Report and insights from the final conference of the BMFTR network Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict, Tunis, October 9–12 2025
peace, conflict, postcolonial, knowledge, justice, security, violence
The conference Re-thinking Peace and Conflict Studies in a Postcolonial World took place in Tunis in October 2025. The event marked the culmination of four years of collaborative research by members of the network, while also opening a space for collective reflection on the implications of the network’s contributions to the field and future perspectives. The discussions demonstrated the deep relationship between knowledge production and global hierarchies, showing that rethinking peace and conflict studies necessarily entails confronting epistemic foundations while remaining attentive to the ongoing geopolitical developments, uneven power relations and political economies that continue to shape the field.
Miriam Bartelmann is a Ph.D. researcher at the Arnold-Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) in Freiburg, focusing on environmental and territorial conflicts that stem from or reproduce postcolonial trajectories. She collaborates in the coordination, conceptualization, and development of the Virtual Encyclopedia.
Viviana García Pinzón is a Senior Researcher at the Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institute (ABI) in Freiburg and an Associate at the Institute of Latin American Studies at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA).Viviana’s research analyses the intertwinement between postcolonial hierarchies, contentious politics, and urban governance in violence-affected cities. In addition, she coordinates the conceptualisation and development of the Virtual Encyclopedia.
Fabricio Rodríguez is a Senior Researcher at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) in Freiburg. His research in the Postcolonial Hierarchies network explores the ways urban protests are entwined with the contestation of coloniality/modernity dynamics and how this relationship shapes violent processes of hierarchisation in Latin America.
The authors express their sincere gratitude to all participants of the conference for their valuable insights and constructive engagement throughout the event. We particularly acknowledge the conference organizers from the Merian Center for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) and from the network Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict for their remarkable work and contributions to the development of the conference programme and the coordination of logistical arrangements.
Available in English: Re-thinking Peace and Conflict Studies in a Postcolonial World.
About the event
Organised by the competence network Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict in cooperation with the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM), the conference Re-thinking Peace and Conflict Studies in a Postcolonial World, which took place in Tunis in October 2025, brought together researchers from MECAM and other Maria Sibylla Merian Centres for Advanced Studies (MERIAN centres) including CALAS (Mexico), Mecila (Brazil), ICAS:MP (India) and MIASA (Ghana). All these projects are funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space (BMFTR).
The event marked the culmination of four years of collaborative research by members of the Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict network, while also opening a space for collective reflection on the implications of the network’s contributions to the field.
During different panels and roundtables the participants discussed four key themes:
- the dynamics of violence
- security governance
- transformative justice
- civil society and everyday peace
The network also presented two projects aimed at both addressing epistemic hierarchies and promoting plural approaches in peace and conflict:
- The Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025) edited by Siddharth Tripathi and Solveig Richter (open access)
- The Virtual Encyclopaedia ‘Rewriting Peace and Conflict’: https://rewritingpeaceandconflict.net/
Over the four days in Tunis the discussions demonstrated the deep relationship between knowledge production and global hierarchies, showing that rethinking peace and conflict studies necessarily entails confronting epistemic foundations while remaining attentive to the ongoing geopolitical developments, uneven power relations and political economies that continue to shape the field.
INTRODUCTION: Pluralising Peace and Conflict Studies.
The opening roundtable, a presentation and discussion of the Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies (), was chaired by Adam Sandor and included an expert comment by Mariam Salehi. This conversation set the tone for the conference by interrogating the epistemic underpinnings of peace and conflict studies. As Siddharth Tripathi, Tareq Sydiq and Fabricio Rodríguez outlined, the field emerged largely from institutions and experiences of the Global North, establishing European notions of peace after WWII as the global standard to follow. As a result, the field has long understood patterns of peace and violence through a unilateral logic, implicitly reinforcing colonial hierarchies of knowledge about the meaning of peace itself, its political and economic components, and the means to achieve it.
The handbook therefore is not merely a collection of case studies; it is a comprehensive project to pluralise the field by centring the perspectives and experiences of Global South scholars. Rather than promoting a wholesale rejection of European ideas, the contributors call for a move beyond Eurocentrism toward a more inclusive discipline that is attentive to grounded realities across the plurality of contexts in the Global Souths and the Global East among other places. These plural Souths are not understood as passive peripheries, but rather as heterogeneous spaces of intellectual practice and epistemic creativity.
