Decolonial, Peace, Resistance, Conflict, Oppression
Dominant paradigms of peace within international relations and peace studies have long been shaped by liberal, Eurocentric frameworks that equate peace with institutional stability, state-building, and the simple absence of violence. Such frameworks, while widely adopted, often neglect the structural violence, historical injustices and epistemic erasures that continue to define the lived realities of colonised and formerly colonised peoples in our world. In response to these limitations, decolonial peace has emerged as a radical theoretical and practical alternative that recentres justice, historical redress and Indigenous epistemologies. This essay explores decolonial peace as a theory of resistance and justice, challenging the hegemonic liberal peace model by foregrounding the ongoing coloniality of power, advocating epistemic plurality, and reimagining peace as an active, dynamic process of resistance, repair and transformation. The entry examines the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a key case study, arguing that decolonial peace is not only relevant but also essential in confronting the enduring structures of settler colonialism, dispossession and epistemic violence that shape this context.
Dr. Nijmeh Ali is a Fellow at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, at the University of Otago. She focuses on resistance and activism within oppressed groups, particularly among Palestinian activists in Israel.
Available in English: Decolonial Peace and Resistance Theory.
Liberal Peace and the Coloniality of Power: Limitations of Conflict Management and Resolution Approaches
Mainstream peacebuilding practices – predominantly promoted by Western states and international institutions – rest on the liberal peace model. This paradigm emphasises democracy promotion, market liberalisation and institution-building as mechanisms for achieving sustainable peace (Richmond, ). However, scholars have critiqued this approach as normatively universalising, top-down, and insensitive to local contexts (Mac Ginty, ). More fundamentally, it perpetuates what Aníbal Quijano termed the coloniality of power: the persistent operation of colonial structures, racial hierarchies and epistemologies long after formal colonisation has ended (Quijano, ).
Under this framework, peace becomes synonymous with the pacification of dissent and the normalisation of neoliberal governance, rather than liberation from historical violence and oppression. Consequently, the legacies of land dispossession, racialised marginalisation, epistemic violence and socioeconomic inequality remain unaddressed. Liberal peacebuilding thus risks reproducing the very structures of colonial modernity which it claims to transcend (Barkawi & Laffey, ; Pugh et al., ).
The liberal peace framework underpins dominant approaches to conflict management and resolution, which aim to stabilise societies by promoting negotiated settlements, institutional compromise and conflict de-escalation. However, in deeply asymmetric and settler-colonial contexts such as Palestine/Israel, these approaches are not only inadequate but also counterproductive.
Conflict resolution assumes a level playing field where both parties have equal power and legitimate claims, thereby masking structural violence and colonial domination. By treating the settler-colonial reality as a conflict between two equal sides, peace initiatives obscure the foundational violence of occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing. As Jabri () notes, depoliticised conflict resolution frameworks often serve to reproduce existing hierarchies by privileging elite negotiations over grassroots resistance.
Meanwhile, conflict management aims to contain violence without addressing its root causes by criminalising resistance and reducing justice to procedural agreements, often imposed by external mediators with vested interests. As seen in the Oslo Accords and subsequent peace processes, conflict management becomes a tool of containment that reinforces the status quo rather than enabling transformative change.
Theoretical Foundations of Decolonial Peace
Rooted in Latin American, African, Indigenous and broader Global South intellectual traditions, decolonial peace arises from the wider body of decolonial thought. This tradition challenges the epistemological, political and ontological dominance of Eurocentric modernity. It calls not merely for the inclusion of marginalised voices, but also for a radical rethinking of the very foundations of what counts as peace, justice and knowledge (Mignolo, ; Tlostanova & Mignolo, ).
Decolonial thought emerged in response to the enduring structures of coloniality – that is, the persistence of colonial power relations long after formal decolonisation. Thinkers like Aníbal Quijano conceptualised coloniality as the matrix through which modernity enforces racialised hierarchies, capitalist exploitation, epistemic silencing and ontological erasure (Quijano, ). In this framework the problem is not simply conflict or war, but the very ways in which dominant systems define peace as the absence of violence while ignoring the profound and ongoing violence of dispossession, occupation and cultural annihilation. Maldonado-Torres (), on , exposes how peace as a rhetorical tool is used to mask domination and obscure the underlying structures of colonial violence and systemic erasure.
