Description
Overt the last two decades, the scholars of peace studies, predominantly based in Global North metropolitan academic centres, have tried to ‘capture’, imagine, and theorise the elusive and alluring phenomena of ‘the local’ through concepts of local ordering, everydayness, empowerment, and inclusion/participation. While these so-called ‘turns’ in scholarship have raised important questions about the dominant practices and normative underpinnings of the “liberal peace” approach and international interventions, they nevertheless met their own limits. The limitations have been particularly pronounced in the domains of accounting for structural conditions of global racial hierarchies (Azarmandi 2024), indigenous onto-epistemologies (FitzGerald 2023), the colonial matrix of power (Quijano), and different ways of knowing and living “an/other peace”(Shroff 2019). By drawing on the anticolonial and decolonial feminisms, and geo-political epistemic grounding in post-Yugoslav, post-war experiences, in this paper, I focus on the politics of knowledge production about local ordering in Peace Studies. In particular, I focus on its un/intended consequences - silences, erasures and re-production of coloniality of knowledge under the guise of finding an alternative to the consistently failing liberal peace and inadequacy of the Western epistemic authority/monopoly in Peace Studies.