The discussion revolved around three fundamental questions:
1) Who takes a protagonist role in the field as a knowledge bearer, and for what purpose?
2) How can horizontal dialogues across North, South and East be sustained despite enduring asymmetries of authority? and
3) How can we transcend the binary of North/South altogether, without erasing difference or reproducing epistemic hierarchies?
The panellists, as well as Mariam Salehi’s comments to the roundtable, stressed that peace and conflict studies should not only seek to understand the world but also to transform it. While this was the initial promise of the field, reality demonstrates the problems involved in an enduring prospect of peace. Enhancing the transformative character of peace and conflict studies, panellists argued, requires an openness to the diverse ways of knowing, sensing and enacting peace that exist outside canonical frameworks. Such an acknowledgement of ‘epistemic plurality’ is a foundational condition in any meaningful commitment to ‘epistemic justice’.
As several authors in the handbook noted, the Global South has always been central to the ‘global’, serving as the site of theorisation, experimentation and practice, albeit in peripheral ways. The denial and erasure of Southern modes of ‘world intellection’ persists as a colonial wound. Participants emphasised that the Global South is not just a physical or geographical space, but a historical and epistemic prism through which to view and understand social phenomena both in and from places sharing distinct experiences of colonialism. Reclaiming and re-defining that centrality means rethinking and reworking the ontological (what is peace?), epistemic (how do we know it?) and methodological (how do we study it?) foundations of peace and conflict studies through everyday practice: in research projects, in the classroom, and in everyday public life.
Discussions touched on the dangers of ‘racial amnesia’ and its intertwining with epistemic violence within peace and conflict studies, whereby those most affected by structural violence are rarely recognised as theorists or knowledge producers, being often automatically relegated to non-voluntary spheres of victimhood which thereby negates their manifold sources of agency. To take the Global South seriously as an epistemic partner, scholars must both listen more and unlearn more, acknowledging that peace (and peace knowledge) may be located in places and practices that are conventionally associated purely with conflict.
Conversely, broadening the field’s gaze also reveals multiple forms of violence as ingrained parts of the assumed ‘peaceful’ North. The debate traced how liberal, illiberal and neoliberal peacebuilding frameworks normalise certain rules as universally valid, while excluding others. Several speakers warned against canon reconstruction in critical processes, i.e. simply expanding the Northern canon rather than centring and building on Southern contributions.
Members of the audience problematised the use of the very term ‘Global South’, questioning who it serves and who gets included under its umbrella. Some participants noted that the category does not build on a state-centric perspective, which means that instead of referring to a set of states, it serves to enunciate the experience and continuities of colonialism as a common phenomenon among specific groups of people. It also implies a relationality with the Global North. Furthermore, this category is far from innocent, as these participants argued; it can be co-opted, as in geopolitical projects to sustain alternative but still hierarchical world orders.
Ultimately, the roundtable positioned the handbook as both a scholarly contribution and a collective act of epistemic ‘recentring’ of voices and perspectives that have thus far lacked an adequate stage. By centring relationality, rather than division, it calls for a reworlding of peace and conflict studies, a way of connecting ‘both halves’ of the globe as interdependent and co-constitutive, opening up new avenues for debate and reflection and thereby broadening and deepening the agenda for peace and conflict studies.
1. Coloniality of Violence and the Politics of Naming
The panel on dynamics of violence explored how violence persists across time, space and discourse, often in ways that escape conventional definitions of conflict. Swati Parashar opened with a powerful intervention on famines, slow violence, and necropolitics. She argued that famines must be understood not as natural disasters or humanitarian crises but as deliberate, preventable acts of structural violence. By unpacking the bureaucratic criteria that define a ‘famine’, i.e. the percentage of households affected and the thresholds of malnutrition, she demonstrated the gendered aspects of famines, and how the politics of naming determines what counts as violence and who can be held accountable.
Parashar’s engagement with the notion of slow violence and Mbembe’s () concept of necropolitics pointed to the temporal dimension of harm: the gradual deterioration of bodies and communities long after the ‘event’ has passed. This raises the provocative question of who deserves to live in this hierarchy of life, which challenges the field to confront not only the spectacle of war but also the quieter forms of harm and neglect that mark global hierarchies of suffering. Feminist approaches, Parashar reminded the panel, have long taught us that the politics of naming is central to the politics of emancipation, the conquest of rights, and the building of relations of care.