Decolonial peace therefore begins by exposing the violent foundations of the liberal peace model, which assumes universality in Western political forms – democracy, state sovereignty, market economies and human rights – while masking the colonial histories that made these forms possible. Liberal peace frameworks often reduce conflict resolution to institutional engineering, ignoring the historical wounds, power asymmetries and cultural dislocations at the heart of many so-called post-conflict societies. Even within mainstream peacebuilding discourse, the limitations of liberal peace frameworks have been increasingly acknowledged. Concepts like local ownership, hybrid peace and inclusive dialogue have emerged in response to the failures of top-down, technocratic interventions (Richmond, ; Mac Ginty, ). These shifts reflect the important recognition that institutional engineering alone cannot resolve deeply rooted conflicts. However, while such approaches nod toward inclusion, they often remain trapped in managerial logics that treat peace as a technical fix rather than a moral and historical reckoning. They rarely confront the deeper structures of settler-colonial violence, historical injustice and ontological erasure – precisely the dynamics that define the Palestinian experience (Maldonado-Torres, ).
In contrast, decolonial peace:
1. Recognises the constitutive relationship between colonialism and contemporary structural violence, such as occupation, settler colonialism, racial capitalism and ecological destruction;
2. Elevates subaltern, Indigenous and embodied epistemologies, viewing them not as supplementary to dominant knowledge systems but as equally legitimate and necessary for understanding and practicing peace; and
3. Refuses the teleological notion of peace as a destination or a state to be achieved, instead framing peace as an ongoing, contested process of ethical reckoning, resistance, historical repair and future-making.
This perspective aligns with Escobar’s () call for an ‘epistemology of the South’, which resists the monoculture of Western knowledge and affirms the pluriversality of the world – that is, the existence of multiple coexisting worlds, worldviews and ontologies (, ). In this sense, decolonial peace is not just an alternative model; it is a relational, situated and pluriversal project that demands the dismantling of hierarchical modes of knowing and being.
Moreover, Indigenous scholars such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Taiaiake Alfred have emphasised that peace cannot be understood as separate from land, kinship and relational accountability. For many Indigenous peoples peace is not the outcome of treaties or negotiations mediated by settler systems, but rather the cultivation of
Decolonial peace is, at its core, both an ethical and a political concept. It does not view peace as something imposed from the top down, but rather as a process of liberation that begins from the ground up. It places deep value on memory, dignity, and the right of people to shape their own futures, pushing back against the ongoing violence caused by neoliberal globalisation.
At its heart, then, decolonial peace is about justice, remembrance, and the challenging but necessary work of repair.
Decolonial peace challenges the narrow confines of legalistic or institutional peacebuilding by insisting that any meaningful peace must be rooted in historical redress and moral accountability. Justice here is not just about legal rulings or formal processes of transition. It is about telling the truth, making amends, acknowledging both past and present harm, and helping communities that have carried the heavy burden of colonial violence to begin to heal (Sieder et al., ). It brings forward:
1. Historical justice: recognition of genocide, slavery, land theft and cultural erasure;
2. Transitional justice from below: driven by affected communities rather than externally imposed models (Sieder et al., ; , );
3. Restorative and reparative justice: addressing both material and symbolic harms (, ); and
4. recognising the role of coloniality in ecological degradation (Whyte, ; , ).
Crucially, memory plays a central role in this framework. Because coloniality involves not only physical domination but also epistemic control – the silencing of histories and the rewriting of narratives –decolonial peace insists on active remembrance. This includes the remembrance of pain, loss, survival and resistance, not as backwards-looking nostalgia but as a forward-facing political practice that disrupts erasure and reclaims agency (Mignolo, ; , ). Justice and peace, then, are not possible without memory, especially the memory of those rendered invisible by dominant historical accounts.
