A decolonial critique of the liberal peace: Insights from peace practices of ethnic people in Colombia

Abstract

This article develops a decolonial theoretical framework of peace by conducting a decolonial analysis of the hegemonic liberal peace in order to explain the power relations at play in peacebuilding in post-colonial nation-states, and also among different alternative local/ethnic peace views. It argues that the hegemonic discourse of peace is fruit of the modern/colonial system, and therefore the liberal peace has been conceptualized as a universal phenomenon based on particular Western and modern ideologies. Thus, the promotion and importation of this model into the periphery, that is in post-colonial states, implies the reproduction of the coloniality of power/knowledge/being by keeping the bases and ideology of the modern/colonial system that establishes profound abyssal lines between those that fit into the hegemonic standard and those that not. A decolonial perspective, thus, serves to understand how alterities underlying the war-peace dynamics do also reproduce the colonial difference that establishes an ethnic-racial hierarchical classification of the population in the postcolonial periphery. As a result, liberal peace is studied as a discourse that does not overcome the coloniality of power and the exclusion of the others, but instead tries to control the alterities by coopting them, reinforces the legitimacy of the nation-state by securing the centrality of the nation-state (despite any multicultural openness), and extends its sovereignty to the peripheries.