Siddharth Tripathi extended this reflection by analysing vocabularies of violence that traverse colonial, populist and authoritarian regimes. He argued that authoritarianism should not be seen as an anomaly, but rather as a structural precondition of imperial power. When formal empires collapse, their mechanisms of domination, such as surveillance, securitisation and disciplinary control, persist in new institutional forms: checkpoints, welfare systems, and educational projects designed to ‘civilise’ or ‘educate’ the ‘native’. Across both North and South, he observed, protests against austerity, ecological crises or inequality are met with increasingly normalised forms of coercion. Authoritarian violence does not always scream out its workings, since it has become embedded in the infrastructures of everyday governance.
Izadora Xavier brought a gendered lens to these questions by analysing how women in the favela of Alemão, Rio de Janeiro understand militarisation, being themselves heavily affected by military invasions in their home quarters. Her work illuminated how military and humanitarian logics intersect, delving into how ‘pacification’ is performed and justified through gendered narratives of care and protection, even as it reproduces the political economy of militarisation. Drawing on Cynthia Enloe’s and Katharine H.S. Moon’s book ‘Sex among allies’ (), Xavier situated militarised masculinity and the circulation of weapons as central indicators of power, revealing how global security orders are built upon intimate and everyday economies of gendered inequality.
Anika Oettler’s presentation on transformative justice in Colombia shifted attention to the entanglement of postcolonial legacies and contemporary inequalities. Colombia, she argued, is simultaneously a country of enduring patriarchy, intersectional exclusion and deep inequality rooted in the hacienda system, while it also remains a country that is persistent in its peace efforts. The 2016 peace accord with the FARC promised a new beginning, yet its implementation exposed the limits of transformative justice while structural issues such as racism, land concentration and political participation remain unaddressed. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s notions of redistribution and recognition (), Oettler underscored that genuine transformation requires both material and symbolic parity.
Taken together, these interventions addressed violence as neither exceptional nor episodic, but as a structure organising visibility, empathy and accountability. This structure is always felt in the everyday life of people. From famine to policing, from humanitarianism to peacebuilding, violence operates through hierarchies of time, place and different sources of legitimacy. Its coloniality lies in how some lives remain continuously exposed to harm while others are buffered by distance, privilege or abstraction. The challenge, as the panel made clear, is to reimagine how we name, know and narrate violence without reproducing the hierarchies that sustain it.
2. Security Governance Beyond the North–South Divide
The panel on security governance interrogated how new configurations of power and security reshape postcolonial hierarchies in the twenty-first century. The discussion unfolded around a central provocation: if colonialism is no longer territorial, how do its logics continue to structure security practices across North and South, and even within South–South relations?
Adam Sandor and Jana Hönke opened with an analysis of emerging security arrangements in the Global South, drawing on examples such as Kenya’s leadership of the 2024 Multinational Security Support Mission in Haiti and the presence of the Russian Wagner Group in Mali. These cases, they argued, reveal how security cooperation among states of the Global South both contests and sustains existing hierarchies. Drawing on Marsha Henry’s () reflections on the ‘end of peacekeeping’, they noted that funding and decision-making power often remain concentrated in the Global North, even when interventions are executed through Southern actors. The Brazilian participation in the UN’s MINUSTAH mission in Haiti, for instance, showed how the rhetoric of ‘non-intervention’ coexisted with established, violence-affirming interpretations of order and control.
Sandor and Hönke thus proposed a crucial shift in analytical focus: rather than reading postcolonial hierarchies exclusively through North–South relations, we must examine how they are reproduced within variegated South–South configurations that draw on, rework and sometimes mimic imperial forms of governance. Russia’s role in Mali and Guinea, where Soviet-trained officers replaced French troops after independence, exemplifies this ambivalence. This may be seen as an apparent move away from Western hegemony that nonetheless reinforces dependency and coercive forms of order.
