The Rowman & Littlefield „Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies – Perspectives from the Global South” has been published open access. Edited by Siddharth Tripathi and Solveig Richter, this anthology aims to make peace and conflict research, which was originally dominated by Western perspectives, more plural. A new research agenda should be more strongly rooted in the ground realities, contexts, imaginations – political, economic, and social – of the Global South(s). Written in the context of the BMFTR-Network Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict, the handbook features several TraCe contributions.
In the chapter „Looking Beyond Peace and Conflict Studies: The Global South(S) in Other Disciplines”, Thorsten Bonacker together with Tareq Sydiq examines calls for a global perspective in disciplines such as sociology, history, and international relations. The term “Global South” is often used to criticize Eurocentrism and power dynamics in systems of knowledge production. Some want to enhance the existing, Northern-dominated canon with knowledge from the Global South, while others want to fundamentally restructure disciplines and create truly “Global” disciplines by overcoming North/South divides.
Jonas Wolff contributes the chapter „The Local Turn and the Global South in Critical Peacebuilding Studies” to the handbook. He shows how peace research is increasingly embracing local perspectives and experiences from the Global South, thereby challenging traditional, Western-influenced, top-down approaches to peacebuilding. The chapter discusses the importance of this 'local turn' and its consequences for the theory and practice of peace processes.
In her chapter „The Politics of Naming, Epistemology, and the Study of ‘Armed Non-state Actors’ in the ‘Middle East’”, Hanna Pfeifer addresses struggle over the meaning of terrorism as a concept. From a perspective of social constructivism, the question is not so much whether or not an act of violence objectively qualifies as terrorism but rather under what conditions can a phenomenon called “terrorism” emerge, who participates in its production and who does not, and what are the effects of this construction in terms of political power.
In their chapter „Challenging Peacebuilding from a Postcolonial Perspective”Kristine Andra Avram, Susanne Buckley-Zistel, and Alexandra Engelsdorfer use existing approaches of postcolonial reasoning to criticize the concept of peace and peacebuilding from a non-Western perspective, with a focus on reflecting the concepts of binaries, temporality, linearity, and spatiality. This reflection may serve to move beyond a so-called Western-centered view on peace, conflict, and peacebuilding.
The whole handbook can be found here: The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies: Perspectives from the Global South