Book talk: "The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies: Perspectives from the Global South”

Abstract

This new open access handbook combines conceptual thinking with empirical illustrations to understand the trajectories of conflict and violence in our world.

Peace and Conflict Studies were broadly founded in the Northern Hemisphere, which strongly influenced how scholars understand patterns of peace or violence in Africa, Latin America and South-East Asia. This has proven to provide practitioners not only with false promises about external intervention, but even strengthened asymmetric colonial power structures in the way knowledge was and is produced. There is a need to make the discipline more plural by initiating and shaping a new research agenda that is more strongly rooted in the ground realities, contexts, imaginations – political, economic, and social – of the Global South(s).

This handbook is the first of its kind with a comprehensive and inclusive agenda for the field of peace and conflict studies: It engages in a thorough academic discussion not only about the Global South(s) but includes perspectives from the Global South(s). It reflects productive discussions with scholars from the Global South(s) that constitute the majority of authors in this handbook. In addition, while the handbook is a scholarly knowledge product, it is also an ongoing process for scholars, students and practitioners from both South(s) and North(s) with diverse backgrounds and positionalities.