Contributors
Amya Agarwal
Amya Agarwal is a lecturer of International Relations at the University of Sheffield, UK. Prior to moving to the UK, she was a senior researcher at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute, Freiburg, Germany (2021–2023) and a postdoctoral fellow in Duisburg, Germany (2019–2021). She received her PhD from the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi, India in 2017. In the past, she has held teaching positions in the University of Delhi, South Asian University, University of Freiburg and University College Freiburg. Amya’s research lies at the intersection of gender, conflict and security. In particular, she studies and writes about masculinities, motherhood, art and aesthetics in times of violence and resistance.
Nijmeh Ali
On: “Decolonial Peace & Resistance“
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Dr. Nijmeh Ali is a Fellow at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (NCPACS), University of Otago. Her research focuses on resistance and activism within oppressed groups, particularly among Palestinian activists in Israel. Her research provides a critical perspective on studying resistance and revolution in non-western societies and challenges the classic liberal framework of citizenship. It also deals with exposing strategies used by oppressed and marginalised groups in resisting their subjugation; therefore, it applies to women, minorities, refugees, and migrants. Dr. Ali provides political consultancy on Middle East politics, and migration and refugee policies.
Mahdis Azarmandi
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Mahdis Azarmandi is a Senior Lecturer in Educational Studies and Leadership at the University of Canterbury, where she also serves as the co-coordinator for the Bachelor of Youth and Community Leadership program. After earning her PhD from the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago, she held a position as Assistant Professor at DePauw University. Additionally, she has taught in Germany and Denmark. Her research focuses on addressing the notable absence of race in peace and conflict studies, alongside examining the interplay between colonization, imperialism, and white supremacy in the context of peace and violence.
Her current research extends beyond peace and conflict studies, encompassing abolition and the envisioning of a war-free world, with a focus on confronting the structural violence of capitalism, racism, and militarization to dismantle oppressive systems. In addition to her work on peace and conflict studies, she also works on the politics of memorialization in Spain and Aotearoa New Zealand. Her scholarly works delve into resistance to monuments and uncover the colonial inscriptions embedded within urban landscapes. She is one of the editors of the book Decolonize the City! Zur Kolonialität der Stadt – Gespräche | Aushandlungen | Perspektiven.
Manuela Boatcă
Manuela Boatcă is a Professor of Sociology and Head of School of the Global Studies Programme at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She has a degree in English and German languages and literatures and a PhD in sociology.
She has published widely on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In 2018 she was awarded an ACLS collaborative fellowship alongside literary scholar Anca Parvulescu, for a comparative project on inter-imperiality in Transylvania. The resulting co-authored book, titled “Creolizing the Modern. Transylvania Across Empires” will be published published in English, German, and Romanian.
Layla Brown
Layla D. Brown is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology & Africana Studies and affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Layla’s research focuses on Pan-African, Socialist, and Feminist social movements in Venezuela, the US, and the broader African Diaspora. She is working on completing her first book manuscript entitled An Anthropology of Pan-Africanism in the 21st Century, an ethnographic exploration of the rise of Pan-African/Feminist activism and social movements in Venezuela and the United States. Layla is also the co-host of a new podcast, “Life. Study. Revolution.” with Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly.
Claudia Brunner
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Claudia Brunner is a social scientist and Associate Professor at the Centre for Peace Research and Peace Education at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. In her habilitation (2019) at the University of Vienna’s department of Political Science, she developed a transdisciplinary concept of epistemic violence, the research for which was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (2015-2020). The resulting book Epistemische Gewalt. Wissen und Herrschaft in der kolonialen Moderne is available online, as are further publications in German and English at www.epistemicviolence.info. For previous work, she received academic awards issued by Humboldt-University in Berlin (2012) and by the German Association of Peace and Conflict Studies (2011).
Copyright to the picture: © photo riccio, klagenfurt
Selbi Durdiyeva
Selbi Durdiyeva is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Conflict Studies, Philipps University Marburg, working on ‘Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict’ project. She obtained her PhD at Transitional Justice Institute, Ulster University, Northern Ireland. Her PhD focused on reimagining the role of civil society in transitional justice processes in Russia with respect to Soviet repression. She is a former Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability (AHDA) Fellow, which took place at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University (2021-2022). She also worked as a research assistant at Nottingham Law School’s UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project. She has an LLM in International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law from the University of Essex. Previously, she worked as an adjunct lecturer and Legal Clinic Coordinator at the School of Law at KIMEP University, Kazakhstan and as the Child Rights International Network researcher.