Resistance (Theory) as the Foundation of Decolonial Peace
Central to the decolonial peace paradigm is the understanding that resistance is not antithetical to peace but foundational to it. This perspective challenges the core assumptions of liberal peacebuilding, which often view resistance as a threat – something chaotic, irrational or even extreme. Scholars such as Richard Jackson () have shown how resistance is frequently delegitimised through securitising discourses that label it as terrorism or extremism. In these models, peace is often reduced to the simple restoration of order, even when that order is built on deep inequalities, racial injustice and the ongoing displacement of people. In contrast, decolonial peace recognises resistance as a life-affirming force, a necessary response to the systemic and ongoing violence of colonisation, occupation and epistemicide (Fanon, ; Smith, ).
Resistance in this framework is not simply oppositional; it is creative, generative and ethical. It emerges not from a desire for destruction, but from a longing for justice, dignity and coexistence on radically different terms. For colonised and Indigenous peoples, resistance becomes a mode of survival, memory and futurity. Decolonial peace approaches have embraced the perspectives of Frantz Fanon (), who argues that resistance to colonial domination is not just a political necessity, it is a process of reclaiming humanity, self-worth and historical agency. Similarly, Linda Tuhiwai Smith () emphasises that resistance is central to Indigenous research and knowledge production, since it interrupts colonial narratives and recentres the voices, values and epistemologies of those who have been systematically silenced.
In settler-colonial and postcolonial contexts resistance takes multiple, overlapping forms, be they cultural, political, epistemic or spiritual. These acts of refusal and reclamation are not one-size-fits-all or neatly structured; they are grounded in the specific histories, worldviews and hopes of each community. Through a decolonial lens, some of the most powerful forms of resistance include:
1. Epistemic disobedience, as conceptualised by Walter Mignolo (), entails a deliberate rejection of the universalising tendencies of Western knowledge systems. Epistemic disobedience is about reclaiming local, Indigenous and subaltern ways of knowing that have been marginalised or criminalised by colonial and imperial projects. It is a refusal to think within the terms of the oppressor, instead engaging in the creation and validation of alternative epistemologies rooted in lived experience, memory and place.
2. Revival of Indigenous legal and governance systems: Indigenous resistance often involves the restoration of relational modes of governance based on principles of reciprocity, accountability and ecological stewardship (Alfred & Corntassel, ). These systems are not relics of the past; instead they are living practices that challenge the colonial state’s authority and propose fundamentally different understandings of power, territory and belonging.
3. Cultural affirmation through language, storytelling, ritual and memory: Resistance is also embodied in cultural practices that sustain identity, intergenerational connection and community cohesion. Keeping Indigenous languages alive means protecting all channels of knowledge – whether through storytelling, ceremonies or rituals – via which communities hold on to their histories and spirits, honouring what has been lost while nurturing what still lives on (Dutta, Azad, and Hussain, ).
4. Refusal to participate in colonial institutions: Tactics such as boycotts, divestment, non-cooperation and the creation of parallel institutions serve to delegitimise systems of domination while building capacity for self-determination (Duggan, ). These acts of refusal are strategic, not nihilistic; they expose the moral bankruptcy of colonial regimes while asserting the right of oppressed peoples to determine their own futures (Hagen, Michelis, Eggert, and Turner, ).
5. Everyday resistance: As James C. Scott () reminds us, resistance is not always spectacular. It often occurs in subtle, everyday acts of defiance – refusing to assimilate, speaking native languages in public, tending to sacred land, or teaching suppressed histories. These practices may seem inconsequential to the untrained eye, but they are cumulative and sustaining. They affirm the presence and persistence of colonised peoples in spaces that seek to erase them.
Richard Jackson expands this conversation by challenging the dominant understanding of peace as the simple absence of violence. In his critical peace research, Jackson emphasises that peace must encompass justice, equality and the dismantling of systemic violence, including the violence inherent in knowledge systems and political exclusions (Jackson, ). From this perspective, resistance is not a threat to peace but rather its condition – a means of interrupting the normalised violence that is often invisible in liberal peace discourses.
Similarly, Nijmeh Ali () writes from the context of Palestinian resistance, arguing that resistance is an act of ethical clarity in a world structured by injustice. For Ali, the refusal to normalise occupation, the insistence on memory and dignity, and the courage to defy dehumanisation are not only political strategies, they are also pedagogical and moral acts. Resistance, she argues, is a means of asserting political agency in a landscape designed to erase it. It is also a way of constructing solidarity across borders by challenging the silencing and fragmentation imposed by colonial regimes.
