Re-thinking Peace and Conflict Studies in a Postcolonial World
By Miriam Bartelmann, Viviana García Pinzón, and Fabricio Rodríguez
Insights from the first-phase conference of the BMFTR network Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict, Tunis, October 9–12 2025.
The conference Re-thinking Peace and Conflict Studies in a Postcolonial World took place in Tunis in October 2025, marking the culmination of four years of collaborative research, while opening a space for collective reflection on the network’s contributions to the field. The discussions addressed the deep relationship between knowledge production and global hierarchies, showing that rethinking peace and conflict studies necessarily entails confronting the field’s epistemic foundations while remaining attentive to geopolitical developments, uneven power relations and the political economies affecting it.[1]

About the event
Organised by the competence network Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict, in cooperation with the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM), the conference gathered researchers from MECAM and other Maria Sibylla Merian Centres for Advanced Studies including CALAS (Mexico), Mecila (Brazil), ICAS:MP (India) and MIASA (Ghana).[2] During different panels and roundtables, the participants discussed four key themes:
- the dynamics of violence
- security governance
- transformative justice
- civil society and everyday peace.
The network also presented two open access projects addressing epistemic hierarchies and promoting plural approaches in peace and conflict: (i) The Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025), edited by Siddharth Tripathi and Solveig Richter and (ii) The Virtual Encyclopaedia ‘Rewriting Peace and Conflict’, hosted and curated by ABI Freiburg.
Introduction: Pluralising Peace and Conflict Studies
The opening roundtable, chaired by Adam Sandor and commented by Mariam Salehi, discussed the Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies. This conversation began by interrogating the epistemic underpinnings of peace and conflict studies. As Siddharth Tripathi, Tareq Sydiq and Fabricio Rodríguez outlined, the field emerged largely from institutions and experiences of the Global North, establishing European notions of peace after WWII as the global standard. This logic implicitly reinforces colonial hierarchies of knowledge about the meaning of peace itself, its political and economic components, and the means to achieve it.
In this light, the handbook seeks to pluralise the field by centring the perspectives and experiences of Global South scholars. Rather than promoting a wholesale rejection of European ideas, the contributors call for a move beyond Eurocentrism toward grounded realities in the Global Souths (and the Global Easts) – understood as heterogeneous spaces of intellectual practice and epistemic creativity.
The roundtable addressed three questions:
- Who takes a protagonist role in the field as a knowledge bearer, and for what purpose?
- How can horizontal dialogues across North, South, and East be sustained despite enduring asymmetries of authority?
- How can we transcend the binary of North/South altogether, without erasing difference or reproducing epistemic hierarchies?
The contributions stressed that peace and conflict studies should not only seek to understand, but also transform reality. Enhancing the transformative character of peace and conflict studies requires an openness to the diverse ways of knowing and enacting peace that exist outside canonical frameworks. As several authors in the handbook noted, the Global Souths have always been central to the ‘global’, serving as a site of theorisation and experimentation. The denial and erasure of Southern modes of ‘world intellection’ persists as a colonial wound. Hence, centring the Global becomes a historical and epistemic task through which to understand social phenomena and a variety of experiences with colonialism.
Discussions touched on the dangers of ‘racial amnesia’ and its epistemic violence: the fact that those most affected by structural violence are rarely recognised as knowledge producers or are even denied this quality entirely. To take Global South actors seriously as epistemic partners, scholars must both listen more and unlearn more. This entails recognizing the knowledges of peoples living in places that are conventionally associated with conflict and understanding the multiple forms of violence underpinning the North’s assumed ‘peacefulness’.
By centring relationality, rather than division, the handbook calls for a reworlding of peace and conflict studies as a way of connecting ‘both halves’ of the globe as interdependent and co-constitutive.
1. Coloniality of Violence and the Politics of Naming
The panel on dynamics of violence explored how violence persists across time, space and discourse. Swati Parashar spoke about famines, slow violence, and necropolitics, arguing that famines are not natural disasters or humanitarian crises but deliberate, preventable acts of structural violence. Parashar’s understanding of slow violence and Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics point to the gradual deterioration of bodies and communities long after a conflictive ‘event’ has passed. This requires consideration of the slower and ‘uneventful’ forms of harm that mark global hierarchies of suffering. Feminist approaches, Parashar argued, have long demonstrated that the politics of naming is central to political emancipation, the conquest of rights, and care-based relations.
