Category: C

Coloniality of Nature

This contribution examines how peace and conflict studies remain deeply entangled with the coloniality of nature, perpetuating a worldview that reduces nature to an economic resource for driving economic growth, development and peacebuilding. I argue that the coloniality of nature operates through three interconnected mechanisms: the imposition of a dualist human-nature ontology, the degradation of life and territory through resource exploitation, and epistemic violence against Indigenous knowledge systems. By confronting these colonial underpinnings, this contribution calls for a reimagining of the relationship between nature, conflict and peace in order to address the colonial roots of environmental conflicts and advocate for decolonial futures built on reciprocity, care and ecological justice instead.

Colonialities of Power and Peace in Cameroon

This article makes the case that the militarised model of peace favoured in the discourse around Cameroon’s Anglophone crisis falls within a hegemonic, liberal/Western conception of peace shaped by the coloniality of power. This top-down perspective makes no space for a pluriversal dialogue, which is essential for resolving the crisis. Drawing on the concepts of decolonial peace and coloniality (of power), the article outlines several pathways for enshrining peace in Cameroon – and in Africa more broadly – within African peoples’ systems of values and knowledge. The core argument is that lasting peace in Cameroon and other conflicts on the continent requires a decolonial and Indigenous approach to peace.

Coloniality of Peace

The coloniality of peace describes how appeals to peace can be complicit with coloniality by supporting and reinforcing modern/colonial purposes of domination, control and extraction, among others. To provide analytical tools to identify the coloniality of peace, this contribution builds on a range of critiques of ‘peace’ that have been offered from post- and decolonial stances. It includes three analytical steps: 1) identifying the coloniality of peace; 2) problematising the coloniality of peace; and 3) destabilising the coloniality of peace. The contribution sets out to outline this critique along with some of the core analytical concepts of decolonial theories, and locate the function of the coloniality of peace in the modern/colonial system.

Collaborative Research

Dominant logics of knowledge production, such as epistemic imbalances, continue affecting collaborative research efforts and have proven difficult to overcome. Funding agencies and selection commitees are usually based in the Global North, which limits the inclusion of voices from the Global South in the initiation and organisation of research. On the ground, the awareness about how these standards have induced specific ways of doing research and reproduced power imbalances is even thinner. Many of these issues have gained increased visibility and small steps have been made to move away from the status quo. However, these have not led to a radical change in how collaborative research is framed, funded and executed.

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