Gelila Enbaye
On: “Futures-Thinking“
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Gelila Enbaye is a Research Associate at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin, where she works on peace and security policy. She contributes to the Stabilization Lab project where she co-developed a simulation game designed to analyze political economy dynamics in conflict settings. Currently, Gelila is working on African perspectives on stabilization policy and conflict management as part of this project.
As a 2024 Think Tank School fellow, Gelila is exploring the potential of futures-thinking in peace mediation through her personal policy project. Her insights and commentary have been featured in Tagesspiegel, Africa is a Country, and Zeit Online.
Gelila holds a dual master’s degree in International Security and International Relations from Sciences Po Paris and the London School of Economics. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Mannheim.
Garrett FitzGerald
On: “Pluriversal Peacebuilding“
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Garrett FitzGerald is an Assistant Professor of Peace & Justice Studies at Pace University. Garrett’s research broadly focuses on the politics of knowledge production in the field of peacebuilding, and draws on resources from decolonial, Indigenous, and Black feminist theory to interrogate persistent exclusions in peacebuilding theory and practice. Recent publications can be found in in the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Democratic Theory, and a forthcoming volume on critical feminist approaches to Peace Studies. His current research focuses on abolitionist approaches to peacebuilding; developing an intersectional approach to the concept of environmental violence that is gaining traction in peacebuilding literature; and in developing place-based approaches to teaching, researching, and practicing peace and justice work in New York City, where he lives and works.
F. Richard Georgi
On: “Postcolonial and Decolonial Differences“
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F. Richard Georgi is postdoctoral researcher at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and research associate at the Max Planck Research Group ‘Multiplication of Authority’. He is currently involved in two research projects, on the violence of building peace and ‘prepping’ as activism for in-/security. In his PhD dissertation, he studied the political activism of human rights defenders amidst the deferred promise of peace and violent realities in post-accord Colombia. His research is dedicated to listening to lived experiences in order to find ways out of the academic trenches that scholars like to build on subjects like human rights, activism and social mobilisation, conflict studies, and the transformations of capitalism.
Andréa Gill
On: “Systems of Conflictivity“
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Andréa Gill is a professor of the Political Science Department of the Institute of Philosophy and Social Sciences (IFCS) of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro – Brazil (UFRJ), in the Sector of International Politics and Decoloniality. Associate researcher of the Interdisciplinary Center for African Descendent Research and Heritage (NIREMA) and of the Global South Unit of Mediation (GSUM) of the BRICS Policy Center (BPC) of the Institute of International Relations at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). Member of the Fiscal Council of the Directorship of the Brazilian Association of International Relations (ABRI), as well as the Commission for Evaluation of Affirmative Action Politics and Vice-Coordination of the Thematic Area of Teaching, Research and Community Extension of the National Association. Editor of the book review section of the Sexualities Journal published by SAGE. Areas of research: postcolonial and decolonial studies; race, gender, sexuality, and class relations; urban politics; violence and conflict; international relations and globalisation; political economy and development; education; Latin American and Brazilian social and political thought. Her formation consists of a Bachelor’s in Social and Political Thought from Western University (UWO-Canada) and the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN-South Africa), and a Master’s and Doctorate in Political Science, with a specialisation in Cultural, Social and Political Thought, from the University of Victoria (UVIC-Canada).
Juliana González Villamizar
On: “Intersectionality“
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Juliana González Villamizar is a researcher and doctoral candidate at the Chair of Peace Studies at Justus-Liebig University in Gießen. Philosopher from the National University of Colombia with a master’s degree in Political Theory from Goethe University Frankfurt. Previously, she worked as researcher and consultant at CAPAZ Institute in Colombia and accompanied the work of the Colombian Truth Commission. Juliana’s research focuses on transitional justice, memory politics and peacebuilding from feminist, intersectional and decolonial perspectives, and aims to build ethical solidarity among activist and knowledge-production networks. She is co-editor of Comisiones de la verdad y género en países del sur global. Miradas decoloniales, retrospectivas y prospectivas de la justicia transicional (Universidad de los Andes/Instituto CAPAZ, 2021) and author/co-author of recent articles on the mainstreaming of intersectionality in the Colombian peace process: Feminist intersectional activism in the Colombian Truth Commission: constructing counter-hegemonic narratives of the armed conflict in the Colombian Caribbean (2023); The Promise and Perils of Mainstreaming Intersectionality in the Colombian Peace Process (2021); Arhuaco Indigenous Women’s Memories and the Colombian Truth Commission: Methodological Gaps and Political Tensions (2021). Her research received the Herbert Stolzenberg Award from Gießen University (2022).
