Hungry for PeaceFood Peacebuilding in an Entangled World

Explores how everyday food practices actively shape conflict and cultivate peace

• Explores how everyday food practices contribute to both conflict and peacebuilding, using participatory fieldwork with young people in Melbourne, Australia
• Demonstrates how more-than-human actors – including food, tables, gardens and built environments – act as instruments and agents of peace-conflict
• Challenges anthropocentric approaches in Peace and Conflict Studies, proposing a posthumanist framework where peace-conflict is more-than-human
• Highlights multi-sensorial experiences of peace and conflict, including smells, tastes, atmospheres and embodied practices
• Draws together interdisciplinary research from anthropology, sociology, international relations, intercultural studies, animal studies and ethics
• Extends the everyday peacebuilding agenda by examining youth practices in Australia, a context often seen as peaceful, and by connecting Continental and Eastern philosophical perspectives

Hungry for Peace invites readers into the remarkable world of food as an active agent of conflict and connection. From community kitchens to food festivals and shared meals around tables, Elaine Mei Lien Pratley shows how food shapes tensions, sparks understanding and produces everyday peace. Through participatory fieldwork with young people in Melbourne, Australia, ordinary acts – eating consciously, sampling unfamiliar cuisines and reducing food waste – emerge as powerful, agentic gestures that negotiate conflict, build trust and nurture connection.

Blending feminist peace studies, food research and posthumanist theory, the book reveals how more-than-human actors – smells, ingredients, tables and atmospheres – participate directly in peace and conflict. It shows food practices not as background, but as lively collaborators in peacebuilding, offering new ways to understand, navigate, and shape conflict in our interconnected, entangled world.