The Global South as a theoretical and methodological marker for scientific inquiry: researching and teaching decolonial peace

Abstract

How do we know, theorize, and teach the possibilities of peace in the Global South? For most of Eurocentric literature on the topic, peace in the Global South seems like an impossible utopia. Building on Freire’s pedagogy, I argue for a decolonial approach to peace studies centered on the agency of Global South peoples and their power to transform the world. This means that the construction of knowledge around the possibilities for peace are situated in concrete and real struggles of marginalized groups that have been resisting the expansion of violent and oppressive systems, and whose existence and struggles for alternative worlds are an example of “building peace” beyond the neoliberal-Western constraints. The aim of theorizing and learning peace from such perspective is to rescue the liberatory power of the idea of peace away from an imperialist agenda of control and oppression, and towards a liberatory strategy for people and planet.

Keywords:

• Global South
• decolonial
• peace studies
• critical pedagogy
• feminist methodology

“What is the fate of Latin America?” The fate I don’t know, but I know the challenge. The challenge is whether we will convert ourselves in a sad caricature of the North … Are we going to be like them? Are we going to repeat the horrors of a consumer society that is devouring the planet? Are we going to be violent? Are we going to believe that we are condemned to endless war? Or are we going to generate a different world? Are we going to offer a different world to the world? Eduardo Galeano

It happens that peace cannot be bought; peace is experienced in solidarity and loving acts, which cannot be incarcerated in oppression. Paulo Freire

Introduction

Bell Hooks (1994, p. 12) affirmed that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy,” but given my personal experience as a peace studies teacher, the classroom is not unlocking this revolutionary potential currently—why? I argue that the way we structure our courses and our teaching is directly tied to how we carry out our research and how we develop theory. If our theoretical and methodological practices are not being used to address real-world issues in a liberatory way, then our pedagogical practices will constrain students’ ability to envision and engage in transformative processes in our societies. If, through our research, we do not believe that change (peace) is possible, then we will not work toward it, and we will not teach our students about the possibilities either.

To a large extent, teaching in Peace and Conflict Studies (PCS) follows a methodological nationalist approach and neoliberal ways of solving problems that limit the explanations for violence and conflict in the Global South within the borders of nation-states (Hajir & Kester, 2020; Krause, 2019; Nicoson et al., 2023). This sets deterministic boundaries of development, liberalization, modernity, and progress that equate global structural problems such as underdevelopment, corruption, and inequality as a product of weak state capacity and a failure of national governments in implementing liberal policies of democratic institutionalization and liberalization of national economies (Magalhães Teixeira, 2021; Selby & Hoffman, 2014). This state of teaching and learning is not only a problem for classrooms but for broader research and practice on understanding and tackling the causes of violence and conflict in the Global South¹ and fostering peace.

Despite such arguments and critiques already existing within and in parallel fields of peace research, as well as rich currents of decolonial scholarship, these remain marginal, and the state of peace research and pedagogy remains trapped in a logic of nationalist and neoliberal problem-solving. This article adds to existing concepts and theories with a broader framework for decolonial praxis in peace pedagogy to gather alternatives that have so far been developed in isolation. I contribute to existing arguments in PCS that critique imperialist logics through localized and decolonial peace frameworks (Azarmandi, 2023; Cruz, 2021; Cruz & Fontan, 2014; Day et al., 2023; Jaime-Salas et al., 2020; Rodríguez et al., 2021) by here focusing on the role of pedagogy as transformational.

In this paper, I advance calls to break with Western and Eurocentric traditions within peace and conflict studies in order to fully capture the global complexities of these phenomena. As Hooks (1994) asserted, “theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary” (61). In fact, most of the time, the use of theory is instrumental in setting up “unnecessary and competing hierarchies of thought which reinscribe the politics of domination” (64). However, theory has a strong potential of being liberatory and revolutionary when we direct our theorizing towards this end—towards practices of knowledge production that legitimize and designate as important theoretical work that is carried out in the everyday struggles of the people in connection with their lived experiences. It is only by assigning “the people a fundamental role in the transformation process” that theory can serve the purpose of liberation (Freire, 2005, p. 126). When this is the case, when theory is informed by the lived experiences of people to change their realities of oppression, there are no longer gaps between theory and practice (Hooks, 1994).

Adopting a normative decolonial feminist position, I join others in arguing that it is necessary to shift the peoples of the Global South from the position of “objects of investigation” to “subjects of investigations” in a way to lift their epistemologies and cosmovisions as legitimate and important sources of knowledge (Carneiro, 2005; Curiel, 2014; Espinosa Miñoso, 2014; Mendoza, 2014). Building on Freire’s (2005) pedagogy of the oppressed, this paper aims to engage thinking and learning with the world, and not outside of it, in an attempt to mobilize teachers’ and students’ creative power to actively transform the world towards liberatory visions of peace.

