https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836720954479 Cooperation and Conflict 1–18 © The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0010836720954479 journals.sagepub.com/home/cac The spatial-relational challenge: Emplacing the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies Morgan Brigg Abstract The nascent spatial turn in peace and conflict studies is a promising development that expands conceptual resources and offers useful correctives to existing scholarship. However, the turn to space and place tends not to adequately emplace itself (including on its own European-derived terms) or sufficiently engage the socio-spatial difference of diverse peoples. Instead, a de- contextualised knower is invited to apply a new set of mobile scholarly tools in various settings without seriously considering diverse peoples’ conceptualisation and operationalisation of place in socio-political ordering. Long-standing Aboriginal Australian approaches to place, meanwhile, indicate the diversity and sophistication of approaches to space and place. They furthermore show that western political ontology – including the figures of the individual and the state embedded in much dominant scholarship – may not be relevant in many settings in which peace and conflict scholarship is undertaken. Realising the full potential of the spatial turn requires grappling with the relational emplacement of the knowing subject and the varied ways in which place configures socio-political order both for diverse peoples ‘in the field’ and in the centres of dominant forms of knowing in the Global North. Keywords Aboriginal Australia, indigenous people, place, political ontology, relationality, spacetime Introduction Recent peace and conflict studies interest in questions of spatiality, as well as cognate concepts including place, scale and vernacular and ontological security, have promise for progressing peace and conflict scholarship and practice. There is little doubt, as one recent edited collection amply demonstrates (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, 2016b), that this ‘spatial turn’ offers access to underexploited analytical concepts. The spatial turn is also a useful bulwark against the notion that space and place do not matter in a globalised Corresponding author: Morgan Brigg, The University of Queensland, 4072 Australia. Email: m.brigg@uq.edu.au 954479CAC 0 0 10.1177/0010836720954479Cooperation and ConflictBrigg research-article 2020 Article