The Paradoxical Construction of Peace: A Grounded Theory Study of Utopian, Heterotopian, and Dystopian Forms of Peace

Introduction
Peace is widely regarded as a desirable condition of social life, yet its meaning and the conditions through which it can be achieved have never been settled. Although peace has traditionally been understood in opposition to war, contemporary approaches have increasingly moved beyond the mere absence of armed conflict and have linked peace to justice, equality, dialogue, recognition, coexistence, and the quality of social relations. This conceptual expansion raises an important sociological question: how do social actors construct and experience peace in their everyday lives? From a sociological perspective, peace cannot be treated solely as a normative ideal or a political condition. Like other social realities, its meaning is produced and reproduced through interaction, language, interpretation, and lived experience. Different social actors may therefore attach different, and sometimes contradictory, meanings to what counts as peace. Peace may be associated with mutual understanding, dialogue, tolerance, empathy, and care, but it may also be understood as compromise, accommodation, the management of conflict, the absence of violence, compliance under pressure, or even the pursuit of particular interests. Consequently, the presence of what is called “peace” does not necessarily imply the same quality or social meaning. Despite the growing development of peace studies, peace has received comparatively less attention as an autonomous sociological phenomenon than as a subject of political science and international relations. In Iran, much of the existing scholarship has focused on normative, educational, cultural, political, or institutional dimensions of peace. Less attention has been paid to how social actors themselves interpret and construct the meaning of peace through their experiences and everyday interactions. The present study addresses this gap by examining peace as a socially constructed reality rather than as a fixed or universally defined condition. It asks: How do graduate students construct the meaning of peace in their experiences, and what patterns of meaning emerge from these constructions? The study seeks to identify the different configurations through which peace is understood and to explain the relationship among them.
Methodology
This study employed an exploratory qualitative design within a social constructionist orientation. Grounded theory was selected as the methodological strategy because the diverse meanings associated with peace could not be adequately accounted for through a single predetermined theoretical framework. The research was conducted among graduate students at the University of Tabriz during the 2022–2023 academic year. Participants were selected through purposive and theoretical sampling, with maximum variation used to capture diversity in participants’ social and cultural backgrounds. Data were collected through 43 in-depth semi-structured interviews. Although indications of theoretical saturation emerged by the 39th interview, four additional interviews were conducted to ensure greater confidence in the adequacy and stability of the emerging categories. Data analysis followed the coding procedures associated with Strauss and Corbin and involved constant comparison throughout the analytical process. The analysis moved from empirical statements to concepts, subcategories, main categories, and ultimately a central category that integrated the relationships among the emerging dimensions of peace.The existing literature was primarily used to enhance theoretical sensitivity and, at the discussion stage, to compare and interpret the findings rather than to impose predetermined categories on the data. The credibility of the analysis was pursued through consistency among the research design, conceptual orientation, research questions, data collection, coding procedures, data management, and interpretation.
Results and Discussion
The analysis generated three major configurations of peace—utopian, heterotopian, and dystopian peace—which were integrated into the central category of the paradoxical construction of peace. These configurations should not be understood as successive stages or mutually exclusive types. Rather, they represent interconnected and potentially overlapping dimensions of a dynamic social process. The term “paradoxical” refers not to a logical contradiction, but to the coexistence and tension of different, and sometimes contradictory, meanings of peace within social experience.