In this paper, I explain my arguments with illustrations taken from my role as a researcher-activist during fieldwork conducted in Brazil and Guatemala in 2023 and 2024, and secondly, as a teacher in a peace and conflict bachelor’s program at a Global North higher education institution. The examples stem from field notes, fieldwork interviews, classroom notes, and my reflections on discussions with students. My epistemological and pedagogical perspectives herein are shaped and formed by my own experiences and position as a young woman and immigrant scholar from the Global South in a Global North institution. Privileges of class, race, and physical ability have allowed me to stand in this position, and I am careful to consider my positionality so as not to reproduce and/or detach myself from the structures that I discuss in this paper. Instead, my aim is to use my positions of priviledge to work against violent and oppressive structures. This is why I include myself both in the “we” of peace studies literature, but also the “we” of the Global South that is fighting for different ways of thinking and knowing within and outside academia. Drawing on examples from my own research and teaching, I show how a decolonial theoretical and methodological approach to studying and teaching peace can help us re-engage with the liberatory power of peace for the liberation of the peoples of the Global South.

The way I propose that we do this is by using the Global South as a theoretical and methodological marker for scientific inquiry, which necessarily engages three important points: first, it necessitates a completely different way of understanding what the Global South is, and what are the real possibilities for transformation coming from its peoples. I propose a geopolitical understanding of the Global South as a place of both suffering, but also of resistance and power for transformative change. It is necessary to work with the tensions and contradictions of material and symbolic modes of domination that have constrained liberatory action but that have also shaped resistance. Second, since the Global South is understood as a collective of peoples that have agency and power of transformation, it becomes then important to highlight and to engage with knowledge that is produced by peoples and groups that build on lived experiences. This presupposes moving peoples from the Global South from the position of “objects of knowledge’ into “subjects of knowledge” because their lived experiences offer unique and situated possibilities for creating knowledge that addresses real problems. Third, by decolonizing the way that we theorize and how we design methodological approaches to research, it becomes impossible not to carry these changes into our pedagogies within the classroom. The way we teach is directly connected to the way we research and the way we reproduce—or not—hierarchies within and outside academia.

What are we writing for?

In order to reclaim the liberatory power of peace studies, we first need to understand how current pedagogical practices are enacted in the classroom, how the field of research and practice has evolved, and the implications these have for peace education with a focus on transformation.

From my experience discussing ideas of peace with environmental defenders, Indigenous leaders, and campesino activists at the frontline of climate and environmental justice, as well as anti-colonial/decolonial struggles in Brazil and Guatemala, the hegemonic idea of peace in its neoliberal terms is not only useless for their own organization and strategies, but it is also seen as politically nonprogressive and obedient to neoliberal and neocolonial processes. Indeed, going back to the geopolitical site of the university in the Global North after a long period of immensely rich, colorful, and creative discussions about radical transformations toward peace with people in the field, it has been incredibly difficult for me to adapt back into the structures and hierarchies of knowledge and to theoretical discussions that are highly abstract, jargonistic, and difficult to relate to the experiences from the field.

This gap created between the lived experiences of peace (or the lack of it) of the peoples in the Global South to the theorizations of peace by the ivory tower in the Global North is also felt within the classroom. Students of PCS have shared their frustration in not being able to envision peace beyond the constraints of Western categorizations (Nicoson et al., 2023). In one example of a PCS classroom in a Global North institution, when students were presented with this understanding of peace, and of the deep structural transformation it entails, they felt hopelessness in the prospect of this peace being made possible. In other words, when presented with a liberatory understanding of peace, students were immediately paralyzed by its “utopic” nature.

Throughout my own career, it is not only students who are not able to see peace beyond the Western categorizations and Eurocentric constraints, but academic colleagues too have questioned the motives of whether theorizing peace from such a decolonial perspective was a good use of my time, since it would be impossible to ever be achieved. In this context, my theoretical investigations are made to feel silly and out of place in academia, like a childish dream that I will eventually grow out of once I mature into my academic profession and realize how the world really works. This difficulty of both peace and conflict scholars and students in envisioning peace that is transformative and that is cultivated in a world free of the determinism of conflict and violence for communities in the Global South is a symptom of a deep crisis of imagination, and I would even call it a crisis of hope, within the field.

Existing literature has shown that while the field of peace and conflict studies emerged from a deep connection between political peace activism and research, it has moved away from a focus on radical transformation of society and towards promoting liberal ideals of peace that sustain the status quo (Krause, 2019). PCS has suffered from a process of depoliticization of the issue(s) of peace based on structural foundations of oppression and inequality globally, towards an explanation of manifestations of violence and treating symptoms of conflict domestically (Jaime-Salas et al., 2020; Magalhães Teixeira, 2021). In this context, peace has stopped being an issue of colonization and imperialism (Galtung, 1971) and has become an indicator of the (in)ability of different countries and societies (mostly in the Global South) to adapt to and incorporate Western ideals of modernization and progress, mostly through projects of resource extraction and economic growth in the name of peace and development (Hettne, 2001; Jaime-Salas et al., 2020; Magalhães Teixeira, 2024; Selby & Hoffman, 2014; Simangan, 2024).