Ultimately, resistance is the precondition for reclaiming agency, not just politically but ontologically. It is the basis for envisioning and enacting pluriversal futures, which are not imposed through violent peace treaties or liberal reform but co-created through collective struggle, healing and imagination (Fanon, ; Escobar, ). Decolonial peace is impossible without resistance because peace that does not confront and dismantle the structures of colonialism is simply another form of domination.
Decolonial Peace in Practice: Challenges and the Way Forward
While decolonial peace offers a robust framework for justice-centred transformation, its application faces profound and multi-layered challenges, both conceptual and material (Mignolo, ). These challenges not only reflect the entrenched power of liberal paradigms, but also reveal how hard it is to put radical visions into action, especially in political environments that are resistant or even openly hostile.
1. Institutional Entrenchment and Epistemic Hegemony
Perhaps the most significant barrier lies in the dominance of Western institutions and knowledge systems that define and govern peacebuilding. The liberal peace model is embedded in the architecture of international law, development aid, diplomacy and academia (Mac Ginty, ; Richmond, ). Institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank and Western universities continue to operate under the logic of managerialism, securitisation and technocratic governance (Choudry & Kapoor, ). In such environments decolonial ideas are often dismissed as impractical or radical, and epistemic alternatives are systematically excluded.
Moreover, even when institutions adopt the language of decolonisation through initiatives such as diversity programmes or “local ownership” schemes, this is often superficial. Terms like “indigeneity”, “resilience” and “pluralism” are increasingly co-opted by state and NGO discourses, emptied of their political content, and used to legitimise ongoing inequalities (Choudry & Kapoor, ). This institutional domestication of decolonial discourse undermines its critical potential.
2. Power Asymmetries and the Violence of Translation
Decolonial peace demands a redistribution of power, not only in material terms but also in terms of who gets to define knowledge, justice and legitimacy (Quijano, ). However, the structural asymmetry between the Global North and South, between settler and Indigenous populations, persists through every layer of the peacebuilding process. The very mechanisms used to “listen to” local communities, such as consultations, participatory forums or community mapping, are often framed by colonial assumptions and bureaucratic constraints.
Furthermore, when decolonial concepts are translated into institutional or international language, they risk distortion and misinterpretation. The act of making decolonial ideas “legible” to donors, policymakers or international organisations often results in their depoliticisation. Concepts like “self-determination”, “liberation” or “epistemic resistance” are reframed as developmental goals rather than radical political claims. This translation becomes a form of epistemic violence.
3. Operational Challenges: From Theory to Practice
While decolonial peace offers rich philosophical and ethical insights, translating these into concrete strategies for policy, education and movement-building is an ongoing struggle. Pluriversality, relational ontologies and communal justice often resist codification into metrics, programmes or policy guidelines (Escobar, ; Tlostanova & Mignolo, ). This presents difficulties for activists, educators and practitioners, who must navigate between transformative ideals and institutional constraints. offers a significant example, as it was the first to incorporate dedicated provisions on ethnic communities and to mainstream gender throughout the accord. However, both the conceptual framing and the practical implementation of these commitments have encountered substantial limitations (González Villamizar & Bueno-Hansen, ).
For example, in peace education, how can curricula integrate Indigenous and decolonial perspectives without being tokenistic or exoticising? And when it comes to legal reform, how can we incorporate restorative justice approaches grounded in Indigenous traditions, especially within systems built to protect settler power? There are no simple answers here. What is needed is patience, openness to learning, and a commitment to community-led experimentation and creativity.
4. Risks of Romanticisation and Essentialism
A further challenge lies within the decolonial movement itself: the tendency, at times, to romanticise indigeneity or resistance (Ali, ). While honouring Indigenous knowledge is crucial, essentialising Indigenous communities as inherently peaceful, spiritual or harmonious risks flattening internal diversity and ignoring dynamics of gender, class and power (Mbembe, ). Similarly, valorising resistance without considering its forms and consequences can obscure the ethical dilemmas faced by communities under siege.
