Opinion Peace Podcast for Un-Disciplined Scholars, hosted by Sladjana Lazic

Over the last two-two and a half decades, scholars have produced a vast number and variety of works that grappled with international and especially European interventions in the Western Balkans in the spheres of state- and peace-building, post-war reconstruction, and reconciliation, EU enlargement, and Europeanization. A simple google search based on any of the terms I've just mentioned would trick you into wondering, what could have possibly been left unasked in this area of academic inquire?

My today's guest on the Opinion Peace Podcast, Dr. Vjosa Musliu from the Vrije University in Brussels points out that most of this vast literature, however, prioritizes structures, institutions, methodical processes, EU enlargement, acquis communautaire, etc., but does not delve much into broader, sociological aspects of Europeanization. That is why Vjosa's new book "Europeanization and Statebuilding as everyday Practices - Performing Europe in the Western Balkans " analyzes Europeanization and processes related to Europeanization through everyday, mundane acts, practices, and events that are performed across four Western Balkan countries - Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, and Albania. The book is forthcoming in May with Routledge Studies in Intervention and Statebuilding.

In this episode, you will learn:

- What gets revealed when we look at Europeanization through the lens of everyday performativity;
- How EUrope is performed, staged, simulated, and even fetishized in the WB.
- What is the purpose and who is the audience for these performative acts;
- What and who gets “other-ed”, silenced, and even erased because they “do not fit” these imaginings of EUrope and Europeanness.
and many, many other things.

Dr. Vjosa Musliu is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, Free University of Brussels (VUB). Her research focuses on international interventions, EU external relations and the way the EU creates and maintains its relations with its ‘others’ and how such practices also creep into the academic work. Her research interests also include poststructuralism and decoloniality. At VUB she teaches on international conflicts, International Political Economy (IPE), and European History.  Previously she has worked as a postdoc at Ghent University and a lecturer at Kent University – Brussels School of International Studies.

She is also a co-editor of the Routledge Studies on Intervention and Statebuilding Series.

Twitter: @VjosaMusliu; Email: vjosa.musliu@vub.be

One of the first episodes of the Opinion Peace in 2019 was a conversation with Annick Wibben about Piecing up Feminist Peace Research. Since then, several aspects and themes of feminist peace research and analysis have been discussed in the podcast episodes with Swati Parashar, Élise Féron, Heleen Touquet, Philipp Schulz, Jamie Hagen, and Daniela Lai.
Today’s episode weaves those and many other threads of feminist peace research and analysis together to open a conversation about what peace research is and where it could and/or should go.

My guests on the podcast are editors of the soon to be published Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research: Tarja Väyrynen and Élise Féron from the Tampere Peace Research Institute in Finland, Swati Parashar from the School of Global Studies, at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and Catia Cecilia Confortini from the Wellesley College, in the US.

In today's episode, you will be hearing about:

- feminist approaches to questions of violence, justice, and peace;
- de-centering of peace research;
- feminist collective decision making and editing;
- slow and epistemic violence;
- feminist care and
- great reading suggestions.

For more about this episode visit: https://site.uit.no/opinionpeace/

The guests of the first Opinion Peace podcast in 2021 are Dr. Katarina Kušić and Dr. Jakub Zahora, editors of the open-access volume "Fieldwork as Failure. Living and Knowing in the Field of International Relations". Through thirteen chapters written by early-career researchers, the edited volume engages with fieldwork experiences and politics of methods in IR through the concept of failure. In their personal and analytical reflections, the editors and chapter contributors take the concept of failure from a personal and affective reaction towards epistemological, political, and structural points that the concept of failure reveals. They say failure can be productive. It can also present a resistance towards neoliberal hyper-productivity. Some failures, however, never turn into anything productive - and that is OK too. While they grapple with disappointments and feelings of failure that arise out of personal and structural expectations and images of ideal researchers, the authors of the chapters and the editors also acknowledge the joy of doing research through fieldwork and the value of community that they've built through vulnerability and intimacy in writing about fieldwork 'failure'.

As uncomfortable and hard as it gets, still admitting the failure and exploring it as an academic project is also a privilege. As Katarina put it: "To think about failure we have to have come out the other end quite well."

For more visit: https://site.uit.no/opinionpeace/