This raised a broader conceptual debate: what precisely do we mean by colonialism, postcolonialism or coloniality in these contexts? Does invoking coloniality still help us make sense of relations among non-Western powers, or does it risk flattening historical specificity and racial hierarchies into a generic metaphor of domination? The panel wrestled with whether frames such as imperialism, dependency or hegemony might sometimes offer greater analytical clarity, especially when ‘colonial’ becomes an all-encompassing label that obscures the historicity and unevenness of South–South relations.
Tareq Sydiq approached these questions through his study of negotiated security arrangements in Pakistan. His research traced how colonial-era security architectures were not merely imposed by external actors from above but continually renegotiated by local actors from below. Drawing on archival work and field research, Sydiq showed that while structural change (such as the end of colonial rule or the Global War on Terror) created new openings, local actors exercised agency by steering reforms toward more inclusive arrangements. His analysis illuminated how the global order of security is reproduced through multilayered and often hierarchical negotiations, not simply through external imposition.
Darja Wolfmeier’s contribution, Narrating humanitarianism: who tells the story of aid?, redirected attention to the epistemic dimension of security. She argued that humanitarian organisations do not only deliver aid but also produce historical narratives, for example by controlling archives, restricting access and curating what becomes visible. Through two case studies of archival (in)access, she showed how these ‘humanitarian silences’ shape public perceptions and reproduce Western self-images of benevolence. Decolonising humanitarianism, she suggested, requires expanding accountability to include historical transparency and narrative responsibility.
In his intervention, Yazid Benhadda traced a colonial genealogy of anti-migration ‘information campaigns’ in the Mediterranean. Drawing on French colonial archives, he demonstrated how post-war propaganda in Algeria sought to discourage ‘unwanted’ migration to France, anticipating contemporary European strategies of externalised border control. By reading these campaigns through the lens of colonial governance, Benhadda exposed the enduring logic of ‘security through deterrence’, where the mobility of certain populations is treated as a threat to be managed.
Albeit from different angles, these presentations all suggested that the coloniality of security governance resides not only in who exercises violence, but in how security is imagined, narrated and legitimated. From military interventions to humanitarian archives, the same asymmetries of credibility and authority persist. As one discussant put it, the challenge is not only to decolonise security policy but also to decolonise the concept of security itself – its temporalities, its geographies, and its hierarchies of fear and selective protection.
3. Transformative Justice and the Limits of Liberal Peace
The panel on transformative justice grappled with the tensions between universalist ideals of justice and the situated, often messy realities through which justice is enacted. The presentations examined how law, aesthetics, activism and historiography interact to produce and contest the moral and political geographies of justice.
Selbi Durdiyeva opened the session with a far-reaching critique of the liberal peace paradigm and its selective application of justice. Drawing on decolonial and post-Soviet perspectives, she argued that transformative justice has emerged as a corrective to the shortcomings of transitional justice, although it also risks reproducing the same colonial blind spots which it seeks to overcome. Modern coloniality, she noted, survives in the ‘double standards’ of liberal peacebuilding, which places the burden of transformation on victims while neglecting structural complicity in the Global North. Durdiyeva called for a more radical understanding of solidarity: not as empathy or aid, but as praxis, echoing Sylvia Wynter’s () insight that ‘being human is praxis’. Her intervention also opened a neglected horizon in postcolonial studies: the persistence of non-Western imperialisms and the colonial reverberations of the Soviet and Russian projects, whose absences in the global conversation are themselves signs of epistemic inequality.
Anna Lena Goll continued the discussion by examining how justice is performed visually. Her paper, distributing the sensible: aesthetic regimes and postcolonial authority in the ICC’s visual performance of justice, dissected the International Criminal Court’s digital campaign #JusticeAtWork. Through staff portraits and curated imagery, the ICC presents justice as expert-driven, neutral and universally valid. However, as Goll showed, such aesthetic strategies do more than communicate, since they shape the very sensory field in which justice is recognised. By mobilising emotions like care and dedication, the ICC constructs legitimacy through affect. What remains unseen are certain forms of labour, suffering or political contestation, which mark the boundaries of what global justice allows us to feel.