Decolonial peace must therefore avoid reproducing binaries – coloniser/colonised, Western/Indigenous, knowledge/power – that obscure complexity. It must remain open to critique, reflexivity, and evolving forms of solidarity that do not assume purity or authenticity.
5. Criminalisation of Decolonial and Anti-Colonial Movements
Globally, states increasingly respond to decolonial and anti-colonial activism with surveillance, repression and criminalisation (Mbembe, ; Choudry & Kapoor, ). Indigenous land defenders, Palestinian activists and anti-imperialist intellectuals are routinely targeted by state apparatuses that frame decolonial resistance as extremism or terrorism (Tartir, ). This creates a climate of fear and silencing that constrains the very political imaginaries which decolonial peace seeks to nourish.
In the Palestinian context, for example, organisations calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) face legal repression in Europe and North America, accused of incitement or antisemitism for challenging settler-colonial structures (Ali, ; Khalidi, ). Such state-led efforts and non-state actors – often individuals or organisations with political agendas – aim to criminalise decolonial struggle, actively pursuing legal and administrative complaints to suppress such activism and revealing the stakes of epistemic and political resistance.
6. Fragmentation and the Challenge of Coalition-Building
Even though decolonial peace is rooted in solidarity and collective change, bringing different struggles together is not always easy. Movements often come from very different places and have their own histories, strategies and values, and that can create real tension. Furthermore, the ways in which NGOs have shaped activism sometimes force communities to compete for attention and funding, rather than collaborate with one another. Still, when movements do come together – such as in Black-Palestinian alliances or global Indigenous movements – it demonstrates what is possible in terms of their effectiveness, their voice and presence in the media and politics, and the power of solidarity. These efforts offer real hope and lessons we can carry forward.
Sustaining decolonial peace thus requires not only radical critique but also radical care. Feminist peacebuilding theories emphasise that peace is not merely the absence of violence, but the presence of equitable, nurturing social structures. This means constructing infrastructures of care rooted in trust, mutual accountability and sustained dialogue, which can resist the fragmentation imposed by colonial violence and foster long-term movement solidarity. By centring care as a political practice, feminist frameworks challenge masculinist, state-centric approaches to peace, insisting instead on healing, inclusion and the transformative power of collective responsibility (Tronto, ).
The Failure of the Palestinian-Israeli Peace Process and the Need for Decolonial Peace
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict clearly shows a case where liberal peacebuilding has fallen short. For decades, international diplomacy – especially efforts led by the United States – has treated the Palestinian-Israeli issue as merely a territorial disagreement, which can be resolved through negotiations, security agreements and mutual recognition. However, this approach often overlooks the deeper realities of power, injustice and colonialism that underlie the conflict (Klein, ).
Decades of peace efforts – including the Oslo Accords (1993), the Camp David Summit (2000) and subsequent negotiations – have failed to resolve the conflict or produce justice for Palestinians. Instead they have entrenched systemic inequalities, enabled the expansion of Israeli settlements, and deepened Palestinian dispossession (Erakat, ). This failure stems from the fact that the liberal peace model simply does not fit with the settler-colonial reality of Israel and Palestine.
Settler violence in the West Bank has escalated sharply since the onset of the October 2023 Gaza war. Between 7 October 2023 and 31 December 2024 the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documented at least 1,860 settler-related incidents resulting in casualties, property destruction and widespread displacement (Al Jazeera, ; OCHA, ). Left-wing Israeli monitoring groups estimate that 57 Palestinian villages have been completely erased during this period (Portside/972 Magazine, ). In the calendar year of 2023 alone, more than 12,000 separate attacks by both settlers and Israeli forces were recorded, including 2,410 perpetrated by settlers. These assaults contributed to the forced displacement of over 1,500 Bedouin individuals and the destruction of nearly 19,000 olive trees (OCHA, ; OCHA, ). These figures reveal that the violence endured by Palestinians is deeply structural and orchestrated; these are not isolated events, but part of a systematic campaign of dispossession and erasure. As Noura Erakat () points out, peace efforts that overlook these settler-colonial dynamics often end up deepening Palestinian dispossession instead of bringing real resolution. The peace process treats Israel and Palestine as two equal sovereign parties negotiating borders and security, ignoring the structural asymmetry whereby Israel exercises control over Palestinian land, resources and movement within a settler-colonial framework (Wolfe, ; Pappé, ).
