Materializing Peace: Finnish Women’s Wartime Narratives and the Politics of Embodied Transition

CBEES Advanced Seminar with Tarja Väyrynen, Professor of Peace and Conflict Research at Tampere Peace Research Institute (TAPRI), Tampere University, Finland.

Speaker: Tarja Väyrynen, Professor of Peace and Conflict Research at Tampere Peace Research Institute (TAPRI), Tampere University.

Discussant: Johanna Mannergren, Professor in Political Science and International Relations, and Research Coordinator at CBEES, Södertörn University.

Abstract: Major political events—wars, disasters, pandemics—are inscribed upon and remembered through the sensing, moving, and feeling body. Scholars in International Relations, feminist security studies, and feminist peace research increasingly attend to the embodied dimensions of war, exploring its physicality and the effects of trauma, memory, and silence. Yet, the embodied experiences of peace remain comparatively underexplored. Asking how bodies experience and enact peace shifts the analytical focus toward peace’s everyday, material, and relational dimensions. This article explores peace as a situated, corporeal, and experiential phenomenon through life-story narratives written by Finnish women who lived through the Second World War and its aftermath. Collected in 1987–88, four decades after the war’s end, these narratives reflect on daily life during wartime and the transition to peace. They offer a rich archive for examining how peace materializes in everyday spaces and relationships. Drawing on feminist materialist theory, I conceptualize peace as emergent of an intra-action—as dynamic entanglements of bodies, memories, environments, and material conditions. This approach contributes to feminist theorizing on peace by foregrounding the embodied and relational processes through which peace is continuously shaped, lived, and materially enacted.

Tarja Väyrynen is Professor of Peace and Conflict Research at Tampere Peace Research Institute (TAPRI), Tampere University, Finland, and a leading scholar in feminist peace research. Her work explores among other things embodied politics, affect theory, post-conflict memory, and feminist new materialism. She is co-author of Feminist Peace Research: An Introduction (Routledge, 2024) and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research (2021). Her recent articles include "War Agency in Women's Auxiliary Military Organizations: The Case of Lotta Svärd in Finland" (International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2023) and "Feminist Ecological Pacifism and Care in the Anthropocene" (2023), which examines pacifism through feminist environmental thinking. Väyrynen’s current research investigates peace as an emergent intra-action through Finnish women’s wartime life-stories, emphasizing the material, relational, and affective dimensions of peace in everyday life.