By Juliana Krohn and Christina Pauls

Peace and racism have hardly ever been considered together, even though racism is one of the most devastating forms of violence in modern times. In this regard, Mahdis Azarmandi speaks of a racial silence in peace research, and Aicha Diallo states that peace is an exclusively white privilege. Such criticism of dominant understandings of peace, which is often voiced by People of Color^[1], must be taken seriously if peace research and education are to live up to their normative claims. Drawing on decolonial theories, in this article we offer reflections that put "peace" in peace research and education to the test and reveal its modern/colonial traits.

Decolonial theories

European colonialism has fundamentally changed the world. People, non-human beings and territories were forcibly divided, hierarchized, appropriated and exploited, with economic, ecological, political and social consequences that continue to this day. The specific manifestations of colonialism vary depending on the spatial and temporal contexts. For example, contexts of settler colonialism such as in the USA, South Africa or New Zealand differ both from each other and from contexts of an even more extraction-oriented colonialism. Through the latter, European countries such as Germany, France and Great Britain amassed great wealth through the exploitation of colonies in the Caribbean, India and on the African continent, among others. Against this background, it becomes clear that there cannot be "one" decolonial theory. Rather, there are many locally situated perspectives on how decolonization can be shaped. Nevertheless, thinkers from the Latin American decolonial school of theory have developed some groundbreaking reflections on the connections between racism and colonialism, which can also be important for peace research and education.

Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (2016), for example, identifies racism in connection with the global division of labor as the basis of the colonial power matrix: a global system of domination that was initiated in 1492 with the conquest of the Americas and is still effective today as racialcapitalism. According to Quijano, the racialization of people served to legitimize the power relations between colonizers and colonized that went hand in hand with colonialism. In the process, race became a criterion for differentiating and hierarchizing people that is still effective today. Racism is therefore an ideology based on the differentiation, exclusion and devaluation of people on the basis of their supposed origin or culture.

Decolonial theorists argue that so-called modernity is based on a dark and mostly concealed underside (Mignolo, 2002), which is sometimes characterized by technologies and mechanisms of dehumanization, dispossession, displacement, exploitation, appropriation and accumulation that now endanger planetary survival. This underside continues to have an impact today and is referred to as coloniality. This refers to those colonial structures of power, violence and domination that emerged from historical European colonialism and still shape social relations, political and economic conditions and processes of knowledge today. With the conceptual pair modernity/coloniality, decolonial theories point out that modernity could only emerge, flourish and exist due to its colonial underside.

Rolando Vázquez (2011) also states that modernity and coloniality are held together by a certain knowledge system that is based on epistemic violence. Epistemic violence refers to "the contribution to relations of inequality, power and domination that is inherent in knowledge itself and has become invisibleto the analysis of these very relations" (Brunner, 2022). Hegemonic scientific theories and practices serve(d), for example, to justify and legitimize colonialism and racism as well as to repress and render invisible other bodies of knowledge - and thus also the bearers of this knowledge. In doing so, they make coloniality as the dark underside of modernity no longer accessible for academic debate.

By examining the effects that the colonial world system had and still has on various levels, decolonial theorists want to make these effects visible, thus making them accessible to criticism and transforming them. Decolonial theories thus tie in with anti-colonial liberation struggles and movements and political processes of formal-political liberation from colonial rule and demand the as yet unfulfilled promise of decolonization for all areas. Therefore, decolonial theories, if taken seriously, cannot be viewed and implemented in isolation from the political struggles associated with them.

Modern, liberal, democratic - which peace?

If coloniality has an impact on political and social areas, then peace cannot remain unaffected, especially since peace is considered a central pivot of European identity formation (Diallo, 2019) and was and is the basis of legitimacy for 'humanitarian' interventions and imperial claims to power. In peace research and education, the focus on peace has at least two directions: on the one hand as a normative point of reference for one's own actions and activities, which is about reducing relations of violence, and on the other hand as a normative embedding in and thus communication of specific value systems and bodies of knowledge. The understanding of peace as the absence of war was expanded by Johan Galtung (1971) in such a way that the view of institutional and structural forms of violence was sharpened. Since then, peace research and education have increasingly devoted themselves to power relations and the reduction of structural violence, without, however, creating a particular sensitivity for racism or, in this context, placing a specific focus on current colonial conditions.

What is often neglected in the consideration of peace, which is usually understood as universal, is an understanding of its historically determined, cultural and normative embedding in specific, regionally located epistemologies and value systems. Due to this historical contingency of peace, as well as its different regional and temporal forms, it is more appropriate to speak of understandings of peace in the plural. Politically relevant understandings of peace are based on 'modern' principles (reason, enlightenment, civilization) and fundamental liberal values, such as individual rights, the rule of law and order, and trust in the power of the market. This is why we speak of modern-liberal understandings of peace in this article.

From modern-liberal peace to modern/colonial peace

Since the maintenance of the above-mentioned modern/colonial system is based on epistemic violence, it is important from a decolonial perspective to expose this violence in relation to understandings of peace. Only in this way can its colonial underside, and consequently also the coloniality of peace (Maldonado-Torres, 2020), become visible, because modern-liberal understandings of peace de-thematize their own involvement in colonial and imperial logics (Pauls, 2022). With the coloniality of peace, Maldonado-Torres shows that peace, which is secured and enforced by law and order, is usually in the service of the modern nation state, which in most cases has historically emerged from colonial violence and continues to do so today. If peace research and education are conceived without a theoretical understanding of race and coloniality, it is not only misunderstood that both are constitutive for the social and political constitution of the present, but also that knowledge of PoC in a continuity of epistemic violence is ignored. Only in recent years, due to the increasing and increasingly recognized urgency of dealing with the long-suppressed colonial past, for example in Germany, have relationships between peace and colonialism been examined more closely. Decolonial theories then call for the historical and current embedding of modern-liberal peace in colonial and imperial power structures to be revealed.

