Tag: Peace

Re-thinking Peace and Conflict Studies in a Postcolonial World

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.

Shuar visions 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).

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.

Sudan

Sudan is facing one of the world’s most devastating yet underreported humanitarian crises. Since the outbreak of war in April 2023, millions have been displaced, infrastructure destroyed, and civilian lives shattered amid a climate of international neglect and inadequate media attention. This silence is not new. Sudan’s complex histories of revolution, resistance, and repression have long been marginalized in global discourse, often overshadowed by reductive narratives or geopolitical disinterest. Despite this, Sudanese scholars, activists, and communities continue to produce powerful analyses and interventions that illuminate the country’s struggles and aspirations. This intervention page centers Sudanese voices, inviting deeper engagement with the brilliant yet too often overlooked intellectual and political labour of Sudanese thinkers, as well as those in solidarity with them.

Coloniality of Nature

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.

Against simplification

Written for students, journalists, practitioners and decision-makers, the entry responds to simplifying accounts of postcolonialism and discusses the main points of convergence and divergence between the fields of de-/postcolonial thought and peace and conflict studies. Using the current global political situation and the heated debates about ‘woke gender and postcolonial ideologies’ as a starting point, the first section of this entry outlines the broad field of postcolonial thought, highlighting three lines of argument. First, de-/postcolonial approaches deal with colonial continuities. Second, they form part of a broader movement to critically assess the impact of interests and standpoints on knowledge production, and to use language for the reconstitution of subjectivity, identity, and politics. Third, de-/postcolonial thought and practice are intrinsically linked to resistance in diverse forms. The second part section of this the entry turns to the field of peace and conflict studies and spells out how it connects to these three lines of arguments. The entry is an invitation to delve deeper into the field, and to think ahead.

Coloniality of Peace

The coloniality of peace describes how appeals to peace can be complicit with coloniality by supporting and reinforcing modern/colonial purposes of domination, control and extraction, among others. To provide analytical tools to identify the coloniality of peace, this contribution builds on a range of critiques of ‘peace’ that have been offered from post- and decolonial stances. It includes three analytical steps: 1) identifying the coloniality of peace; 2) problematising the coloniality of peace; and 3) destabilising the coloniality of peace. The contribution sets out to outline this critique along with some of the core analytical concepts of decolonial theories, and locate the function of the coloniality of peace in the modern/colonial system.

Epistemic Violence

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.

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