Siddharth Tripathi called attention to the vocabularies of violence that traverse colonial, populist and authoritarian regimes. He argued that authoritarianism is not an anomaly, but rather a structural precondition of imperial power. When formal empires collapse, their mechanisms of domination persist in new institutional forms: checkpoints, welfare systems, and educational projects designed to ‘civilise’ or ‘educate’ the ‘native’. Across both North and South, he observed, protests against austerity, ecological crises or inequality face increasingly normalised forms of coercion.
Izadora Xavier analysed how women in the favela of Alemão, Rio de Janeiro, understand militarisation, being themselves heavily affected by military operations. Her work illuminated how military and humanitarian logics intersect, and how ‘pacification’ is performed through gendered narratives of care and protection. Xavier situated militarised masculinity and the circulation of weapons as indicators of power, revealing how global security orders build upon intimate and everyday economies of gendered inequality.
Anika Oettler’s presentation on transformative justice in Colombia shifted attention to the entanglement of postcolonial legacies and contemporary inequalities. She argued that Colombia is simultaneously a country of enduring patriarchy, intersectional exclusion and deep inequality, while it also remains persistent in its peace efforts. The 2016 peace accord promised a new beginning, yet its implementation exposed the limits of transformative justice while structural issues such as racism, land concentration and political participation remain key obstacles.
This panel addressed violence as neither exceptional nor episodic, but as a structure organising visibility, empathy and accountability – one that affects the everyday life of people in ways that reproduce colonial continuities: some lives remain exposed to harm while others are selectively protected, often along categories of race and gender. Panellists highlighted the need to reimagine how we name, know and narrate violence without reproducing the hierarchies that sustain it.
2. Security Governance Beyond the North–South Divide
The panel on security governance interrogated how new configurations of power and security reshape postcolonial hierarchies in the twenty-first century. The discussion departed with a provocation: If colonialism is no longer territorial, how do its logics continue to structure security practices across North and South, and even within South–South relations?
Adam Sandor and Jana Hönke reflected upon their work on emerging security arrangements in the Global South, drawing on examples such as Kenya’s leadership of the 2024 Multinational Security Support Mission in Haiti and the presence of the Russian Wagner Group in Mali. These cases of South-South cooperation both contest and sustain existing hierarchies, even as funding and decision-making power often remain concentrated in the Global North. Furthermore, the Brazilian participation in the UN’s MINUSTAH mission in Haiti, showed how the rhetoric of ‘non-intervention’ coexisted with established, violence-affirming interpretations of order and control. Sandor and Hönke thus proposed that rather than reading postcolonial hierarchies exclusively through North–South relations, we must examine their reproduction within variegated South–South configurations that draw on, rework and sometimes mimic imperial forms of governance.
Tareq Sydiq approached these questions through his study of negotiated security arrangements in Pakistan. He argued that colonial-era security architectures were not merely imposed by external actors from above but continually renegotiated by local actors from below. Sydiq showed that while structural change (such as the end of colonial rule) created new openings, local actors also exercised agency through reforms toward more inclusive arrangements.
Darja Wolfmeier’s contribution, Narrating humanitarianism: who tells the story of aid?, redirected attention to the epistemic dimension of security. She argued that humanitarian organisations do not only deliver aid but also produce historical narratives by controlling archives and curating what becomes visible and what does not. Her presentation engaged with the meaning of ‘humanitarian silences’ and how these shape public perceptions and Western self-images of benevolence.
In his intervention, Yazid Benhadda traced a colonial genealogy of anti-migration ‘information campaigns’ in the Mediterranean. Drawing on French colonial archives, he demonstrated how post-war propaganda in Algeria sought to discourage ‘unwanted’ migration to France, anticipating contemporary European strategies of externalised border control. Benhadda exposed the enduring logic of ‘security through deterrence’, where the mobility of certain populations is treated as a threat to be managed.
These presentations suggested that the coloniality of security governance resides not only in who exercises violence, but also in how security is imagined, narrated and legitimated. From military interventions to archival memories of violence, the same asymmetries of credibility and authority persist. As one participant put it, the challenge is not only to decolonise security policy but also to decolonise the concept of security itself – its temporalities, its geographies, and its hierarchies of fear and selective protection.
