Urban restructuring, social economics and violence after conflict

This paper argues that the spatiality of violence needs to pay attention to the production of space as well as the nature of conflict in post-war conditions. Regimes of violence and how they live on in peace, emphasises the need to see how they are assembled in relation to economic, state and social processes implicated in placemaking. Coercion, control and surveillance are all part of the necessary assemblage of ethnic conflict, and in its aftermath, different forms of violence (or simply the threat of violence) reproduce identarian conflict and simultaneously exploit its reproduction. Liberal and increasingly neoliberal forms of peace fail to connect with the people and places most damaged by conflict and the relationship between poverty, sectarianism and place intensify the conditions for enduring forms of paramilitarism and ultimately violence. The paper draws on Belfast, Northern Ireland to argue that tackling the distinct economic conditions of the most marginal places is a critical but undervalued dimension of violence after peace. The analysis concludes by evaluating the potential of the Social and Solidarity Economy in transitional processes in which the relationship between violence, place and poverty are constitutive of embedded forms of materialist peacebuilding.