While a rich body of literature in the field has been critical to what has been termed “liberal peacebuilding” and finds consensus that this practice has failed to build peace at large, academic literature and policy have not moved on from this liberal paradigm (Bliesemann de Guevara et al., 2023; Mlinarević & Porobić, 2021) (FitzGerald, 2023; Leonardsson & Rudd, 2015; Randazzo, 2021). From outside the discipline, geographers have pointed to an “Orientalist” (Said, 2003) tendency within peace and conflict literature and practice, wherein the Global South is portrayed as violence-prone and unruly (Springer, 2009, 2011). Global North scholars often attribute the causes of conflict in the Global South to a perceived lack of control over populations and resources (Lahiri-Dutt, 2006). Indeed, this idea of development as a process of “ordering” is connected to the vision that a world outside the Western/Eurocentric rule would be doomed to total and complete chaos (Smith, 2020) and that without undergoing this process, societies in the Global South are fatalistically determined to violent conflict.

Current theories in peace and conflict studies prescribe peace and strategies for peacebuilding based on a “hegemonizing impulse” (Roohi in Wibben et al., 2019, p. 90) aiming to impose neoliberal agendas and democratic institutions on Global South societies under the guise of progress. However, the implications of this approach are that it fails to address the underlying cause of violence and instead perpetuates colonial structures of oppression. The “peace-writing industry” has become “complicit in the installation of negative and imperial forms of peace” (Lottholz, 2018, p. 697), in which peace has lost its originally critical engagement with anti-imperialism and radical vision for the total transformation of modern societies (Addams, 2007; Galtung, 1971), and has instead, served as a tool for ordering, domination, and homogenization of the Global South by the Global North.

More than that, as Ragandang (2021) reports, the field of peace research has become an “impermeable metropole” in which knowledge production is created in a closed circuit which is not accessible to either practitioners or by the “distressed communities” in the field. The idea of “peace” as it is currently advanced by mainstream peace and conflict literature fails to comprehend the diversity of lived experiences of peoples of the Global South that shape their understandings of peace and their strategy towards it.

From a decolonial perspective, it is impossible to understand peace in a liberatory way without recognizing the impact of colonial history in the processes of formation of nation-states in the Global South (Azarmandi, 2023; Jaime-Salas et al., 2020; Sunca, 2023). More than that, it is necessary to highlight the historical struggle of marginalized groups that have been put on the outside of modernity, and who have been organizing to promote and provide alternatives to contemporary system of capitalist development and Western civilizational project (Cruz & Fontan, 2014; Parrado Pardo, 2020). From a decolonial perspective, it is impossible to build peace over the extremely violent and oppressive structures of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. Peace is also not understood as something that happens within the constraints of these structures by the international authorities but is necessarily built by the groups and communities of the peoples of the Global South that have resisted the expansion of capitalism and colonialism for centuries and that already create alternatives way of being and relating to each other and the world, as is the case in many Indigenous and campesino, societies across the Global South (Magalhães Teixeira, 2024).

If neither scholars nor students from peace and conflict studies in the Global North believe, and work for, radical transformation of our societies towards peace, why are we studying and teaching peace if we do not believe it to be possible? Echoing the question posed by Ragandang (2021): what, then, are we writing for? Is it to advance solutions to real-world problems faced by real-world people, or is it to conceptualize and re-conceptualize definitions of peace that are useless for people at the frontline of these struggles? If knowledge production is to be constrained “merely for the purposes of community description, and not intervention”, (Ragandang, 2021, p. 270) then academia is sealing its fate as the place where knowledge is legitimized but also where hierarchical structures prevent the realization of transformative processes (Todd, 2016). This context illustrates a deep crisis of praxis, where theorization and knowledge production are completely detached from direct action to change the world (Freire, 2005). To transform this critical situation, I build on critical pedagogy literature - especially inspired by the work of Paulo Freire (2005) and Bell Hooks (1994)—to reclaim the emancipatory roots of peace studies through engaging the Global South as both a methodological and a theoretical marker for scientific inquiry that can redirect the classroom as a site for important transformational change.

Reclaiming the liberatory power of peace studies

Based on this critical reading of the state of both research and practice in peace and conflict studies, the aim now is to theorize together with Freire and Hooks, how a critical pedagogy approach can help reclaim the liberatory power of peace away from an imperialist hegemonizing process.