The first configuration, utopian peace, emerged as peace understood as an ethical-civic virtue and a normative horizon for social relations. Participants associated this configuration with mutual understanding, dialogue, reciprocal benefit, non-instrumental communication, equality in interaction, tolerance, empathy, compassion, and care. Two principal dimensions were identified. The first was communicative peace, in which peace is produced through understanding, dialogue, and forms of communication that recognize others as equal participants in social relations. The second was care-based or maternal peace, which emphasizes protection, attention to others, compassion, and responsibility for sustaining life. In this sense, utopian peace is not merely an abstract ideal; it is expressed through concrete ethical patterns of interaction. The second configuration, heterotopian peace, conceptualizes peace as something “of another kind”: neither a fixed ideal nor simply the absence of conflict. The notion of heterotopia was employed here as an analytical metaphor rather than as a claim of full equivalence with Foucault’s concept. This configuration consisted of agonistic peace and fluid peace. Agonistic peace recognizes conflict and difference as enduring features of social life. Peace therefore does not require the elimination of disagreement but may involve transforming hostile relations into forms of interaction, legitimate competition, compromise, and peaceful coexistence. Within this dimension, compromise-based peace refers to negotiated accommodation and mutual concessions, while tolerant peace refers to coexistence with difference without necessarily eliminating disagreement. Fluid peace, by contrast, emphasizes the contextual and relational character of peace. Its meaning changes according to circumstances and relationships and includes reflective, situation-based, and relation-based dimensions. Peace, from this perspective, is neither fixed nor universally transferable from one context to another. The third configuration, dystopian peace, reveals how the meaning of peace can be emptied, inverted, or separated from its emancipatory and ethical connotations. Here, peace may coexist with continuing conflict, unequal power relations, domination, or concealed forms of violence. Three dimensions were identified. Negative peace defines peace primarily through the absence or cessation of war, violence, or disorder. Forced or imposed peace refers to agreements or settlements produced under coercion, unequal power, necessity, or limited freedom of choice. Such arrangements may reduce immediate harm or the costs of conflict while lacking genuinely voluntary agreement. Instrumental peace treats peace as a means of pursuing interests, preserving positions, or reducing the costs associated with conflict. It includes both apparent or performative peace, in which the language or appearance of peace may conceal continuing rivalry, and interest-based peace, in which peace is pursued through strategic calculations of costs and benefits.
Taken together, the findings demonstrate that peace is not constructed around a single, stable meaning. Its meaning emerges through a continuing tension between normative aspiration, situated negotiation, social relationships, and relations of power. A condition may be interpreted as peaceful from one perspective while being experienced as coercive, superficial, or instrumental from another. The significance of the central category therefore lies not simply in identifying three different forms of peace, but in explaining their coexistence and interaction within a single social process. Peace may simultaneously contain ethical aspirations, negotiated accommodation, and the possibility of distortion or domination.
Conclusion
The findings recast peace as a dynamic and multi-layered social reality rather than as a singular and universally defined condition. The three configurations identified in the study illuminate different ways in which peace acquires meaning in social experience. Utopian peace emphasizes the ethical and civic dimensions of peace through understanding, dialogue, tolerance, empathy, compassion, and care. Heterotopian peace draws attention to the negotiated, relational, and context-dependent character of peace, in which disagreement and difference may persist without necessarily producing destructive relations. Dystopian peace, in contrast, demonstrates how peace can be reduced to the absence of overt conflict, imposed through unequal relations, or employed instrumentally while underlying tensions and inequalities remain. The central contribution of the study is therefore the concept of the paradoxical construction of peace, which connects these seemingly divergent meanings rather than treating them as isolated categories. Peace is constructed and reconstructed through everyday social relations and may acquire different meanings according to context, interaction, and power. Accordingly, the mere presence of peace in discourse or social practice does not necessarily indicate the same social quality or meaning. The distinction between the presence of peace and the quality of peace becomes particularly important when peace is maintained through coercion, strategic calculation, or the concealment of continuing conflict. The findings also suggest that the sociological study of peace should move beyond approaches that treat peace exclusively as an international condition, a political settlement, or an abstract normative ideal. Attention to everyday experiences makes it possible to examine how peace is produced, negotiated, sustained, reinterpreted, or distorted within social relations. In this respect, the utopian and heterotopian configurations identified in the study provide greater analytical space for understanding peace as an ongoing social, contextual, and ethical process, while the dystopian configuration draws attention to the possibility that the language and appearance of peace may coexist with domination or unresolved conflict. Thus, a sociological approach to peace requires not only asking whether peace exists, but also examining the meanings through which it is constructed and the social processes through which those meanings are maintained or transformed.