Decolonizing peace and conflict studies: intersectional perspectives from racialized women in academia

Abstract

Within a global context of high intensity conflicts, war, and genocide, there has been an increased awareness that there is a need for universities to reckon with their colonial past and politicized economic relations through decolonizing practices. These complex dynamics raise debates around academic freedoms, epistemicide, and the coloniality of knowledge and its dispossession of people’s ideas. This article argues that decolonizing peace and conflict studies (PACS) in higher education institutions involves the critical questioning of how to recenter ‘worldviews’, stories, experiences and learnings of racialized, gendered, BIPOC, and/or Global South women educators and researchers in academia. The article offers insights into how marginalized women educators and researchers are: reflecting on decolonial and intersectional theories; engaging in institutional acts of service, offering critical classroom pedagogies, and; conducting reflexive qualitative research in conflict affected contexts through everyday forms of resistance.