Making alternative world(s)

: Unarmed civilian protection and nonviolent imaginaries of conflict

Crynodeb

This thesis examines the role of nonviolence in the practices and conflict imaginaries of Unarmed Civilian Protection (UCP) practitioners. UCP is a method of civilian (self-) protection which is not only unarmed, but nonviolent. Through interpretive empirical research and the utilisation of critical feminist and peace and conflict literature, this thesis asks: How does nonviolence shape the ways that UCP practitioners make sense of armed conflict and their responses to it? This is important for understanding how nonviolence can manifest in response to armed conflict and possible alternatives to traditional methods of protecting civilians. To answer this question, this thesis first situates nonviolence within the wider protection of civilian’s literature and introduces the case study of UCP. Then, drawing on both empirical material and conceptual literature, it outlines the nonviolent conflict imaginaries of practitioners. For analytical purposes, it separates these imaginaries into three distinct but interrelated themes: embodiment, space, and temporality. Finally, it restitches these separate analyses to demonstrate their co-constitutive nature, and how they come together to produce a worlding process that is different from ‘the one-world world’ present in much of the social science tradition. This thesis argues that nonviolent imaginaries of embodiment, space, and temporality allow for an undoing of binaries which are present in traditional approaches to the protection of civilians, such as peace/ war, civilian/ combatant, safe/ unsafe. By bringing together these imaginaries, which together constitute a worlding process, it argues that nonviolence is a way of knowing, doing and being. Nonviolence is a process which is both ontological and epistemic, meaning that it concerns not only ways of knowing (the) world(s), but of what (the) world(s) might be. This thesis provides new insights into (non)violence and armed conflict, through the introduction of alternate conflict imaginaries, creating new possibilities for both theory and practice.

Dyddiad Dyfarnu	2023
Iaith wreiddiol	Saesneg
Sefydliad Dyfarnu	Prifysgol Aberystwyth
Goruchwyliwr	Charalampos Efstathopoulos (Goruchwylydd) & Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (Goruchwylydd)