3. Transformative Justice and the Limits of Liberal Peace
The panel on transformative justice grappled with the tensions between universalist ideals of justice and the situated realities through which justice is enacted, staged and enforced.
Selbi Durdiyeva opened the session with a critical interrogation of transformative justice drawing on decolonial and post-Soviet perspectives. She argued that modern coloniality survives the ‘double standards’ of liberal peacebuilding by placing the burden of transformation on victims while neglecting structural complicity in the Global North. Echoing Sylvia Wynter’s insight that ‘being human is praxis’, Durdiyeva called for a new understanding of solidarity: not as empathy or aid, but as praxis.
Anna Lena Goll continued the discussion by examining the visual performance of justice. In her analysis, she dissected the International Criminal Court’s digital campaign #JusticeAtWork. Through staff portraits and curated imagery, the ICC presents justice as expert-driven, neutral and universally valid. By mobilising emotions like care and dedication, the ICC constructs legitimacy through affect. What remains unseen are certain forms of labour, suffering or political contestation, which mark the boundaries of what global justice allows us to feel.
Hanna Schnieders explored the concept of global justice through experiences of environmental and climate activists in Costa Rica. Focusing on the praxis of activism as a site of theory-building, she explored how activists themselves understand their struggles as forms of global, environmental or transformative justice. This sparked a discussion on whether such experiences can be connected to transitional justice frameworks, or whether new understandings and approaches to ‘justice’ itself are needed.
Finally, Nessim Znaien’s contribution brought the attention to Tunisia, situating debates on justice in a post-authoritarian context. His analysis of the Truth and Dignity Commission (IVD) traced the conflict between transitional justice institutions and professional historians, particularly around questions of archival authority and historical narrative. The Commission’s attempts to recover documents from the dictatorship years provoked resistance from academic institutions. For Znaien, this contestation was not merely institutional but epistemological: it exposed the many conflicting claims to truth in postcolonial contexts.
In this panel, the concept of justice emerged as a field of tension between universality and locality, norm and praxis, recognition and redistribution. While transitional and transformative justice frameworks seek to repair past harms, they often remain bound to Western needs and temporalities. The challenge is to imagine justice as an ongoing relational practice, grounded in solidarity, historical awareness and epistemic humility.
4. Contesting Hierarchies, Civil Society and Everyday Peace
The panel on contesting hierarchies: civil society and struggles for peace shed light on practices through which peace is enacted, narrated and sustained. The four contributions emphasised that peace is not a post-conflict condition but an ongoing process rooted in social struggle, memory and everyday forms of resistance.
Christine Hatzky opened with insights from the CALAS Knowledge Lab ‘Visions of Peace’ and its book Peace in Latin America (Díaz Arias et al., 2025). She described how the project deliberately ‘shifted from studying conflict to studying peace’, exploring transitions between violence and peace through literary, cultural and historical lenses. In contexts where diffuse and non-political violence has proliferated, peace often persists quietly within civil society. Hatzky argued that peace already exists whenever violence is actively confronted. In her view, cultural production plays a decisive role as it shapes not only representations of conflict but also the moral imagination of peace itself.
Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel’s intervention connected these ideas to the longue durée of European peace movements and their entanglements with the Global South. Tracing the transition from anti-militarisation to re-militarisation, she asked how this shift reflects changing notions of peace, order and democracy in Europe. Mageza-Barthel emphasised how the German peace movement is intertwined with decolonial and anti-imperialist struggles in the Global South, which inspired its global solidarity ethos.
Viviana García Pinzón brought these reflections to Cali, Colombia, the epicentre of the 2021 National Strike. Through the lens of relational space, she examined how blockades and street occupations disrupted and reimagined the city’s socio-spatial order based on postcolonial hierarchies. Otherwise marginalised urban spaces became laboratories of collective agency where new meanings of citizenship, belonging, care and solidarity emerged. García Pinzón invited participants to read everyday resistance as an expression of peace – that is, as a form of acting against violence while exposing its structures.
Finally, Sophie Falschebner’s contribution, Ambiguous narratives of (de)colonisation: the case of Cyprus analysed how Cypriots interpret and mobilise the concept of colonialism to make sense of enduring division. In a rather underexamined case, Falschebner found a multiplicity of converging colonial layers and historically competing narratives. Some narratives challenge colonial hierarchies, while others inadvertently reproduce them. This ambiguity demonstrates how anti-colonial resistance can itself become entangled with exclusionary logics contributing to their endurance.
