Description
Peace and conflict studies engages with the state of our world by analyzing the root causes of armed conflict, the factors that enable conflict transformation and the mechanisms for ensuring long-lasting sustainable peace. However, there continues to be a dearth of research that confronts coloniality as a major root cause of historical conflict and posits “the all” (Mbembe, 2021) at the centre of finding peaceful solutions. Decolonization is a useful frame in peace and conflict studies that is both an event and an ongoing process that takes place at the structural, epistemic, personal and relational levels (Kessi, Marks and Ramugondo, 2020). Decolonization approaches are amplified by intersectional feminist views that aim to re-centre the voices of marginalized womxn (Ballo et al 2022). This paper requests for a shift of our attention away from liberal peacebuilding frameworks that focus on the function, motivation or intention of actors and processes related to conflict resolution, liberal democracy and market sovereignty and towards peaces that (re-)centre the ‘local’, everyday, diverse voices that reflect on how peace has an impact on people and places. It posits that by identifying peace promotion work as structural, epistemic, personal and relational, we can begin to envisage a decolonial peace.