Hanna Schnieders approached these questions from a different analytical and empirical standpoint, exploring global justice through the lived experiences of environmental and climate activists in Costa Rica. She asked how grounded ethnographic work might challenge the Eurocentrism of normative political theory, where justice is often defined by distant, abstract actors. Her research foregrounded the praxis of activism as a site of theory-building, raising questions about how activists themselves understand their struggles as forms of global, environmental or transformative justice. In the discussion participants reflected on whether such experiences can be meaningfully connected to transitional justice frameworks, or whether they demand a rethinking of what ‘justice’ itself entails.
Finally, Nessim Znaien’s contribution brought the discussion back to Tunisia, situating debates on justice in a post-authoritarian context. His analysis of the Truth and Dignity Commission (IVD) traced the conflict between transitional justice institutions and professional historians, particularly around questions of archival authority and historical narrative. The Commission’s attempts to recover documents from the dictatorship years provoked resistance from academic institutions, revealing deeper struggles over who has the right to define history, and, by extension, justice. For Znaien, this contestation was not merely institutional but epistemological: it exposed the uneasy coexistence of juridical, political and historical claims to truth in postcolonial contexts.
Across the panel, a common question pertained to the question of who calls what justice? From the ICC’s digital aesthetics to local truth commissions and grassroots climate activism, the concept of justice appears as a field of tension between universality and locality, norm and praxis, recognition and redistribution. While transitional and transformative justice frameworks seek to repair past harms, they often remain bound to Western temporalities of progress and closure. The challenge, as several participants concluded, is to imagine justice as an ongoing relational practice, grounded in solidarity, historical awareness and epistemic humility, rather than as an institutional endpoint.
4. Contesting Hierarchies, Civil Society and Everyday Peace
The panel on contesting hierarchies: civil society and struggles for peace shifted the conversation from violence and justice to the diverse practices through which peace is enacted, narrated and sustained. The four contributions, ranging from Latin America to Germany, and Cyprus, collectively emphasised that peace is not a post-conflict condition but an ongoing process rooted in social struggle, memory and everyday forms of resistance.
Christine Hatzky opened with insights from the CALAS Knowledge Lab ‘Visions of Peace’ and its recently published synthesis volume Peace in Latin America (Díaz Arias et al., ). She described how the project deliberately ‘shifted from studying conflict to studying peace’, exploring transitions between violence and peace through literary, cultural and historical lenses. In contexts where diffuse and non-political violence has proliferated since the 1990s, peace often persists quietly within civil society, especially among those who confront violence in their daily lives. Drawing on examples such as Las Patronas, the Mexican women who assist migrants on their way to the United States, Hatzky argued that peace already exists whenever violence is actively confronted. Cultural production, including literature, performance and storytelling, plays a decisive role in this process, shaping not only representations of conflict but also the moral imagination of peace itself. Inspired by liberation theology, Hatzky defined peace as relentless persistence, a practice of endurance and care in the face of structural harm.
Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel’s intervention connected these ideas to the longue durée of European peace movements and their entanglements with the Global South. Revisiting Germany’s peace activism from the Cold War to the present, she is currently examining how movements that once opposed militarisation and nuclear armament have gradually been absorbed into discourses of ‘responsibility’ and security. Tracing the transition from anti-militarisation to re-militarisation, she asked how this shift reflects changing notions of peace, order and democracy in Europe. Mageza-Barthel emphasised that the German peace movement has always been transnationally embedded; encounters with decolonial and anti-imperialist struggles in the Global South inspired its global solidarity ethos. However, Eurocentrism in research has often obscured these connections, and intergenerational gaps within the movement have weakened its continuity. Her analysis reminded us that understanding peace in Germany also requires confronting its imperial legacies and its geopolitical role as a ‘gateway’ between West and East.
Viviana García Pinzón’s paper brought these reflections to the streets of Cali, Colombia, the epicentre of the 2021 National Strike. Through the lens of relational space, she examined how blockades, occupations and street performances disrupted and reimagined the city’s socio-spatial order during the wave of protest. Building on an ethnographic approach, her work showed that protests did not simply challenge national political decisions, but entailed the rejection of an urban order based on postcolonial hierarchies and its recreation through practices of solidarity and care. In the ‘capital of resistance’, marginalised urban spaces became laboratories of collective agency where new meanings of citizenship, belonging and solidarity emerged. García Pinzón invited participants to read everyday resistance as an expression of peace – that is, as a form of acting against violence that exposes, rather than denies, its structures.
