Intimacy-geopolitics: Exploring the utility of a peacebuilding framework to address domestic and family violence among resettled refugees in Australia

Peacebuilding as a concept emerged out of international efforts to address conflict and forced displacement in countries affected by ongoing war. While there is a ‘local turn’ in the peacebuilding literature examining on-the ground efforts to create community-level change, there has been no examination of the application of peacebuilding in refugee resettlement contexts. This research draws on data from an evaluation of a community led initiative in Queensland, Australia, which utilises peacebuilding as a theory to train leaders of refugee and migrant communities on how to better address domestic and family violence. The aim of the paper is to examine the utility of applying peacebuilding as a theory to address domestic and family violence in refugee resettlement contexts; not just to affect change in communities, but also the implications of diluting the analytical rigour of what constitutes peacebuilding as it travels across global and local contexts Conceptually, the paper follows Kobayshi et al.’s (2025) approach to peacebuilding as a ‘political ordering process’, and employs Rachel Pain’s ‘intimacy-geopolitics’ as a lens to understand the complex challenges facing refugee and migrant communities as they respond to the challenge of domestic and family violence as a private matter that is also inherently political.