School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemHungry for Peace: Food and Posthumanist Peacebuilding in an Entangled World( 2023-04)Hungry for Peace explores some of the extraordinary and ordinary, but valuable, ways young people’s food practices in Melbourne, Australia produce and sustain conflict and peacebuilding. Food touches all aspects of life, yet its metabolical, political, and ecological impacts on conflict can be easily overlooked. Recent food shortages and unstable food supply chains – caused by pandemic lockdowns, economic volatility, and climate extremities – are stark reminders of how human survival and livelihood depend upon food. Drawing on peacebuilding, feminist peace studies, food research, and agential realism, this thesis considers how food affects peace and conflict. Over eight chapters, it develops a ‘posthumanist peacebuilding’ framework and adopts a ‘peace-led diffractive methodology’ whereby the understandings of peacebuilding and the foci of peace research are not restricted to human activities alone. Rather, food, bodies, animals, and other more-than-humans are envisioned as contributing agentically towards ‘becoming-peace’ as well. Informed by two years of participatory fieldwork with young people that included cooking, eating together, and interviews at food spaces like kitchens and supermarkets, this research investigates some of the ways that food facilitates ‘food peacebuilding’ and ‘food violence’. In adopting a posthumanist peacebuilding framework, Hungry for Peace’s unique intervention in peacebuilding is the foregrounding of food’s affordances in everyday peacebuilding. The central argument pivots on the notion that more-than-humans can become both instruments and active agents of peace and conflict (or ‘peace-conflict’) in a highly connected world. In advancing this conceptual shift, this thesis moves the locus of understanding peacebuilding beyond human actors to demonstrate how more-than-humans (like food, smells, tables, and atmospheres) are more than contextual features of food-related conflicts; they are, instead, key characters directly shaping how peace-conflict unfold. From this perspective, peace-conflict are more-than-human acts. Importantly, humans are not always positioned as perpetrators of violence and more-than-humans are not always situated as victims entitled to claims of innocence (and vice versa). This thesis invites peacebuilders to re-imagine more-than-humans as collaborators in peace work, resisting and producing peace-conflict beyond human consciousness. ‘We’ are all intra-connected and ordinary practices, like eating, hold opportunities for everyday forms of peacebuilding.
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ItemEmployment and durable peace in the conflict affected region of Sri Lanka( 2015)The thesis analyses the complex nexus between employment and peace in the conflict-affected region of Sri Lanka since the end of the war. Based primarily on in-depth interviews and using a multi-disciplinary theoretical framework, it identifies several factors that have created a disadvantageous employment situation for small businesses, youth, ex-combatants and war-widows, despite perceptions that improved employment is essential for durable peace. It concludes that the government, private sector and other stakeholders must alter their approaches and commitment to create employment-based peace-dividends.