Finally, Sophie Falschebner’s contribution, Ambiguous narratives of (de)colonisation: the case of Cyprus, turned to a space often imagined as peripheral to postcolonial studies, situated ‘on the margins of Europe’. Drawing on narrative interviews across the island’s divide, she analysed how Cypriots interpret and mobilise the concept of colonialism to make sense of enduring division. Her findings revealed a multiplicity of converging colonial layers and competing narratives: some challenge colonial hierarchies, while others inadvertently reproduce them. This ambiguity, she argued, demonstrates how anti-colonial resistance can itself become entangled with exclusionary logics. The Cypriot case thus highlights a key challenge for peace and conflict research: to examine not only how colonial power endures, but also how it is reinscribed through well-intentioned discourses of decolonisation. By referencing Catherine Walsh’s concept of ‘crack-making’ (), understood as strategies of disrupting colonial structures through alternatives to the status quo, Falschebner pointed to the potential of envisioning peace in a deadlock such as the Cypriot case.
In discussion, panellists and participants drew connections between these diverse cases. Whether in Latin American grassroots initiatives, German peace movements, Colombian street protests or Cypriot memory politics, peace appeared as a continuum of survival, resistance, care and healing. It begins where people act against violence, sometimes collectively, sometimes quietly, and it is sustained through practices that refuse to accept violence as normal. Peace spans through multiple temporalities. By interrupting violence, transgressing what is seen as normality and addressing past harms, peace delineates the basis of alternative worlds. It weaves together the past, the present and the future. The panel’s conversations underscored that studying peace requires more than analysing its institutional frameworks; it demands attention to the embodied and cultural labour through which people contest hierarchies and cultivate the fragile possibility of coexistence.
5. THE VIRTUAL ENCYCLOPAEDIA. Rewriting Peace and Conflict
The roundtable Rewriting Peace & Conflict: The Virtual Encyclopaedia, moderated by Miriam Bartelmann and Viviana García Pinzón, introduced the network’s multimodal platform promoting collective and other forms of knowledge production and knowledge sharing. Emphasising the need to link the critique to coloniality with concrete practices, the Virtual Encyclopaedia (VE) represents a tangible intervention to address the coloniality of knowledge of peace and conflict studies. Core to the VE is the critical interrogation of key concepts and theories and their underlying premises. This goes hand in hand with an expansion of the field’s vocabulary and analytical corpus by foregrounding concepts and theories rooted in the experiences and historical trajectories of people and communities in the Souths and in historically marginalised groups. Based on the acknowledgement of epistemic plurality, the platform includes different forms of knowledge production and communication beyond textual academic scripts, for example through visuality, storytelling, humour and collaborative authorship. With the participation of contributors to the VE, and , the roundtable provided a space to reflect on the project’s contributions, challenges and tensions.
Participants highlighted the relevance of reckoning with the existence and consequences of epistemic hierarchies and violence in the field. For instance, Garroum mentioned how academia tends to debate war and peace without populating the concepts and the debate itself. Analyses often remain at the abstract level, without considering the people who suffer war and violence, and who build peace. An engagement with the embodied and material character of these phenomena raises a set of questions about how we make sense of research and the role of the researcher. From such a perspective, positionality and reflexivity emerge not as accessory aspects of scholarship but as crucial components of research praxis. Research is not unidirectional, as in an object/subject relationship, but deeply affects the researcher. The selective recognition of knowledges and experiences in both theoretical and practical terms reflects epistemic violence. In this regard, Durdiyeva noted how race and gender define hierarchies of epistemic credibility and trust. The testimony of racialised populations is often assumed to be less trustworthy in academic debates, and also before the courts in the framework of transitional justice processes.
Against this backdrop, the contributors emphasised the importance of initiatives such as the VE. Durdiyeva stressed how the VE provides a space for re-writing and expanding the vocabulary in peace and conflict studies, noting the inadequacy of prevalent theories and the need of concepts rooted in the experience and knowledges of those that remain at the margins of scholar debates while bearing the brunt of violence. Along these lines, the VE offers a conceptual toolbox for both academia and non-academic audiences. Likewise, the participants discussed the potential of including different forms of communication beyond academic written texts. Garroum reflected on the use of photography and maps to grasp the texture of the life, materiality and destruction of Aleppo, a case of a city lost to urbicide. Drawing on his experience as co-host of the podcast , Rodríguez foregrounded how the process of preparation and the conversations and encounters with dialogue partners themselves create a connection and exchange of ideas and experiences that cannot be achieved in traditional written formats. Engagement with a diverse range of formats and forms of communication opens the path towards new inclusive forms of knowledge production, ways that are often more attuned to the complexities, nuances and depth of embodied experiences and plural worldviews.
