Post-Abyssal peacebuilding : thinking peace through the epistemologies of the South

Abstract

Liberal peacebuilding, based on the ideology of liberal peace, became the hegemonic form of peace construction after the end of the Cold War. As performed by the United Nations (UN), liberal peacebuilding does not include endogenously developed answers to conflict in its formula for peace. The troubled relationship between the UN and the local has long been criticised by peace studies scholars, who have been exposing its hybrid character by recognising agency in local actors. My intention is to take these critiques further and draw attention to the importance of revealing the local understandings of peace that produced resistance to international intervention. For this, I suggest the integration by peace studies, of a new conceptual framework to deal with local epistemologies. The research question guiding this dissertation thus becomes: how can Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ conceptual framework of the epistemologies of the South further the knowledge and practice of peacebuilding? The argument set out is that the liberal peace concept, as part of modern western thinking, constitutes an abyssal line, radically excluding all other forms of social, political and economic organisation found in post-conflict spaces that do not conform to liberal values. The epistemologies of the South are able to confront this hegemony through the practice of the sociologies of absences and emergences and the work of translation, which reveal local epistemologies. Integrating this framework into peace studies constitutes a conceptual advancement since it helps to explain different visions of peace, thereby contributing to a broader understanding of this concept and enriching peaces that are already known. Thus, the dissertation makes a twofold contribution: first, it constitutes an epistemological critique of the liberal peace as associated with modern Western thinking; second, it constitutes a conceptual contribution, since it explores different tools to investigate endogenous forms of peace. Its main goal is to inspire new research into peace and peace construction that follow the epistemologies of the South framework and thus help to deepen the understanding of these concepts.