Narratives about war are, almost by definition, typically characterized by a primary focus on violence, suffering, cruelty, and harm. Yet, in the midst and wake of violence, people also fall in love, forge social and intimate relationships, and extend different forms of care to one another. Motivated by our failure to pay sufficient attention to love and care in our research to date, in this new research project we ask: How can centering practices of love and care illuminate different pathways for understanding the remaking of worlds in the wake of violence?
Our previous work has focused on different dimensions of feminist peace research, exploring the politics and hierarchies of victimhood in Colombia and the lived realities of male survivors of wartime sexual violence in Uganda. Our interlocutors — ranging from former combatants to victims and survivors of violence, and from humanitarian practitioners to bureaucrats of transitional justice — regularly carried out the work of care and love and narrated it to us. For reasons linked to hierarchies that privilege certain topics when it comes to telling stories about violence, however, we had failed to adequately represent those narratives of love and care in our work to date. Yet, love and care kept coming up and made themselves visible — even when we did not always ask directly about them, even when we failed to treat them as central to our scholarship. In light of this, our current research project explicitly seeks to take love and care seriously for illuminating experiences of conflict, violence, peace and survival. We thus take up Angela Lederach’s question: “What is seen—and made possible—when we widen the frame and focus the lens on life and love, rather than limit the field of vision to death and suffering?”1
We think of love and care not only as feelings, but also as active practices and potential sites of politics that shape how people survive and make sense of violence as well as imagine and enact lives in its wake. We deliberately do not provide a definition of love or care, instead letting our analysis be guided by the meanings our research interlocutors attach to these terms. At the same time, we are indebted to numerous frames from different disciplines and fields of practice that help us think about the work love and care do in the world.
In terms of love, bell hooks’ work provides a key conceptual frame, understanding love as an active verb, and a set of interactive processes, actions and practices, embedded in relationalities and inter-dependencies. According to hooks, love is composed of different ingredients, including care, along with “affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”2 Even though romantic and sexualized love within hetero-normative family or couple units often dominate narratives about love, these manifestations of love are only part of what we are interested in. We are also interested in the love of community, friendship, place, nature, ideas, and more.
In terms of care, we are less focused on the formal work of professional care-giving (e.g. by nurses) and are, instead, more attuned to the everyday manifestations and relations of care as practiced by those who do not necessarily have a professional mandate to provide care. In this vein, we think about care not only as an abstract value, but also as an active practice, encompassing “everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible […].”3
Building on these insights, then, in this project, we learn from interlocutors across different settings — Colombia, Uganda, Scotland and Germany — about how experiences and practices of love and care underpin the diverse ways in which people remake worlds in the wake of violence, displacement, conflict, war, grief and other forms of loss, including loss of species, loss of habitat or place, and ecological losses resulting from climate change.
These investigations take on diverse forms. For instance, our research documents how in Colombia and Uganda victims’ and survivors’ associations can serve as sites in which the work of love and care unfolds in the wake of violence. These groups can be understood as caring spaces where people with a shared reality of living through war and political violence get together and support one another in compassionate ways. Other facets of this work explore how people who have spent years in armed groups also experienced meaningful forms of kinship, social connections, relationships, or intimacy, and how these relations kept them alive under cruel and violent circumstances. As one formerly abducted person, who spent years in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group in Uganda explained to us: “yes there is violence and brutality, but there is also commonality and caring for each other.” Such sentiments are also shared by groups of forced migrants living in Germany, whom we also work with. Young, male and racialized forced migrants in particular are often imagined in connection with violence, danger and insecurity, or are alternatively portrayed as inherently vulnerable and in need of external aid and protection. But, as noted by the forced migrants we work with, “the people here in Germany, they do not see any love or care in our lives. Of course, we also love, and we care for others, but they fail to recognize our humanity as people who love and care.” When we take these dimensions seriously, and pay attention to them, we notice how different practices of love and care are often what keeps people alive, what fosters their survival, or what helps to re-make a life in the wake of violence.
Another core component of this work is a broadening of the frames of love and care to include nonhuman or more-than-human elements, such as place, nature, landscape, ideas about ancestors and kin, and more. Critical thinking across academic fields reminds us of the connectedness of all living things, composed as webs of reciprocity, recognizing mutual and relational bonds between societal, environmental, and spiritual worlds. In light of this, our ongoing work explores how people in Scotland pay close attention to nature, landscape and place, and how in a context of historical land dispossession and ongoing climate change, these practices of paying attention are profound, life-sustaining acts of care. In Uganda, too, conflict-affected communities live in close relationship and kinship with nature, landscape, place and the spiritual-ancestral world. In the wake of violence and in the face of ongoing environmental losses, our interlocutors are teaching us how they care for their ancestors and spirits, and for mountains, rivers and trees. They also highlight not only their own love of nature and place, but how they feel loved by and cared for by nature and place.
Importantly, we place these perspectives of love and care alongside people’s continuous experiences of suffering, harm, and violence. These realities coexist, rather than negating each other. Rather than suggesting an idealized or romanticized turn towards love and care in our depictions, we therefore cautiously propose a politics of simultaneity that allows us to recognize these realities side-by-side. At the same time, it is also important to acknowledge that love and care themselves can often be bound up in power discrepancies, and can indeed be cruel, violent, and characterized by domination and abuse. While narratives and ideals about love, care or compassion may often give off a “warm, fuzzy glow,” we are mindful to foreground these intricacies and potential tensions. Our hope is to contribute to a more meaningful, realistic exploration of love, care, violence, and loss.
Ultimately, then, taking love and care seriously offers more nuanced and textured representations of lived experiences in armed conflict, beyond a universalizing storyline focused on violence and cruelty. Illuminating practices of love and care renders visible multiple relations and realities that are attentive to the complex and intertwined dimensions and experiences of violence and its wake. As such, a focus on love and care can shift our sense of what peace looks and feels like, where it takes place, who is involved in facilitating it and how violence lives on and transforms people’s lives. Crucially, paying attention to love and care will reorient scholarly attention away from dominant individualized understandings of suffering towards more relational conceptions of violence, survival, nature, place, and peace.
Dr. Philipp Schulz, is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) at the University of Bremen. He currently leads three different research projects as principal investigator, among these a project dedicated to practices of love and care in armed conflict in collaboration with Dr. Roxani Krystalli, a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the University of St Andrews School of International Relations, whose research and teaching focuses on feminist peace and conflict studies, as well as on the politics of nature and place.
Rebecca Katusiime & Emmanuel Oloya: Love, War and Care, 2024
Poem: Rebecca Katusiime, Video: Emmanuel Oloya
The work was created in conjunction with the participatory research project and exhibition Love and Care in Conflict and its Wake realized in collaboration with young artists from Gulu, Northern Uganda, 2024.
- 1 Angela Lederach: Feel the Grass Grow: Ecologies of Slow Peace in Colombia. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2023, p. 398
- 2 bell hooks: All about Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow, 2001, pp. 4-5
- 3 Joan Tronto: Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. London: Routledge, 1993, p. 103