In what Freire (2005) describes as the “banking concept of education,” when education is descriptive and not transformative, people are understood to be merely in the world as a spectator, not with the world or other people as a co-creator of this reality. However, when education is used as a practice of freedom, it is imperative to deny that people are “abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached” from the world, and that the world “exists as a reality apart from people” (Freire, 2005, p. 81). In PCS, when conflict is understood as inevitable and as something to be “managed,” and peace something to be “kept,” it makes it impossible for scholars and students to have any agency in changing this material reality. Implied in this view is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world—in which human beings live in the world but have no power whatsoever to transform it, so we should just accept that the world is ridden with conflict, and peace is impossible.

Freire (2005) calls this the ‘ideology of oppression,” which negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry, which are necessary to change the world. The expectation put on students to adapt to how the world works and to leave behind any childlike dreams of building peace that is disruptive and transformative turns them into passive receptacles of knowledge that are integrated into structures of oppression and further perpetuate them. As one example of the classroom, students at the beginning of the course could only envision their prospective future as “peace workers” working for multinational organizations like the UN, World Bank, European Commission, and other international aid and development agencies, which are the main vessels of propagation of liberal peacebuilding strategies and policies and have perpetuated oppression and violence in Global South countries they claim to help.

However, when education is taken as a practice of freedom and is focused on posing questions, it does not accept a “well-behaved” version of the present nor a predetermined future. Instead, critical education is imperatively rooted in revolutionary futurity, which asserts the dynamic nature of the present and its ability to be revolutionized. As Freire (2005, p. 84) has shown, revolutionary futurity

affirms women and men as beings who transcend themselves, who move forward and look ahead, for whom immobility represents a fatal threat, for whom looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.

While the “banking model of education” directly or indirectly reinforces a fatalistic perception of the world’s situation as doomed to conflict and violence, a “problem-posing model of education” presents the situation as a problem—a problem that can be transformed. As David Graeber (2015) affirmed, the world “is something we make and could just as easily make different”. This way of understanding the possibilities of the future is tied to an understanding that people are tied to the world, and it is through their relationships with each other and the world, a deep process of transformation is made possible. This deep level of consciousness of transformation is something I have felt very present in the environmental defenders, Indigenous leaders, and campesino activists I have talked to in Latin America. While learning with them, I have felt nothing but their strong sense of hope and their ability to envision and work towards a different future—which stands in stark contrast to the peace and conflict students in the classroom.

To change this reality, it becomes imperative to theorize the power of people in changing their own oppressive and violent conditions. As Freire (2005, p. 74) showed, “the interests of the oppressors lie in changing the consciousness of the oppressed, but not the situation which oppresses them” and when education is not a practice of freedom, these material realities are kept unchanged. When the academic discussion around peace is deprived of a dimension that targets action, peace stays as an abstract idea that is nothing but alienating to the people in the field that it is supposed to talk to. Indeed, many times when initiating conversations in the field about peace, people would question the purpose of talking about peace, since it either served no use in helping them organize their struggle for decolonization, defense, and protection of their territories, or because it was seen as a synonym of oppression. As explained by Ailton Krenak (2019), it is impossible to talk about peace when you are Indigenous since the idea that we live in “peace” in Latin America - since there are no more overt civil wars in our continent - is an “ideological falsification” used as a “tool to make the “thing” (the system) continue working.” Given this contextualized experience, theories of peace have become empty words, which are unable to neither denounce the horrors of war, neither to create a commitment to transformation. What, then, is the role of theory, if not to change the oppressive reality of the oppressed?

Thus, to reclaim the liberatory power of peace studies—which is rooted in the commitment to the radical transformation of our societies—it becomes necessary to think ‘face-to-face’ with the world to address real issues. This means breaking with the Western scientific tradition of analyzing, categorizing, and describing the Global South as violence prone and unruly, and focusing instead on opportunities for transformation. This entails not only knowing the problems of violence and challenges to peace in the Global South but also understanding the reasons why it is so. To do this, we begin by understanding the material and symbolic structures of domination that have created the Global South as a geopolitical space of domination and resistance (Fúnez-Flores et al., 2022; Fúnez-Flores, 2023; Magalhães Teixeira & Koşanay, 2024).

A geopolitical understanding of the Global South

Depending on the context, and the intention of enunciation, the “Global South” might mean a geographical location, a marker of level of economic development, or a “politically correct” term to replace the use of “Third World” (Sajed, 2020). It is also often reduced to a heuristic for the “Other” in relation to rich and (over)developed countries of the Global North, without any critical challenge of the historical, cultural, and structural process that has created such differentiation. In line with Jaramillo and Vera Lugo (2013), I understand that the way the term “Global South” is used depends on the place of enunciation of the actor or the policial, social, economic, and/or cultural intention of this action.

