Category: D

Disrupting the Knowledge Trap

This entry questions the foundations of knowledge production in Peace and Conflict Studies by advocating an incremental movement that adopts a bottom-up and inside-out approach. Specifically, we argue that, with support, early-career researchers (ECRs) from the Global South can be pollinators, spreading new knowledge production methods across ECRs groups globally and scaling up to engage mid- and senior-level researchers. This is essential for the progression of better, more inclusive knowledge production worldwide. To illustrate our argument, we draw on our own experience leading an international intensive three-day writing workshop on Peace and Conflict Studies for ERCs from the Global South.

Decolonial Peace & Resistance Theory

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 essay 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.

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