Tag: decolonial

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.

Women’s Land Rights as a Pathway to Positive Peace

In India, land rights continue to be structured according to colonial systems of tenancy and ownership, which ensures the persistence of discrimination against women. Through the lens of structural violence and positive peace (Galtung, 1969), this entry discusses the central importance of the decolonisation of land rights in the creation of sustainable peace. Using India’s Gujarat-based Working Group for Women and Land Ownership (WGWLO) as a case study, the analysis demonstrates how achieving positive peace requires a transformation of fundamental power relations through economic justice, social transformation and institutional change.

Sumak Kawsay

Nonviolent actions that advocate for new rights and challenge dominant discourses and practices of progress and development disrupt the colonialities of power, knowledge and being. These forms of resistance, particularly in the defence of nature’s rights and community sovereignty, remain largely unacknowledged within civil resistance studies. This paper explores how buen vivir, or Sumak Kawsay, contributes to nonviolent resistance in Ecuador by identifying areas of convergence, divergence and complementarity between these two concepts and their practical implications. It underscores the decolonial perspective of Sumak Kawsay in reclaiming being, knowledge and power, arguing that its integration into nonviolent resistance studies could foster a more inclusive and culturally responsive approach to Indigenous struggles.

Futures-Thinking

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.

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.

Postcolonial and decolonial differences

Amid academic fondness for embracing trends and ‘turns’, it is reasonable to ask about the actual difference between post- and decolonial perspectives and to consider whether this difference warrants our attention. This lemma seeks to provide some answers, engaging critically with key arguments by decolonial scholars on how their work differs from postcolonial perspectives. I argue that we should pay attention to the key debates sparked by the ‘decolonial turn’ while avoiding the use of buzzwords and strawman arguments. Additionally, I demonstrate the synergies and frictions between post-/decolonial writings within peace and conflict studies, focusing specifically on the deconstruction and reconstruction of human rights.

Pluriversal peacebuilding

Pluriversality is a concept from decolonial theory that names the existence of irreducibly plural ways of knowing and being that connect people to one another and to the world(s) around them. Decolonial theory reveals how modern Eurocentric epistemologies support their claims to universality by eradicating resources for imagining and enacting alternatives to a world structured according to the racialized, gendered, territorialized, and capitalist logics of modernity.

Transitional Justice and Decolonisation

This entry outlines the key debates with respect to transitional justice (TJ), a range of processes that a society may undertake to reckon with the legacies of gross and large-scale violations of human rights and humanitarian law in the past. Although the literature on transitional justice and postcolonialism is emerging, this entry explains why transitional justice might not sufficiently address the complex issue of decolonisation. The entry argues that true decolonisation requires a more radical approach to the future of the field. Transitional justice should not only engage more with genealogies of decolonial thinking; it also needs to be decolonised in itself.

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