In this paper, I propose an understanding of the “Global South” as a geopolitical site of both domination and resistance, based on a dynamic and dialectical understanding of how the material structures of the capitalist system shape and are shaped by the symbolic modes of domination and exploitation resulted from the process of colonization. I do this in order to complicate the notion of the Global South, to show the different levels of marginalization and inclusion, and to bring the issue of agency and power of transformation to the center of discussion on building decolonial peace.

Building on Latin American decolonial theory, my understanding of the Global South is based on how the tensions and contradictions of material processes of resource extraction and expropriation under the ideology of progress, modernity, and more recently of economic development, have produced a matrix of power and domination conceptualized as “coloniality” (Grosfoguel, 2007; Mignolo, 2002; Quijano, 2000). This is to say that while formal and direct colonization via conquest and war has mostly ended, there has however not been a substantial transformation of the international division of labor between center and periphery, the ethnic-racial hierarquization of populations and the formation of nation-states in the periphery (Curiel, 2014). Instead, the forms of domination have transformed: we have shifted from a modern type of colonization to a model of global coloniality reflected in processes of globalization, expansion of capitalist markets and frontiers, and economic development.

As Bautista Segalés (2014) argues, this process has universalized the European/Western cosmovision of history, reality, and humanity, since it imposed its “truth” of modernity and progress as a unique and inevitable path towards development. Sylvia Wynter (1996, p. 300) has shown that the idea of development based on economic growth is a “teleological complex” specific to a “local culture (however, now globalised), of the West.” She argues that this “ideology of development” (Prado, 2020) “has come to both perceive and represent itself as the condition of its secularization, as if it were supracultural and its “local culture truths” equitable with an ostensibly objective reality-in-itself” (Wynter, 1996, p. 300).

The view that the Global South is “backwards” has legitimised the exploitation, domination and use of violence against marginalised, racialised and gendered peoples in what Aimé Cesáire (1972) calls the process of thingification caused by colonisation—when human beings are emptied of their humanity to make it justifiable to dominate them. As Jairo Fúnez (2021) puts it: “the myth of Western modernity, capitalist progress, and Eurocentrism is the belief that the colonial hell imposed on others is the road to a civilized paradise.” In this sense, the idea of development can be understood as a form of power that enables Western domination in and through the world system and works as a standard through which the Global North measures the Global South (Bhambra, 2014).

Based on this understanding, I argue that the Global South can be a useful frame of reference to acknowledge the shared colonial past and more recent history of development changes, marked by a recognition that these processes have not delivered the bountiful promises of “progress” and “modernity,” but have instead, crystalized a shared condition at the margins of the capitalist system. Indeed, the idea of the Global South has been increasingly used to describe a movement of “a global subaltern that increasingly recognizes itself as such” (López 2007, p.5) and reclaims the category of Global South to acknowledge and emphasize a shared heritage of colonial and development histories in the global peripheries (Miraftab & Kudva, 2014).

As Jaramillo and Vera Lugo (2013, p. 16) argue, the Global South has been systematically the “object of practices and discourses of domination, colonization, subalternization, but that is also seen as a configurator of active subjects of historical processes of postcolonial resistance.” This is why I argue for an understanding of the Global South as a geopolitical site of domination and resistance, where it emerges not only as a geographic and economic space constrained by historical, structural, and material realities but that it articulates the relationship between domination and insubordination under the metaphorical conditions of “suffering” to organize itself around praxes of “resistance.”

For Mignolo (2021), “resistance to globalisation is basically the re-existence of ways and modes of knowing and living, disobeying and unfulfilling the expectation of the North Atlantic scholarship.” This means that it is focused on an active movement of contestation of not only the material conditions of domination, but also the symbolic ones, in its ability to generate independent and critical frameworks for thinking and knowing “in permanent conterppoint to the North, which is also an object of representation” (Jaramillo & Vera Lugo, 2013, p. 18). In this context, it becomes important to investigate how we can think and know differently from a subaltern position of the Global South, based on the historical and political patterns of material and symbolic domination, and organization of resistance.

Thinking and knowing from the Global South

What, then, does it mean to think and know from the Global South? Inspired by this question from Juan José Bautista Segalés (2014), and by decolonial scholar-activists from Latin America, I understand that thinking and knowing from the Global South means breaking with the ossified structures, concepts, and theories focused on Eurocentric and Western interpretations of modernity, history, knowledge, and power; and of being and understanding our relationship to the world.

This is what Mignolo (2009) calls “epistemic disobedience,” which is the act of thinkers and movements in the Global South of delinking themselves from Eurocentric categories. This does not mean to ignore Eurocentric categories, but to rupture with the epistemic colonial difference between “knowing subjects” from “subjects to be known” that has created the exclusion and silencing of ways of knowing of subaltern subjects (Palermo, 2010). This is what Carneiro (2020) calls “epistemic violence” or “epistemicide,” which are the practices of denying or expropriating marginalized groups of the Global South from the condition of subjects and producers of knowledge, culture, and science.