Finally, the participants discussed the further possibilities and challenges of the project. In times when algorithmically curated online environments have turned into central arenas of public debate that fuel increasing polarisation, the VE offers an alternative to establishing dialogues with different audiences. Developing these kinds of platforms entails an additional effort for scholars, as it demands a move beyond the familiar – and in many ways limiting – parameters and rituals of academic journals and books. However, this is necessary in our current times. For the project of the VE in particular, this implies an additional effort to promote its content on different social media platforms. Similarly, the project needs to reinforce its efforts for the inclusion of content related to regions that remain underrepresented. While grappling with the challenges of an initiative based in the Global North with its related structural and institutional complexities and contradictions, the VE will strive to remain as an open space for dialogic exchanges.
6. LOOKING AHEAD: Challenges, Debates and Developments
The conference concluded with a roundtable featuring Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel, Merouan Mekouar, Andreas Mehler and Miriam Bartelmann, who moderated a conversation that moved beyond summary to critical reflection. The speakers positioned the network’s achievements within wider global and institutional contexts, asking what it means to engage with postcolonial and decolonial stances from the point of view of academic hierarchies that remain largely unchanged.
Merouan Mekouar framed the discussion by returning to the enduring hierarchies and power relations that structure both global politics and the production of knowledge. The discursive and ideational components of epistemic hierarchies are inextricably linked to a material dimension, a political economy that cannot be ignored. Rethinking peace and conflict, he argued, requires confronting how economic dependencies and security architectures sustain inequalities of knowledge production and circulation.
Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel connected these questions to feminist debates on peace and epistemic plurality. Drawing on the Feminisms in Dialogue lecture series in Kassel, she called for recognition of the multiplicity of feminist voices that challenge both patriarchal and neoliberal academic formats. Decoloniality, she suggested, cannot be reduced to diversifying representation; it also means transforming the conditions of collaboration: the conferences, funding logics, and publication circuits that define scholarly legitimacy. She asked, pointedly, whether the call for innovation in decolonial research risks shifting the burden of transformation onto those already marginalized. The task, she proposed, is not to “overcome” hierarchies but to transcend them by weaving a more interdependent and dialogical landscape of actors and knowledges.
Andreas Mehler emphasized the need for grounding – for connecting theoretical critique to the everyday orders from below and above that sustain social life. He reflected on the scalar dimensions of peace and conflict, from local practices of coexistence to global structures of governance. He also addressed the importance of identifying “positive elements to build a future” rather than only aiming to expose domination. This grounding also entails questioning the “gatekeepers” who determine whose work counts as authoritative and whose remains peripheral.
Miriam Bartelmann broadened the discussion by linking earlier themes of slow and structural violence to the environmental and epistemic crises of the present. She noted that ecology-related harm – for example, exposure to toxins – often lacks an “aesthetics of violence”: it is unspectacular, dispersed and easily ignored, and yet it is deliberate. Grasping such forms of violence, she argued, requires genuine interdisciplinarity, expanding the methodological and theoretical toolboxes that allow for understanding how structural violence unfolds, while revealing the actors involved. Furthermore, she called for a shift in gaze toward researchers from Africa and other regions of the Global South, who increasingly conduct research in and about the North by bringing in the Global South as an epistemic prism and dismantling naturalised hierarchies. She noted that Tunis was a highly fitting setting for these reflections – a city layered with colonial legacies, revolutionary energies, and contemporary struggles for justice.
The roundtable, like the conference as a whole, revealed both the contradictions in and the creative potential of attempting to “decolonize” from within. Across panels, discussions, and informal exchanges, participants enacted what one speaker called “a plurivocal ecology of knowledge”: a collaborative practice that privileges neither centre nor periphery but rather their entangled becoming.
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