Description
Only recently has scholarship begun to recognize the importance of integrating Peace and Conflict Studies with migration research. Specifically, we need to go beyond structural links and related questions about return migration. Instead, a focus on migrants' experiences of displacement shows how these more fundamentally complicate the spatial epistemology between "war there" and "peace here." To understand these experiences and rethink peace transnationally, we must also examine how translocal connections influence the processes through which peace knowledge is created. This paper pushes that discussion forward by proposing participatory approaches as a methodological bridge between the two fields. Drawing on Orlando Fals Borda's tradition of Participatory Action Research (PAR), it defines participatory research in Peace and Conflict Studies as a locally rooted but transnationally connected practice of co-creating knowledge. Going beyond recent work on migrants' experiences, knowledges, and practices of peace, the paper argues that participatory methodologies enable a shift from studying diasporic experiences to co-creating knowledge with diasporic actors as epistemic partners. Speaking to critical debates on epistemic violence and disciplinary boundaries in PCS, the paper demonstrates how participatory methodologies can disrupt Eurocentric hierarchies of expertise on peace and complicate our understanding of the "local" of post-conflict contexts."