These practices are connected to matrixes of domination related to the coloniality of being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007), in which certain groups were denied their condition of humanity (mainly Indigenous, Black, and peoples of color) in a way of legitimizing their domination and expropriation (Krenak, 2020); and to the coloniality of knowing (Lander 2000), which is the type of techno-scientific rationality that assumed “scientific knowledge” to be neutral, objective, universal and positive. From this point of view, Europe and the United States of America are understood to be “the geographical center and the culmination of the temporal movement of knowledge, from where they undervalue, ignore, exclude, silence, and make invisible knowledges from subalternized populations” (Curiel, 2014, p. 51). Indeed, one of the central characteristics of the coloniality of knowing is to subjugate marginalized groups of the Global South as the permanent objects of investigation and never the actors of investigation and knowledge creation themselves. However, how can we understand the realities of populations of the Global South through Eurocentric categories, concepts, and theories?

Bautista Segalés (2014) warns us about the problem of knowing ourselves through the categories of others, which can lead to us not knowing ourselves at all. This is because Eurocentric concepts and theories are unable to explain and understand the specificity of the problems of underdevelopment, dependency, oppression, colonialism, misery, ignorance, suffering, and exclusion because these were never the focus of European philosophy as they were not part of their material realities. Decolonial feminists from Latin America have been critically engaging with the concept of “lived realities” (Lugones, 2008), in which specific cultural and material realities produce a type of consciense so that the people that have lived those realities are the best ones to interpret them. This does not mean that only people who have suffered specific forms of oppression have the capacity to understand them or to investigate them, but it is connected to shifting the peoples from the Global South from objects of knowledge production to subjects of knowledge production, in a movement to recognize and legitimize “other” types of subaltern knowledges (Curiel, 2014). This is because, as Alatas (2010, p. 192) argues, these situated knowledges are often informed by “indigenous historical experiences, philosophies and cultural practices” which are relevant to “their surroundings, creative, non-imitative and original, non-essentialist, counter-Eurocentric, and autonomous from the state and other national or transnational grouping.”

Indeed, from a decolonial perspective, it becomes impossible to “think” and to produce knowledge as if the “locus” or the place of reference did not matter. While for European philosophers the act of thinking was valued as an exercise in pure rationality of the act of thinking, in Latin America, and I dare say, throughout the Global South, “thinking” always begins from somewhere, someone, located in a specific place, based on specific material and cultural realities. In this way, thinking from the Global South means “thinking that departs from ourselves, from the historical and cultural horizon of our own realities—that we have produced and that we have inherited -, through our own concepts and cosmovisions” (Bautista Segalés, 2014, p. 83). This means breaking with the matrices of coloniality of being and knowledge, and to question what knowledges are produced, how they are produced, and to whom they are produced.

This is what Jairo Fúnez-Flores (2022, p. 4) calls a “geopolitics of knowledge from below” when knowledge is produced through active engagement with activist intellectuals and social movements, with the aim of overcoming “the epistemic boundaries established by dominant theories” to open up space for “alternative sites of knowledge production.” Through this practice, we can identify concepts and theories that arise from our own lived experiences and that are usually produced collectively to carry out a “rereading of the “history,” of histories, placing ourselves in contexts traversed by colonialism, making a more complex understanding of oppressions as an intrinsic part of contemporary coloniality and, from there, making our theorizations and directing our political practices” (Curiel, 2014, p. 48). Here it becomes important to clarify that just because knowledge that is created from below is based on the lived experiences of marginalized subjects of the Global South does not mean that this type of knowledge is only local, individual, or that it is impossible to be communicated throughout different socio-cultural contexts.

As I try to rethink and re-signify the Global South, I do this through both my cultural and geographical location of Latin America because this is the socio-political context which I am embedded in and which has helped shape my ways of thinking and knowing. However, the act of rethinking the Global South here is an exercise in transcending the modern ontology and the project of modernity, which can also be done from other parts of the Global South (Bautista Segalés, 2014). Here, what matters most is not the social location per se—just because you are born in the Global South does not mean you have a decolonial commitment – but how your geopolitical location informs your epistemic location, that is, how your lived experiences in a geopolitical site of domination shape your ways of knowing and thinking away from dominant Eurocentric and Western categories and towards subaltern epistemologies (Grosfoguel, 2007).

