Spaces of Peace
Imaginaries of peace in the Russian and Ukrainian diaspora in Germany and their potential for conflict transformation
Contemporary international conflicts often extend far beyond their immediate geographical boundaries. Through migration and other transnational ties, experiences of conflict, political interpretations, and social tensions travel into new social contexts. Yet they are not simply reproduced there. Instead, they interact with different social conditions, biographical experiences, and social relationships, potentially giving rise to new conflict dynamics. Research on peace and conflict transformation must therefore also ask how conflicts unfold beyond their places of origin, how people navigate them in these new settings, and under what conditions peaceful coexistence remains possible.
In this project, funded by the German Foundation for Peace Research (Deutsche Stiftung Friedensforschung, DSF), we work with members of the Ukrainian and Russian diaspora communities in Germany to explore everyday knowledge about practices and possibilities of peaceful coexistence. What kinds of everyday conflicts does the war in Ukraine generate for people living in Germany, and how do they seek to navigate them? By addressing these questions, the project draws greater attention to the social embeddedness of peace and conflict transformation. It brings research on conflict transportation into dialogue with scholarship on everyday peace. We understand Ukrainian and Russian-speaking migrants not merely as people through whose relationships and practices conflicts are carried into new social contexts, but as holders of situated knowledge about how transnationalized conflicts are experienced, transformed, and negotiated in everyday life.
Empirically, the project draws on semi-structured individual interviews and a participatory future lab in which interview material is jointly interpreted with research partners from the social contexts under study. The findings are presented to a wider public in the digital exhibition Spaces of Peace, which will be available online from mid-November 2026 (www.raeume-des-friedens.de).
Duration: April 2024 to March 2027