Maria Ketzmerick-Calandrino
On: “Security. Speaking with Fanon?“
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Maria Ketzmerick-Calandrino (she/her), is an IR scholar focusing on peace, conflict, and security. Currently, she works as postdoctoral researcher in the project CRAFTE at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) Berlin. Before joining ZMO, she was a lecturer at the Chair for Sociology of Africa and Principal Investigator in the Hierarchies Network at the University of Bayreuth. Her research focuses on topics within post/decolonial and postsocialist security research, historical and sociological international relations, and (global) peace and conflict research. In doing so, she wants to contribute to an understanding of the ambivalent and complex interrelationships between locally rooted social dynamics, transnational politics, and global change. Empirically, she is interested in situations in which (social) orders are subject to constant (re)negotiation and the question of how these orders are embedded in historical interdependencies in a globalized context. These situations are embedded in dynamics within decolonization, and the Global Cold War, and stretch to contemporary social conflicts.
Rabea Khan
On: “Terrorism – The irredeemability of a concept“
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Rabea is a lecturer in International Relations at Liverpool John Moores University. Her primary research interests lie in the critical study of terrorism, religion, and counter-terrorism. She approaches the ‘critical’ study of these concepts and ideas through post- and decolonial as well as abolitionist approaches and is also interested in how categories like race and gender have shaped and encoded various concepts central to international security discourses and practices. Rabea is the current co-convenor of the BISA Critical Terrorism Studies working group and the co-editor of an upcoming special issue on ‘Abolition, Decoloniality and Criticality’ which seeks to radically re-think the project of Critical Terrorism Studies. Rabea’s most recent work has been published in Review of International Studies, Critical Research on Religion, Critical Studies on Terrorism and International Studies Quarterly. She is currently working on her first monograph entitled the ‘The colonial Myth of Religious Terrorism’.
Godefroid Muzalia Kihangu
Godefroid Muzalia Kihangu is Professor at the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique (ISP) in Bukavu, Director of the Centre de Recherche Universitaire du Kivu (CERUKI), co-founder and head of the Groupe d’Études sur les Conflits et la Sécurité Humaine (GEC-SH) as well as co-founder of the Congolese Network for Research on Peace and Security (ResCongo). Godefroid is closely involved in collaborative research. His research focuses on security governance and post-conflict reconstruction in the DRC. He focuses on armed groups dynamics and their impact on rural landscape changes.
Swati Parashar
Swati Parashar is a Professor of Peace and Development at the School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden. Her teaching and research have led to academic appointments and fellowships in India, Singapore, the UK, the US, Ireland, Australia, and Sweden. She has also taught at the University of Rwanda in Kigali and at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. Swati is a member of the Swedish Development Research Network and has served on the Scientific Advisory Board of SIDA. Her research interests include feminism, postcolonialism, research methodologies, gender-based violence, famines, and development in South Asia and East Africa. She has published numerous journal special issues, articles, policy papers, and popular media pieces. In 2025, she will be honored as the Distinguished Scholar of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section at the ISA Convention in Chicago.
Christina Pauls
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Christina Pauls is a doctoral researcher currently focusing on peace understandings and post-/decolonial memory activism. She works at the Chair of Political Science, Peace and Conflict Research at the University of Augsburg in the research network Conflicts.Meanings.Transitions. In that context, she is coordinating the ‘Transferzentrum Frieden’ in the city of Augsburg. She is also a consultant for nonviolent conflict transformation, facilitator for reflections critical of domination and educator for peace, remembrance and colonialism. During her studies in Passau, Kigali, Washington, D.C., and Innsbruck, Christina has researched about genocide, guilt and victimization in the African Great Lakes Region and transgenerational traumatization of minorities in the former Soviet Union.
Filiberto Penados
Dr. Filiberto Penados is a Co-Founder of CELA Belize and a Maya scholar whose work focuses on indigenous education and development. Dr. Penados has a long history of engaged scholarship with indigenous and local communities in Belize and a wealth of experience leveraging this involvement to create unique learning experiences.
Dr Penados has served as a professor at the University of Manitoba, University of Toronto, Galen University, and the University of Belize. He teaches courses on Sustainable Development, Natural Resource Management, and Education, and related fields. He also loves to play the guitar.
Jan Yasin Sunca
On: “Inter-subaltern Hierarchies“
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Jan Yasin Sunca obtained a joint Ph.D. degree from Bielefeld University (Germany) and Ghent University (Belgium). His work intersects international historical sociology, revolutionary politics, radical and decolonial political theory, and conflict analysis/transformation with a geographical focus on West Asia. Previously, he advised European institutions and NGOs on the relations between the EU, Turkey and the Kurds. Currently, he conducts a research project on stateless decolonisation.
