Illusions of peace: eurocentrism, endemic violence and the burden of the Postcolony in the Central African Republic

This paper interrogates how Eurocentrism structures what counts as violence and, by extension, what counts as peace. Using the Central African Republic (CAR) as a site of analysis, it argues that violence cannot be understood through calamitous moments but through the endemic conditions embedded in la longue durée that shape life in the Postcolony. These conditions are relational, produced through the entangled histories of metropole and colony, and sustained by structural and cultural domination. Through ethnographic and archival inquiry, the paper shows how liberal peacebuilding transforms domination into order, creating an illusion of peace that conceals the enduring violence of the Postcolony. Reframing the CAR not as a failed state but as a generative site of theory, the paper advances the Postcolony as an epistemic condition and ontological reality. To decolonise peace requires embedding the ontology and epistemology of the Postcolony at its core, displacing the cognitive empire that sustains contemporary peacebuilding.