Spatial Stories of Peace. The case of the Greater Gola Landscape.

Sammanfattning: This thesis follows the interdisciplinary tradition that exists in global studies by performing a spatial analysis of the imaginary of peace(s) and conservation as a practice of peace(s) and thus contributing to the fields of environmental peacebuilding, peace- and conflict studies, and geography. The thesis has its theoretical starting point in environmental peacebuilding and is drawing and building on spatial theory as a way of understanding the construction of peace(s) in the context of the Greater Gola Landscape, straddling the border of Sierra Leone and Liberia. The thesis aims to investigate and analyze the spatial imaginary of peace(s) and trace its underpinning norms, ideas, and assumptions. The thesis approaches the research problem though a case study design, utilizing a textual and visual thematic analysis performed on material produced by local newspapers and local NGOs. The theoretical ideas of spatiality, drawn from the spatial turn in peace- and conflict studies, as well as geographers engaged in the question of peace(s), underpin the thesis. It utilizes the concept of spatial stories as analytically constituting spatial imaginaries. The thesis finds that the dominating story, and thus imaginary, is that of conservation as peace, and bringer of inevitable development.