Given this understanding, thinking from the Global South means thinking face-to-face with our cultural and material realities, where we consider geopolitics, race, class, sexuality, coloniality, and global capital in the process of knowledge production. It is also about understanding that while our knowledge is based on our lived experiences, these experiences are shaped by global structures that reproduce similar patterns across subaltern regions of the Global South. Thus, thinking from the Global South is about bridging the connection between local and global, between personal and public, and between the human and more-than-human world. This is why Bautista Segalés (2014) argues that thinking from this subaltern position means thinking with a universalist pretension, not in the sense of homogenization, but in the sense of understanding that the peoples of the Global South share a history of oppression and domination, and should work together in the process of liberation.

Within this framework, I argue that rethinking the idea of peace from the Global South is necessary because it connects the different lived experiences of peoples and communities that have been relegated to the margins of colonial capitalist society and understand that this is a global phenomenon that has affected—albeit in different ways and under different historical processes—communities, and societies across the Global South.

Researching and teaching decolonial peace

Based on the above discussions, I propose an understanding of the Global South and how knowledge is produced and reproduced to be deeply connected to the historical, political, economic, and cultural realities of the peoples. In this context, the Global South here becomes a geopolitical place where knowledge is produced based on the lived experiences and the material realities of the peoples—through their own concepts and cosmovisions—with a strong commitment towards decolonization and liberation - peace.

This understanding, thus, necessitates different methodologies and processes of theorization, but it also reinforces these new approaches focused on the deep connection between theory and praxis. This is what Espinosa Miñoso et al. (2013, pp. 408–409) mean with “from doing to thinking and from thinking to doing that is localized.²” It is based on an understanding of knowledge that is acquired by doing, that is produced through the articulation of theory and praxis. This is given the close relationship between “political action and the production of reflections that locate, problematize and explain the situation” of the peoples of the Global South. Thus, it is impossible to separate methodologies and theories found in research strategies from pedagogical practices, since they feed onto each other and help produce/reproduce patterns of knowledge production, and legitimization and can be guided towards practices for liberation.

How, then, do we highlight these liberatory practices within both our research and the classroom to rethink, reclaim, and enact peace? First, it begins with how we understand and live in the world and believe we can affect change. Based on feminist decolonial pedagogy, and in line with Freire’s own methods, the proposition here is to provide a re-reading of the world and of history in a way to “dismantle the assumed, naturalized myths, many of them imposed by the modern colonial order of gender and race” (Espinosa Miñoso et al., 2013, p. 412). It is through understanding the colonial pattern of oppression and violence to which we are subjugated, and in turn, providing alternative ways of thinking and knowing—that are rooted in the struggles of the people for liberation—that are then able to take shape for radical transformations of the social, political, economic and cultural structures.

In this context, it becomes imperative to produce knowledge that is in accordance with the material reality of the people we are working with and is directed at transforming it. As one example from conversations in the field, it was impossible to talk about peace with Indigenous and campesino activists in both Brazil and Guatemala without talking about the problem of hunger and lack of access to food and land to cultivate food. The problem, and the fear, of hunger was the pillar of any discussion on peace for these communities given their very real material realities of food deprivation and history of malnutrition. While satiation of hunger is imbedded in the idea of peace as understood by current theories, it is often a topic that is overlooked, a topic that is assumed to be included in these theorizations, but in reality it is mostly taken for granted. This is because of the difference in lived realities of who is living the (lack of) peace and who is theorizing peace. If we do not put the experiences of the people front and center in our theorizations that build our strategies for intervention, addressing the problem of food and access to land to cultivate fresh and healthy food might not even be highlighted in our studies.

Practically, what this means for our research is that we need to rethink the way we engage our processes of knowledge production and theorization, and to question what is the purpose of our theorization? Is it committed to liberation or to advancing the struggles of the communities that we are working with? Is our theorization merely for community description, or is it directed toward transformation? And if it is done with a profound love for the people, how are we engaging the groups and communities in this process?

Second, we need to completely redesign the way that we organize our studies and investigations to allow for research participants to own their knowledge and concepts that they so willingly share with scholars in the field. The truth of this relationship is that researchers have a much easier experience accessing knowledge in the field, than communities have of accessing theories and academic papers given both their jargonistic style and lack of representation of the realities of the people (Ragandang, 2021), as well as because of papers being locked behind paywalls. This necessitates both a complete transformation of how we present and communicate our research in a way that it speaks to the people, but also that we highlight the central role of the research participants in our research. This requires challenging politics of authorship and ownership to theories and concepts, to avoid reproducing colonial practices of epistemic and ontological extractivisms (Grosfoguel, 2016; Tuhiwai Smith, 2021). Academia has been responsible for centuries of intellectual oppression and domination of different groups and peoples, especially Indigenous and traditional communities in the Global South, and that has left deep scars of insecurity in the people to believe and trust their own knowledge. Indeed, many interactions I had in the field started with people questioning why I wanted to learm from them—since I am the university researcher and teacher and they were rural workers that had not finished their formal education. An important part of our work as decolonial scholar-activists thus is to undo a lot of the damage and the trauma that has been done by academics in the past and to create new ways and processes of cooperating in knowledge production that not only talk about what can be done, but that actually show what can be done differently by doing it.