The United States, as the leading peace broker and the largest funder, has played a complex but clearly biased role. While it talks about supporting a two-state solution, in reality US policies have mostly backed Israeli security and expansion, allowing abuses to go unchecked and sidelining Palestinian rights (Khalidi, ). Instead of focusing on justice, American diplomacy has aimed chiefly to keep the region stable and protect its alliances, pushing Palestinian calls for sovereignty and reparations to the side. This illustrates how the liberal peace model – particularly when driven by powerful countries with their own interests – often ends up managing and containing conflicts rather than resolving them.
In contrast, decolonial peace offers a transformative and justice-centred alternative to conventional peace paradigms. Unlike liberal peace frameworks that often manage conflict rather than resolve it, decolonial peace is rooted in dismantling colonial power structures and restoring historical justice. It moves beyond elite negotiations and externally imposed blueprints by:
1. Centring the rights and agency of Palestinians, including the right of return, reparations for dispossession, and sovereignty. For instance, over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced during the 1948 Nakba (BADIL, ), and approximately 9 million Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA (Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics & UNRWA, 2025) and remain in exile, denied the right to return under Israeli law. Decolonial peace insists that any just solution must address these foundational injustices, rather than sidelining them for political expediency.
2. Prioritising Palestinian epistemologies and narratives in peacebuilding processes. Rather than framing Palestinians as a humanitarian crisis or a “security problem”, this approach centres Indigenous knowledge, oral histories and political visions. Initiatives like the Palestinian Museum and Palestinian movements, such as those involving youth, women, journalists and academics, challenge dominant narratives and reclaim space for Palestinian self-representation.
3. Supporting justice and reconciliation led by affected communities rather than externally imposed solutions. Decolonial peace emphasises community-led justice practices, like truth-telling and historical recognition, over top-down institution-building. South African-style truth and reconciliation frameworks, if adapted to the specificities of Palestine, could play a role, but only if they are grounded in accountability and reparative justice.
4. Recognising resistance and resilience as integral components of the peacebuilding process. Palestinian sumud – a concept of steadfastness rooted in daily survival, land cultivation, cultural continuity and refusal to surrender – embodies this resilience. In areas like Masafer Yatta and Sheikh Jarrah, communities facing forced displacement continue to farm their lands, document abuses and engage in collective solidarity, even under intense military and settler violence. These forms of resistance are not obstacles to peace, but rather a precondition for any dignified and lasting resolution.
Adopting a decolonial peace approach could prevent the repetition of past mistakes by addressing the root causes of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, rather than just treating their symptoms. It demands the dismantling of settler-colonial structures and the promotion of justice, dignity and self-determination.
Conclusion
Decolonial peace is neither utopian nor prescriptive; it is a living, evolving theory of resistance, justice and radical possibility. It rejects the restoration of colonial orders masked as stability, and instead demands the centring of silenced epistemologies, repressed histories and insurgent imaginaries. Rather than offering technical fixes or policy frameworks, it calls for a fundamental reordering of the world – socially, politically and ontologically.
This vision is particularly urgent in contexts like Palestine, where liberal peace frameworks have repeatedly failed to address the foundational violence of settler colonialism. The Palestinian struggle reveals how dominant peace paradigms obscure the reality of dispossession, normalise asymmetries of power, and discipline resistance through the language of security and negotiation. A decolonial approach makes visible what is rendered invisible: the continuity of colonial violence.
Despite profound challenges ranging from institutional co-optation and epistemic suppression to criminalisation and fragmentation, decolonial peace remains a vital horizon. Its strength lies not in offering neat blueprints but in opening the way to radical intellectual, political and ethical alternatives. It invites us to unlearn colonial certainties, to imagine beyond imposed borders, and to build from the ground up with humility, accountability and solidarity.
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Video-Interview
Nijmeh Ali in dialogue with Viviana García Pinzón
Podcast
Susanne Buckley-Zistel & Siddharth Tripathi in conversation with Fabricio Rodríguez and Viviana García Pinzón
