Critical reflections on peace and conflict studies: empirical insights into the self-perception of an interdisciplinary field

Abstract Textbooks play a crucial role in shaping academic fields, not only by transmitting knowledge, but also by producing and stabilizing epistemic boundaries and hierarchies. As curated and selective representations, they reflect the broader discursive struggles over what constitutes legitimate knowledge. These dynamics are especially evident in peace and conflict studies, an interdisciplinary field characterized by critical self-reflection and normative ambition. Despite growing attention to the field’s epistemic and normative foundations, textbooks remain largely unexamined. The present study addresses this gap by investigating how German-language peace and conflict studies textbooks represent the field’s self-perception and engage with its normative and epistemological commitments. Drawing on discourse theory and using the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD), the study identifies four discursive formations of the field’s self-understanding: interdisciplinarity, normativity, epistemic heterogeneity, and reflexivity regarding research processes. Based on a macro analysis of five and a detailed discourse analysis of two selected textbooks, the study reveals that the selected material often reproduces epistemic blind spots, downplays methodological diversity, and reinforces established hierarchies. By critically interrogating these discursive patterns, the article contributes to a more empirically grounded and reflexive debate about the epistemic assumptions of German peace and conflict studies. It advocates for a stronger alignment between normative self-reflection and the field’s practices of knowledge representation.