Peace as a white privilege

While peace in modern Europe - for example through the Peace of Augsburg (1555) or the Peace of Westphalia (1648) - was enshrined in treaties, it de facto only applied to white, propertied men. For how else could one explain the fact that at the same time the absolute opposite of peace was exercised on people who did not correspond to these categories, above all in the Global South in the context of the conquest of the "New World". This raises questions about the universal validity of peace, which Aicha Diallo also addresses. According to her, peace is tied to subjectivity and, from a European perspective, applies "exclusively to white Europeans and their descendants scattered all over the world" (Diallo, 2019, p. 329), but not to peopleof color (neither in Europe nor in other regions). Even the proclamation of 'world peace' by the United Nations, founded in 1945, did not lead to any real change, as numerous countries of the Global South became the scene of imperial battles between the Eastern and Western blocs during the Cold War. On the basis of such a historical review of the development of peace, Aicha Diallo notes that "whiteness as an unmarked marker [...] retains its dominant position in the powerful institutions of politics, business and the media" (Diallo, 2019, p. 330). This is also clear in relation to the European border regime. The citation for the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the European Union in 2012 emphasizes that the EU has contributed to the transformation of Europe from a continent of wars to one of peace. A peace, however, that is not granted to those people who die at Europe's borders due to racist border regimes. The struggles over migration and borders therefore make race and coloniality a central issue for Europe (de Genova, 2017). Against this background, numerous authors perceive modern/liberal forms of peace as their opposite, namely as a normalized war against people of colour (Roy, 2004; Maldonado-Torres, 2016).

The racial silence in the peace community

Who produces knowledge about peace and who is the addressee of this knowledge through peace education? Asking such questions makes it possible to perceive the underlying Eurocentrism that is inscribed in peace research and education in the Global North due to its disciplinary and normative orientation towards modern-liberal understandings of peace.

Mahdis Azarmandi is one of the best-known voices who explicitly addresses her criticism to peace and conflict research, and thus implicitly also addresses the reference science of peace education in order to name silence and ignorance towards racist structures and thus make them workable (Azarmandi, 2018). Azarmandi locates the reason for the racial silence she attests to in the fact that war, conflict and violence are usually - in the words of Claudia Brunner (2016, p. 94) - always identified as "elsewhere, anderswer and anderswas" and are therefore projected onto the Global South or onto 'problematic migrant population groups' in the Global North. The latter was recently demonstrated in the racist debate surrounding the 'New Year's Eve riots' in Germany, which were falsely attributed to young people with a migrant background. War and violence are also linked to a supposed level of development, i.e. with the assumption that 'underdeveloped' people are more prone to violence. Violence thus appears as a racializing attribution, which is primarily attributed to people of colour. According to Azarmandi, it is therefore fundamental for peace research - and thus in our interpretation also for peace education - which is committed to reducing violence and strengthening social cohesion, to actively address racism, and not just as one of many forms of structural violence, but as a constant deeply inscribed in modern social structures. In this context, race represents a relationship whose transformation requires not only the centering of perspectives and experiences of people of color in peace research and education, but also the marking of whiteness. For example, Azarmandi demands that peace movements that carry out anti-war demonstrations and corresponding campaigns deal intensively with privilege and positionality - only in this way can participants develop an understanding of the fact that active participation in such activities is significantly more risky for people of color than for white people. It is also important to question (common practices of) solidarity. Against the backdrop of the European border regime and civil sea rescue, which often centers the solidarity of white people, it appears as "a privilege of those whose humanity, whose lives are not endangered by the politics of racialized borders and whose belonging is not questioned" (Ehrmann, 2021, p. 448).

From modern/colonial peace to decolonial peace?

The critical and decolonial perspectives offered here on dominant understandings of peace in the Global North and their shaping and impact on peace research and education cast a 'backward' glance at Europe. Furthermore, the analytical necessity can be derived to mark whiteness and thus make visible in whose name and for whom peace claims validity and when. The perspectives outlined above make it clear that the modern-liberal peace that claims to be self-evident and benevolent is not historically or currently valid for People of Color. If their modern/colonial, Eurocentric frame of reference persists, the emancipatory potential for a decolonization of peace cannot be actualized. This also means that white people (like us authors) contribute to critically marking whiteness and associated privileges, deconstructing taken-for-grantedness and dismantling its dominance.

At the same time, we cannot stop at theoretical projects: In the spirit of re-politicization, which generally accompanies decolonial perspectives, the aim is to get involved in current political and decolonizing struggles. At the latest then, Black Lives Matteror the climate justice movement, for example, can also be understood as peace movements that work to highlight and transform injustices and violent relationships without reproducing them. By learning from and showing solidarity with such movements, a peace education reorientation towards decolonial peace can emerge, or, as Nelson Maldonado-Torres puts it: "A decolonial and decolonizing sense of peace is found [...] in the love and rage of those who come together to make visible the war that has been perpetuated by profoundly misguided conceptions of law and order" (Maldonado-Torres, 2020).

Promotion

This article was produced in part as part of the research project "Deutungskämpfe im Übergang'" [funding reference 01UG2204B], funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Footnotes:

^[1] The term People of Color (PoC) is a political self-designation of people who experience racial discrimination due to their skin color, origin and/or religion. It originated in the context of the civil rights movements in the USA in the 1960s. In the European context, white people also experience racism in the form of anti-Slavism. In this article, we use the terms PoC and white as political group designations, with the latter denoting dominant positions within racially based power relations.

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