Description
Coloniality of Peacelessness: Comparing Colombia’s Liberal and Turkey’s Authoritarian Pacifications
Contemporary critical peace studies have produced influential currents such as critique of liberal peace showing the limits of mimicking western state-building, advances by hybrid/everyday peace including the agency of the local, and decolonial peace showing how our imagination of peace is originally colonial. Each one of these currents exposes the limits of state-centric peacebuilding and the persistence of violence in “post-conflict” contexts differently, yet despite these advances, the field still falls short of grasping how the modern nation-state remains structurally integrated with the coloniality of power in reproducing violence. Through a comparative historical analysis of two most different conflict settings—Colombia and Turkey—this article examines how processes of state formation and nation-building have been intertwined with conflict dynamics from their inception. It argues that state-centrism is not merely problematic for its legitimation of (structural) violence, but because it continuously re-enacts colonial forms of domination under postcolonial elite control, thereby rendering violence interminable. In this way, peacebuilding reproduces coloniality of power, and hence, peacelessness. The analysis first traces how colonial logics embedded in the very notions of “nationalism” and the “nation-state” shaped both contexts. It then compares how these logics governed questions of indigeneity in Colombia through mestizo nationalism, and minoritisation in Turkey through Turkish nationalism, each provoking societal insecurity in different levels to sustain elite rule. Finally, by contrasting post-agreement Colombia (often advanced as a liberal peace success) with post-2015 Turkey (marked by authoritarian pacification), the article shows that both reproduce the colonial genealogy of state violence through new modalities of control. In doing so, it calls for a rethinking of peace beyond both the state and the coloniality of power that it embodies.
