How Resistance Can Save Peace Studies

For the most part, peace studies has assumed that violent conflict and injustice require ‘peace,’ ‘conflict management,’ and forms of liberal interventionism from external actors. The consequence of this unquestioned assumption has been to prioritize external actors, top-down processes, governance, and conflict mitigation – often at the expense of social justice and local actors. A shift in analytical focus, terminology, and epistemology towards the theory and practice of ‘resistance’ has the potential to re-focus the field on local agency and priorities, local and everyday forms of peace, the role of power dynamics in conflict and peace, structural violence, solidarity, anti-violence, and social justice. Generating such an epistemic and practice shift will be challenging, as it will entail de-privileging the field’s position, empowering the other, abandoning Eurocentrism, and putting immanent critique, radical activism, and other-led research methodologies at the center of its practices. A number of key dangers will have to be avoided along the way, including co-option into system maintenance, the lure of violent resistance, pushback from liberal sensibility, the loss of access to powerful actors, the fragmentation of the peace studies field, and potential marginalization in the neoliberal academy. However, on balance, I argue that the shift towards resistance has the potential to save peace studies by recovering its radical critique of violent global structures and practices and its normative commitment to emancipation.