(Un)Stiching Gazes
Artworks
- Beatriz Elena Arias López, Seamstress, PhD Community Mental Health, Principal Investigator in Colombia. University of Antioquia, Faculty of Nursing. beatriz.arias@udea.edu.co
- Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, PhD in International Politics, Senior Researcher in the UK. Aberystwyth University, Department of International Politics. beb14@aber.ac.uk
- Berena Patricia Torres Marín, PhD Social Anthropology, Co-researcher. Universidad de Antioquia, Faculty of Nursing. berena.torres@udea.edu.co
- Martha Rendón Herrera, Historian, Co-investigator. University of Antioquia, School of Nursing. hadaluz17@gmail.com
- Laura Antonia Coral Velásquez, Plastic Artist, Co-investigator. University of Antioquia, School of Nursing. lauraantoniacoralvelasquez@gmail.com
- Christine Andrä, PhD International Politics, Postdoctoral student. Aberystwyth University, Department of International Politics.
- Camila Londoño Román. Spanish Philologist. Co-researcher. University of Antioquia, Faculty of Nursing. camila.londonor@udea.edu.co
- María Teresa Buitrago Echeverri. Weaver, PhD Public Health, Co-investigator, Mtbuitragoe@gmail.com
(Un)Stiching gazes an interdisciplinary collective of reflection, research and praxis, which tells and collects stories of peace and encounters in Colombia, especially after the signing of the 2016 Peace Agreement. They do so through textile narrative, that is to say through threads, needles and fabrics. This is their manifesto:
“We have been saturated with death and pain, but we have also survived. We saw the war very close, it has been in the daily lives of all of us. Today we do something to reinvent history, we meet and talk, that gives us hope, it lets us know that there is something to do and that we can go ahead and do it. … We understand what has happened getting to know each other, living together, remembering that our lives deserve to be lived. This is our country, this is our history. Have been on a suspension bridge, today we process our own and the other’s, we have our debts, debts of justice, debts of indifference. Today we listen to different stories, we texturize politics with knots and threads. We allow ourselves this embrace of understanding, recovering humanized looks, without discarding conflict and difference.”
Siddharth Tripathi
Siddharth Tripathi is a Senior Research Fellow at University of Erfurt where he leads the project on Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict. His primary interest lies in postcolonial and decolonial perspectives in IR and peace and conflict studies especially on epistemic and structural hierarchies that exist in the discipline. He received his PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. As part of his research at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels, he has conducted extensive field research in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Berlin and Brussels. He edited the Rowman and Littlefield Handbook on Peace and Conflict Studies: Perspectives from the Global South(s) which is a collaborative endeavour of scholars from the Global North and the Global South.
Koen Vlassenroot
Koen Vlassenroot is a Professor of Political Science at Ghent University, where he is the director of the Conflict Research Group. He investigates armed groups and civil war. His main contribution in the field of development studies and peace and conflict research is the understanding of the social embeddedness of rurally based armed groups, the mobility of combatants, public authority and non-state forms of governance in conflict zones, the social transformations induced by long-term conflict and DDR processes. He is one of the in initiators of the Bukavu Series, a series of blog posts discussing ethical challenges of conflict research and the positionnality of research collaborators in the Global South.
Juliana Krohn
Juliana Krohn is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Innsbruck. She coordinates the interdisciplinary doctoral program “Dynamics of Inequality and Difference in the Age of Globalization”. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the interconnections between societal relationships with nature and understandings of peace based on decolonial and critical perspectives on peace research, education and work. She Co-Coordinated the APPEAR project “HU-UIBK Partnership for Strengthening Institutional Capacity in Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation“. Together with María Cárdenas, she is the spokesperson of the working group Critical Peace Research of the German Association for Peace and Conflict Studies (AFK e.V.). With Hannah Geuder, she co-coordinates the Scientists for Future regional group in western Austria.
Juliana Krohn
Juliana Krohn is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Innsbruck. She coordinates the interdisciplinary doctoral program “Dynamics of Inequality and Difference in the Age of Globalization”. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the interconnections between societal relationships with nature and understandings of peace based on decolonial and critical perspectives on peace research, education and work. She Co-Coordinated the APPEAR project “HU-UIBK Partnership for Strengthening Institutional Capacity in Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation“. Together with María Cárdenas, she is the spokesperson of the working group Critical Peace Research of the German Association for Peace and Conflict Studies (AFK e.V.). With Hannah Geuder, she co-coordinates the Scientists for Future regional group in western Austria.
