Shuar Geographies of Peace

Deconstructing the coloniality of peace through the eyes of the Indigenous Shuar community unveils the power relations often inherent in theories of peace and spaces for peace. Western-centric definitions allow states to determine who can experience peace and who cannot—narrowly defining it through the absence of violence holds up a curtain over other more invisible or ‘slow violence’ that occurs over time, through systematic oppression and degradations to all forms of life (both human and the more-than-human).

Sumak Kawsay

Nonviolent actions that promote new rights, question dominant discourses and practices of progress and development, challenge the coloniality of power, knowledge and being. These resistances, especially in defence of the rights of nature and communities, are not adequately integrated in studies of civil resistance. This text explores how good living or Sumak Kawsay in Ecuador contributes to nonviolent resistance, identifying points of encounter, divergence and complementarity between the two concepts and approaches to their practical orientation. It highlights the decolonial approach of Sumak Kawsay in the reclaiming of being, knowledge and power, and points out that its incorporation into studies of nonviolent resistance could generate a more inclusive and sensitive approach to the struggles of indigenous peoples.

Security. Speaking with Fanon?

The anticolonial writer and psychiatrist Fanon became famous in the 1960s for his radical criticism of colonial racism and its influence on the colonized peoples. His descriptions of how colonialism destroys people not only physically but also mentally and emotionally have inspired many political movements and theoretical concepts to this day. His work highlights the enduring nature of colonial relations and the different ways in which (in)security and its protection is perceived differently depending on the very position in society. However, Fanon’s name also remains inextricably linked with his most controversial and uncompromising stance: his commitment to the right of colonized peoples to insecure others by the use of violence in their struggle for liberation. Post/decolonial research as one of the heirs of Fanons writings challenges critical security research till today. In the following, the article uses post/decolonial research to indeed point to multiple ways in which both theoretical fields enrich the articulating and practicing of (in)security.

Systems of Conflictivity

Beyond the state-centric categories of war/peace, the ongoing genocide against Indigenous and African-descendent populations on the continent which Lélia Gonzalez renamed ‘Améfrica Ladina’ – recognised neither as a civil war nor as an international conflict – calls for methods of analysis which respond to what and whom has been excluded from the debate as a condition of possibility for its reproduction. By means of transnational and diasporic perspectives – which neither begin nor end at state borders and limits, nor rely on universal or particular/relative decrees – it effectively repositions inherited Eurocentric categories for thinking about violence towards instead relational accounts of systems of conflictivity.

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