While this and many of the topics of the course have a very conflict-centric focus, we wanted to end the course thinking about the discourse surrounding peace and home. While there has been a general dearth of literature on the topic, we examine the different definitions of peace, how it is potentially quantified, and how it is reflected in national curricula globally. We hope that our discussion of peace will challenge you to think about how to incorporate more peace-oriented analysis into intelligence analysis.
Please return to the Lesson 10 module in Canvas where you will find the Lesson 10 Discussion Forum which contains the discussion prompt and specific instructions for the assignment.
Please check the Canvas Syllabus or Calendar for specific time frames and due dates.
You have reached the end of Lesson 10! Double-check the to-do list on the Lesson 10 Checklist page [10] to make sure you have completed all of the activities listed.
If you have any questions now or at any point during this week, please feel free to post them to the GEOG 571 - General Discussion Forum. (That forum can be accessed at any time in Canvas by opening the Lesson 0: Welcome to GEOG 571 module in Canvas.)
Links
[1] https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/PPR-2020web_0.pdf
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sinews_of_old_england.jpg
[3] https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/pdm/
[4] https://sarmaya.in/objects/etchings-engravings/english-homes-in-india/
[5] https://www.granger.com/results.asp?image=0017269
[6] https://www.visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/GPI-2021-web-1.pdf
[7] https://www.visionofhumanity.org/maps/#/
[8] https://www.visionofhumanity.org/maps/us-peace-index/#/
[9] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog571/node/495
[10] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog571/node/326