In this panel, peace appeared as a continuum of survival, resistance, care and healing. It begins where people act against violence through practices that refuse to accept its dynamics as normal. Studying peace, according to panellists, requires more than analysing its institutional frameworks; it demands attention to the embodied labour through which people contest hierarchies while crafting alternative worlds in the process.
5. The Virtual Encyclopaedia. Rewriting Peace and Conflict
The roundtable Rewriting Peace & Conflict: The Virtual Encyclopaedia, moderated by Miriam Bartelmann and Viviana García Pinzón, introduced the network’s multimodal platform that links the critique of coloniality with concrete concepts and practices. The Virtual Encyclopaedia (VE) represents a tangible intervention to address the coloniality of knowledge within peace and conflict studies. By interrogating key concepts and theories as well as their underlying premises, the VE contributes to broadening the field’s vocabulary and analytical corpus, foregrounding the knowledges of people and communities in the Souths. Fostering a practical approach to epistemic plurality, the platform includes different forms of knowledge production and communication.
Contributors to the VE, Gabriel Garroum Pla, Selbi Durdiyeva and Fabricio Rodríguez, highlighted the platform as a way of addressing epistemic violence. For instance, Garroum mentioned how academic debates on war and peace often remain abstract, without considering the people who suffer war and violence, and who build peace. Similarly, Durdiyeva noted how race and gender define hierarchies of epistemic credibility and trust. The testimony of racialised populations is often assumed to be less trustworthy; an expression of epistemic violence that is present both in academic debates and in the actual courts where transitional justice is legally crafted.
Durdiyeva stressed how the VE provides a space for re-writing and expanding the vocabulary in peace and conflict studies, noting the inadequacy of prevalent theories. Consequently, the VE offers an alternative conceptual toolbox for both academia and non-academic audiences. The participants likewise discussed the potential of including different forms of communication beyond academic written texts. Garroum reflected on the use of photography and maps to grasp the texture of the life, materiality and destruction of Aleppo, which he considers a case of “urbicide”. Drawing on his experience as co-host of the podcast Confronting Hierarchies, Rodríguez foregrounded how the process of preparing and holding conversations creates encounters that are not achievable through written academic formats. Engagement with a diverse range of communication formats opens the path towards inclusive forms of knowledge production attuned to the complexities, nuances and depth of embodied experiences and plural worldviews.
While grappling with the challenges of an initiative based in the Global North, with its related structural and institutional complexities and contradictions, the VE strives to cultivate an open space for enduring dialogic exchanges.
6. Looking ahead: Challenges, Debates and Developments
The conference concluded with a roundtable featuring Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel, Merouan Mekouar, Andreas Mehler and Miriam Bartelmann. The speakers positioned the network’s achievements within wider debates and institutional contexts – they reflected on what it means to engage with postcolonial and decolonial stances despite persisting academic hierarchies.
Merouan Mekouar emphasised the enduring hierarchies and power relations that structure both global politics and the production of knowledge in peace and conflict. The discursive and ideational components of epistemic hierarchies are linked to material dynamics and political economies that cannot be ignored. Rethinking peace and conflict, he argued, requires confronting how economic dependencies and security architectures sustain inequalities of knowledge production and circulation.
Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel called for recognition of the multiplicity of feminist voices that challenge both patriarchal and neoliberal academic formats. Decoloniality, she suggested, cannot be reduced to diversifying representation; it also means transforming the conditions of collaboration: the conferences, funding logics, and publication circuits that define scholarly legitimacy. She asked whether the call for innovation in decolonial research risks shifting the burden of transformation onto those already marginalized. The task is, hence, to transcend hierarchies by weaving a more interdependent and dialogical landscape of actors and knowledges.
Andreas Mehler emphasized the need for grounding – for connecting theoretical critique to the everyday orders that sustain social life. He reflected on the scalar dimensions of peace and conflict, from local practices of coexistence to global structures of governance, addressing the importance of identifying “positive elements to build a future” rather than only aiming to expose domination. This also entails questioning the “gatekeepers” who determine whose work counts as authoritative and whose remains peripheral.
Through the case of ecology-related harm, Miriam Bartelmann broadened the discussion by noting how grasping forms of structural and slow violence requires genuine interdisciplinarity, expanding the methodological and theoretical toolboxes to understand how violence unfolds. Furthermore, she called for a shift in gaze toward researchers from the Global South, who increasingly conduct research in and about the North, by bringing in the Global South as an epistemic prism and dismantling naturalised hierarchies.