Third, the way we enact our commitments towards both peace and liberation in our academic practices is undoubtedly reflected inside our classrooms. Indeed, Paulo Freire talked about the impossibility of separating theory, methodology and praxis, since “to critically read the world is a political-pedagogical activity; it is inseperable from the pedagogical-political, that is, from the political action that involved the organization of groups and popular classes to intervene in the reinvention of society” (cited in Walsh, 2013, p. 38). Thus, it becomes imperative to repoliticize the classroom and reclaim the radical roots of the field of peace studies to connect theory, methods and pedagogy towards a liberatory praxis. It also means bringing other voices and types of knowledge to inform critical discussion within the classroom, and opening up the world for transformation, instead of only for description. As Gustavo Esteva (2013) argued, “it is not about learning about the world, it is about learning with the world—and learn from those that are making a new world.”

As a final example, during a session in our Swedish classroom, we were discussing decolonization and liberation of Palestine as a necessary condition for peace in the region. A student asked directly if I was not afraid of losing my job because of my firm position on this topic. This caught me slightly off-guard. Of course, as a young woman, Global South immigrant, PhD student, I work under very uncertain and insecure conditions within academia. Prompted by this question in class, we were able to have an honest and vulnerable conversation about how having strong political stances can hurt academic careers within the university. I shared that my commitment lay with the Palestinian people and their struggles for liberation, and if I were not doing everything that I could do to help spread their story of resistance and their visions for different futures, that I would be betraying myself and my own decolonial commitments—and that would make me a hypocrite.

By repoliticizing the classroom and by being honest with students about our commitments when it comes to processes of knowledge production and especially about enacting real transformation in the world, they, too, begin to envision a world of peace that is not only a utopic dream that will never be achieved but a material and symbolic reality that already exists.

Conclusion

The field of peace and conflict studies is currently undergoing a crisis of both imagination and hope, in which students cannot envision a future where peace is possible and not only a childish utopian dream. In this paper, I have explored how our pedagogical approaches within the classroom are closely tied to our theories and methodological practices: how we study peace in the field and how we theorize peace influence how we teach the possibilities of peace to our students. I build on many previous studies that share this critical engagement with the field of peace and conflict studies, existing approaches are piecemeal. The aim of this paper is to show consistency across reflection, theory, and action - to highlight the connections between them.

Building on self-reflections from my experiences as both a researcher-activist in the field and as a teacher in the classroom, I have explored how it has become imperative to question the motives and purposes of scholarship in the field and to redirect our pedagogical approaches to fit strategies that foster peace that is liberatory for both people and planet.

The way I propose that we do this is by using the Global South as a theoretical and methodological marker for scientific inquiry, which necessarily engages three important points: first, it necessitates a completely different way of understanding what the Global South is, and what are the real possibilities for transformation coming from its peoples. I propose a geopolitical understanding of the Global South as a place of both suffering, but also of resistance and power for transformative change. It is necessary to work with the tensions and contradictions of material and symbolic modes of domination that have constrained liberatory action but that have also shaped resistance. Second, since the Global South is understood as a collective of peoples that have agency and power of transformation, it becomes then important to highlight and to engage with knowledge that is produced by peoples and groups that build on lived experiences. This presupposes moving peoples from the Global South from the position of “objects of knowledge” into “subjects of knowledge” because their lived experiences offer unique and situated possibilities to creating knowledge that addresses real problems. Third, by decolonizing the way that we theorize and how we design methodological approaches to research, it becomes impossible not to carry these changes into our pedagogies within the classroom. The way we teach is directly connected to the way we research and the way we reproduce—or not—hierarchies within and outside academia.

With this paper, I hope to contribute both to scholarship in peace and conflict studies, but also, I join the voices of especially decolonial feminist scholars in advocating for processes of knowledge production that take into consideration the politics of authorship, ownership of concepts, and theories, and the lived experiences of people from the Global South as central to understanding the transformations necessary for peace.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Part of this study was supported by Helge Ax:son Johnsons Stiftelse.

Notes on contributors

Bárbara Magalhães Teixeira

Bárbara Magalhães Teixeira is a peace and conflict scholar-activist and teacher. Her research touches on issues of nature, peace, and development, with a focus on environmental conflicts and the socio-ecological transition. Building on feminist and decolonial commitments, Barbara’s research and teaching are oriented towards fostering liberatory peace for people and planet.

Notes

1 I unpack the concept of Global South and discuss how it affects the way peace is made (im)possible later on in the text.

2 Original, in Spanish:” del hacer al pensar y del pensar al hacer localizado”.