Description
Academics, practitioners and institutions involved in conflict resolution simultaneously emanate and absorb knowledge. Scholars of Peace and conflict studies like myself have been considered part of the ‘peace industry’, especially in global south spaces. This foucauldian discourse analysis is grounded in a participatory observation of 6 university spheres for knowledge production and an ethnographic exploration of 5 others during a 5-month teaching tour in Europe, the Balkans, Central and East Asia. If builds on my observations as I was striving to decolonize my thinking and my teaching content and practice, in acute awareness of my positionality as a white Eastern European young woman scholar.
This paper explores the dialogue between non-haegemonic pedagogies as revealed through this teaching tour. To do so, it engages the concept of ‘negative space’, which allows a neoliberal fragmentation of educational activities to coexist with a post-colonial critique of current conflict spaces, such as the Balkans, Cambodia, or Israel/Palestine. Like the stated purpose of the peace industry, the goal of peace activities is fulfilled when they become useless, i.e. because peace has been achieved. Mainstream pedagogies of peace try to construct the absence of war. However these observations are circumscribed to a critical understanding of pedagogy, which necessarily involves a decolonial and feminist sensibility.
