Digna rabia matters because it captures an unruly, collectively cultivated anger forged amid the forms of devastation produced by capitalism, driving communities to resist destruction and craft alternative horizons.
Digna rabia matters because it captures an unruly, collectively cultivated anger forged amid the forms of devastation produced by capitalism, driving communities to resist destruction and craft alternative horizons.
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, 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. 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.
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.
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.
Futures-thinking encompasses a range of methods, tools and practices designed to explicitly engage with possible and desired futures. The word “futures” is used in the plural to acknowledge the diversity of potential future situations that have yet to materialise. Both external experts and conflict-affected communities use futures-thinking for analytical purposes and to drive societal transformation in conflict contexts. While business and military planning have professionalised the systematic development of futures-thinking methodology, anticipating and preparing for the future is inherent to all human societies. Therefore, systematic and power-critical futures-thinking can lend itself to participatory, reflexive and constructive practices that are beneficial to conflict transformation.
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.
Coined by Gayatri Spivak at the end of the so-called Cold War, the concept of epistemic violence is today a powerful tool of analysis and critique. It draws our attention to the cognitive and epistemic infrastructure of what we believe to know about the world, including about (non-)violence, conflict, war – and peace. Taking epistemic violence into account has the potential of changing the entire research agenda of Peace and Conflict Studies, because it invites us to re- and unthink violence from a groundbreaking perspective: the Euro- and androcentrist nature of our knowledge (and our ignorance) that is grounded in the sustaining colonial condition of the world – and vice versa.
