Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how young people’s engagement with food gives rise to possibilities for food-based peacebuilding. Building on new materialism, I offer a posthumanist peacebuilding framework that adopts a more-than-human ontology in peacebuilding.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how young people’s engagement with food gives rise to possibilities for food-based peacebuilding. Drawing on fieldwork with young people in Australia, this paper highlights some ways youth use their ordinary food practices to negotiate diversity and navigate potentially conflictual relationships. While situated in peacebuilding studies, this paper draws on new materialism, particularly Karen Barad’s agential realism, to rethink human-centred peacebuilding frameworks and understandings of agency and violence. Agential realism and peacebuilding practice share many commonalities despite evolving out of different disciplines. For instance, both frameworks regard all actors to be situated within a web of relations. They also appreciate the value of engaging with difference for the purposes of mutual growth. Building on agential realism, I offer a posthumanist peacebuilding framework that adopts a more-than-human ontology in peacebuilding.