Uneasy Peace: Unresolved Tensions and Veiled Histories

This chapter by Mandipa Ndlovu in Critical Perspectives on Global Peace and Peacebuilding interrogates the limits of liberal peace frameworks through an empirical and conceptual exploration of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city. Drawing on qualitative research conducted between 2021 and 2024, it introduces the concept of uneasy peace - a condition marked not by overt conflict, but by the persistence of silence, denial, and myth in the face of historical trauma, particularly the unresolved legacies of the Gukurahundi massacres. In doing so, it critiques dominant peacebuilding paradigms that fail to grapple with the entanglement of memory, marginalization, and socio-political survival in post-colonial states. Rather than relying on binaries of positive versus negative peace, the chapter conceptualizes uneasy peace as a fragile and adaptive mode of coexistence, underpinned by collective silence and intergenerational negotiation. It examines how silence operates both as a form of political erasure and as a locally situated strategy of resilience which some participants described as asifuni bumbulu (“we do not want nonsense”). Through situated narratives, the chapter uncovers how trauma is negotiated across generations, shaping urban identity, economic precarity, and communal cohesion within Bulawayo’s marginalized geography. By grounding peace in lived experiences where truth-telling may threaten more than it heals, the chapter challenges the normative assumptions of liberal peacebuilding and calls for context-sensitive approaches that recognize memory, denial, and cultural survival as constitutive elements of peace. Ultimately, it argues that Bulawayo’s uneasy peace is not a failed peace, but a negotiated response to systemic exclusion—a vernacular peace that must be taken seriously within the broader discourse of transitional justice in Zimbabwe.