Geographical scholarship has rightly problematised the act of archival research, showing how the practice of archiving is not only concerned with how a society collectively remembers, but also forgets. As such, the dominant motif for discussing historical methods in geography has been through the lens of absence: the archive is a space of ‘traces’, ‘fragments’ and ‘ghosts’. In this paper I suggest that the focus on incompleteness and partiality, while true, may also belie what many geographers working in archives find their greatest difficulty: an overwhelming volume of source materials. I reflect on my own research experiences in the pacifist archive to suggest that the growing scale and scope of many collections, along with the taxing research demands of transnational perspectives, pose immediate practical challenges for geographers characterised as much by abundance as by absence. In the second half of the paper, drawing on recent scholarship in history and geography, I argue that the method of biography offers one possible strategy for navigating archival abundance, allowing geographers to tell stories that are wider, deeper and more revealingly complex within the existing time and financial constraints of humanities research.

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Despite the discipline having undergone a 'peace turn' in recent years, the history of the peace movement itself remains curiously under explored by geographers. This paper retraces the World Peace Brigade and its collaboration with the Northern Rhodesian independence movement in 1962. I argue that the Brigade offers geographers important insights into how ideas of peace have been circulated, adapted and even resisted. The paper suggests that geography poses a distinct conceptual problem for peace movements, which must simultaneously operate beyond conventional forms of territorial politics while remaining sufficiently flexible in the political arena for their strength and relevance. In Central Africa this meant the Brigade developed two, ultimately incompatible, conceptions of peace: an internationalist one that stressed world community, and a local one that adapted pacifism for nationalist movements. I suggest this case study has two implications for peace research in geography. First, it encourages us to remain attentive to the big stories of peace and, specifically, the way in which the peace movement has been a historically important conduit for a range of internationalist ideas. Second, the histories of waging peace (peace armies, civil disobedience, etc.) allow us to critically interrogate the co-constitutive geographies of violence and nonviolence while retaining peace as a distinct category around which to promote political engagement.

This article considers how digitisation is reshaping archival research in geography. Digitisation is more than a technical convenience, something that simply speeds up existing ways of working. Through novel practices of recombination, digital archive platforms enable researchers to extract and recombine fragments of historical information, drawn across multiple periods, places, collections and contexts. This represents a fundamental change in how we research the past. In this paper, we conceptualise recombination as an uneven geographical phenomenon, we situate it within the shifting political and economic infrastructures of archives, and pose a series of ethical questions for geographers to consider.

Martin Luther King Jr. is widely read through his association with Gandhi's ideas and practice. Whilst it is important to neither overstate nor ignore this influence, the paper retraces the work undertaken behind the scenes to script this relationship for wider audiences. It questions how King's casting as America's black Gandhi was strategically undertaken, by whom and for what purposes, as well as exploring why it was ultimately short-lived. Although King experimented with Gandhism briefly in the late 1950s, by the early 1960s the idea had largely been dropped. In particular, the paper focusses on the role played by the American pacifist movement up to, and including, organizing King's visit to India in 1959. These sources are used to make a broader argument that King's ability to inhabit Gandhi's legacy during the movement's early years was critical to forging global anticolonial connections. As such the paper argues that nonviolence was more than a repertoire of resistance techniques, but a spatial mechanism which could fold scale, bridge distance, and thereby produce and reshape racial solidarity itself.