ABSTRACT
Starting with a discussion of war as practice, this chapter offers a detailed introduction to new materialist ways of thinking, focusing on how this tendency is situated vis-à-vis its immediate predecessors, such as social constructivism and discourse theory. The aim is to elaborate on the potential advantages that new materialism offers to the study of political violence, as well as to a more general analysis of international relations, and especially how (slow) political violence is enacted and experienced. New materialism’s distinctive characteristic is that it pays unprecedented attention to issues of matter and materiality, understanding them as important agents contributing extensively to the production of knowledge and experience. This entails acknowledgment of the material-semiotic nature of all processes, as well as the spatio-temporal contexts in which they are situated, which remains especially vital in the context of urban space being a dynamic conglomerate of material arrangements and cultural meaning-making practices. The chapter thus argues that analysis of the role that urbanity (and the forces and rights associated therewith) plays in ethno-national conflicts reveals the complex material-semiotic nature of both urban practices and political violence.
