Decolonising affect: Emotions and the politics of peace

Abstract

Peace processes require societies to break with animosity and violence. Scholars and practitioners have traditionally focused on institutional and structural mechanisms. Recent contributions have stressed the need to address the emotional legacies of destructive conflicts and how they influence peace processes. We build on these contributions by engaging current debates on decolonisation. We advance a three-part argument that places decolonising emotion at the core of peace and conflict studies. First, prevailing concepts and practices of peace rely on collective emotions that are western and colonial in origin. Emotions are central to the power dynamics that sustain colonial legacies and the practices of exclusion and injustice that ensue from them. Second, decolonising emotion requires an openness to different feelings which, in turn, can open up possibilities for creative ways of thinking about and practising peace. Third, these realms – colonial legacies and resistant ways of being and feeling – do not exist in isolation. Potentials for peace-making emerge from complex ‘interfaces’ between them, which we examine through two cases: the emotion of Han (한/恨) in Korean traditions of conflict resolution; and links between mourning and conflict management in the Maluilgal First Nation of the Torres Strait in far northern Australia.