The roundtable, like the conference as a whole, revealed both the possibilities and contradictions of attempting to “decolonize” from within. Across panels, discussions, and informal exchanges, participants engaged in “a plurivocal ecology of knowledge”, as what one speaker put it: dialogic collaborative practices that privilege neither centre nor periphery but rather their entangled becoming.
Notes
[1] We want to thank Louise Maskill and Martine Toppenberg Dahl for their assistance with copy-editing.
[2] All these projects are funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space (BMFTR). The authors express their sincere gratitude to all participants of the conference for their valuable insights and constructive engagement throughout the event. We particularly acknowledge the conference organizers from the Merian Center for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) and from the network Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict for their remarkable work and contributions to the development of the conference programme and the coordination of logistical arrangements.
References
Buckley-Zistel, S., & Koloma Beck, T. (2022). Dekolonisiert Euch! Kritische Betrachtungen der Friedens- und Konfliktforschung. Zeitschrift Für Friedens- Und Konfliktforschung, 11(2), 141–152. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42597-023-00098-8
Díaz Arias, D., Hatzky, C., Mackenbach, W., Martínez Fernández, S., Michael, J., & Onken, H. (with Chinas Salazar, C.). (Eds.) (2025). Peace in Latin America: Shifting Paradigms in the Studies of Culture, Society and Politics. Routledge.
Durdiyeva, S. (2024, December 2). Transitional Justice and Decolonisation. Virtual Encyclopaedia – Rewriting Peace and Conflict. https://rewritingpeaceandconflict.net/transitional-justice-and-decolonisation/
Garroum Pla, G. (2025, October 3). Urbicide. Virtual Encyclopaedia – Rewriting Peace and Conflict. https://rewritingpeaceandconflict.net/urbicide/
Hönke, J., & Müller, M. M. (Eds.) (2016). The Global Making of Policing: Postcolonial Perspectives. Routledge.
Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics (S. Corcoran, Trans.). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478007227
Tripathi, S., & Richter, S. (Eds.). (2025). Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies: Perspectives from the Global South (1st ed.). Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9798881842390
Wynter, S., & McKittrick, K. (2015). Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?: Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations. In K. McKittrick (Ed.), Sylvia Wynter (pp. 9–89). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822375852-002
About the Authors
Viviana García Pinzón is a Senior Researcher at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) in Freiburg and an Associate at the GIGA Institute for Latin American Studies (ILAS). She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science with an emphasis on peace and conflict studies from the University of Marburg. Her research and teaching interests span multiple topics at the intersection of peace and conflict studies and international relations, including political violence, security politics, contentious politics, and peace and conflict transformation, with a strong interest in Latin America and the Global South. In the framework of the collaborative network Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict Studies, she coordinates and co-edits the Virtual Encyclopedia rewritingpeaceandconflict.net.
Miriam Bartelmann is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Freiburg (Germany) and a researcher at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI), Freiburg. Her research focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to environmental conflicts and environmental protection, particularly in Argentina, drawing on sociology, urban political ecology, and human geography. She is especially interested in power dynamics, decolonial thought, poststructuralist theory, and the relationship between epistemic hierarchies and disruptive economies. She is affiliated with the Competence Network Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict, where she co-edits the Virtual Encyclopedia on Peace and Conflict.
Fabricio Rodríguez is a Senior Researcher at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) and a Lecturer at the University of Freiburg. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science, and his work draws on global political economy, peace and conflict studies, and postcolonial/decolonial approaches. His research focuses on the geopolitics of nature–society relations, authoritarian practices, dynamics of violence, and socio-technical transitions, examining how these processes shape social and spatial hierarchies. His current work explores urban protests as contestations of neoliberalism and coloniality/modernity dynamics in Latin America. Within the collaborative network Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict Studies, he coordinates the Knowledge(s) in Dialogue component.
Citation: Miriam Bartelmann, Viviana García Pinzón, and Fabricio Rodríguez, Re-thinking Peace and Conflict Studies in a Postcolonial World, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 06.01.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/63654
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (January 6, 2026). Re-thinking Peace and Conflict Studies in a Postcolonial World. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved February 7, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15ghq


