The Emergent Environmental Dimensions of Everyday Peace
Publisher: Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy
Author(s): Laura Peters
Date: 2026
Despite the entanglements between people and their environments in contexts of war and the aftermath, how people negotiate everyday life during peace transitions in changing environments remains largely unexplored in scholarship. This article examines the environmental dimensions of everyday peace—the mundane interactions and practices through which individuals navigate and cope with conflict and engage in care during transitions out of war—to better understand peace and sustainability in lived realities. The study presents the findings from a systematic literature review of 72 academic articles in the everyday peace literature. The majority of these publications featured little to no reference to people’s natural or built environments. This study subsequently conducted a thematic analysis of the 31 articles coded for environmental content to identify four emergent themes as a starting point to interrogate how environments shape and are shaped by everyday peace. The discussion makes two key arguments. First, environments are not passive backdrops, but they enable and constrain what people do and how they interact. Second, environmental change, degradation, and loss coevolve with changing human experiences, actions, and meaning (re)making. These intertwined relationships underscore that the dynamic material and affective qualities of everyday environments where people live, work, and spend their time are relevant to the study of social micro-interactions constituting survival and coexistence. This research opens new avenues for understanding and supporting relational recoveries from the human and environmental wounds of war, while also laying the groundwork for shared futures that depend on biosocial healing.