Recovering the Everyday Within and for Decolonial Peacebuilding Through Politico-Affective Space
The universalization of Western peace frameworks, which remain discursively tethered to liberal notions of freedom, markets, democracy and justice, continues to be the subject of critique in the peace and conflict literature. These critiques lay bare the
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Recovering the Everyday Within and for Decolonial Peacebuilding Through Politico-Affective Space Shahnaaz Suffla, Nick Malherbe, and Mohamed Seedat
To study the everyday is to wish to change it. To change the everyday is to bring its confusions into the light of day and into language; it is to make its latent conflicts apparent, and thus to burst them asunder. It is therefore both theory and practice, critique and action. (Lefebvre, 2002, p. 226).
Taken as ideology, as well as political, economic and moral philosophy, liberalism locates ‘the good life’ in individual freedoms (Richmond 2009a). Accordingly, liberals champion unregulated market forces, and the assumption that democratization always follows marketization (Paris 2010) as ideal in allowing for the flourishing of such freedoms (Brown 2006). Today, the hegemonic, most visible and best funded modes of peacebuilding rely significantly on the tenets of liberalism (Hudson 2016). In adhering to such liberal doctrine, the liberal peace is underpinned by the base assumption that democratic, capitalist societies are likely to engender the greatest levels of peace in local affairs and international relations (Rampton and Nadarajah 2017; Vásquez-Arenas 2018). From this perspective, “the liberal peace can be understood as a set of particular ideas and practices intended to reform and regulate polities in the global South” (Sabaratnam 2013, pp. 259–260). Richmond (2011) notes that resistance to colonial domination is often interpreted by liberal peace frameworks as wholly ‘violent’, and therefore denotes anathema to peace. It is in this sense that the liberal peace remains in large part indifferent to coloniality as an analytic in the conception of conflict and violence prevention. This includes comprehension of the way violences reproduce and transmute in everyday lives, as well as the ontological (re)production of racial, gender and other differences in the construction of relations of domination and subjugation. If we understand coloniality as a collection of systems that emerged out of Euro-North-American-centric modernity and are, today, observed in the colonial S. Suffla (*) · N. Malherbe · M. Seedat Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa, Lenasia, South Africa South African Medical Research Council-University of South Africa Violence, Injury and Peace Research Unit, Tygerberg, South Africa e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 Y. G. Acar et al. (eds.), Researching Peace, Conflict, and Power in the Field, Peace Psychology Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44113-5_18
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relations of exploitation and domination (see Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015a), we may posit that many contemporary iterations of liberal peacebuilding operate in the service of coloniality. The methodologies of the liberal peace are thus continually defined and reoriented by their impulse towards the colonial gaze, which understands people as passive r
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