The Future of Peace is Decolonial

Introduction

This essay emerges from recorded conversations among members of the Community of Practice on the Environment, Climate, Conflict, & Peace’s Decolonization Discussion Group held in March and April 2026. Rather than distilling our exchange into a single, synthesized argument, we have chosen to preserve the dialogue itself as the primary text. This choice is deliberate: if decolonial peace demands plural ways of knowing, relational approaches, and non-hierarchical forms of knowledge production, then the form of this essay should reflect those commitments.

We are a group of scholars and practitioners working across environmental peacebuilding, conflict transformation, feminist peace research, and community-based development. We are positioned across the global majority and minority, different generations of scholarship, and both diasporic and rooted relationships to place.

What follows is a curated and thematically organized dialogue. Contributions have been lightly edited for clarity, but the voices, ideas, and language belong to each participant. We invite readers to sit with the texture of conversation—its tangents, tensions, and returns—as itself a form of knowledge.

The conversation began with a deceptively simple question: What inspires us about decolonization? What surfaced was a rich discussion about hope, transformation, and the relationship between peace and the creative power of reimagining what is possible.

Hope as Praxis

KarinaI’m drawn to decolonial thinking because of the power of transformation through narrative change: a collective reflection and (re)imagination. When we can change the narrative, we are able to change power, people’s behavior, and systems.

AmandaI really like that. It’s a way of being encouraged to think creatively about what could be different and how what currently exists doesn’t have to be that way. There are other ways of being and being in relationship.

Elaine 蘭因Recently, there was a paper presentation that I was a discussant for that talked about evidence-based hope and resistance. The author framed hope as “white hope,” “red hope,” and “black hope.” White hope is liberal hope, while red hope is about alternatives that have long existed. It’s the pluriverse and we can see it manifested across our universe in so many ways. Black hope doesn’t know what the future world looks like or how to get there, but it wants to hold open futures and the possibilities for change. It’s kind of the most undefined type of hope, according to this author.¹ So, I think when we talk about decolonization and peace and attach it to imagining what’s possible, I think it does give us hope. It’s somewhere there in that space of red hope and black hope. That’s where I find excitement.

BarbaraIt is so important that you brought in hope, because it’s also something that I think about constantly in my work and my teaching. When you have a more critical reading of the state of the world and of the state of the different types of violence that exist, it can feel paralyzing. My students and I have had to work through this together: the overwhelm, the climate anxiety, the sense that we are too small to change anything.

But I’ve come to see that anxiety as, in some ways, a privileged response. When I am in the field working alongside people on the front lines of climate breakdown and conflict like Indigenous communities, small farmers, or peasant movements, they are not paralyzed. They have nothing but hope. They carry an extraordinary certainty that what they’re doing matters, and that it will one day bear fruit. They don’t start from this position of despair.

I’m often reaffirming to myself that, if they are the ones at the forefront of climate and conflict and they just have this much hope in the work that they’re doing…who am I to sit in my little office and feel so much despair in the world? Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator who developed the “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” also talked about hope as a verb. Not sitting around hoping for the best but mobilizing hope and putting it into motion. Doing the things that need to be done today so that a more peaceful future remains possible.

JesseCertainly, hope resonates with me and talking about it as different forms of hope. I feel like what’s inspiring in decolonization is the theoretical aspects of hope and a feeling like there’s opening (but also constraints) in the right way. There are some easy steps forward, like maybe we don’t pollute so much, for example. Or destroy our non-human world. Maybe we’re dismantling colonial structures within governments when we address stuff like that. I feel like that’s where it gets into more concrete, inspirational actions.

When land is repatriated and legal battles are won by Indigenous groups, I feel like those stories bring more hope for me. When I hear stories of Indigenous people, especially people who’ve gone through residential schools in Canada or who’ve gone through multi-generations of violence against their people, connecting with their land and connecting with their family and their community to connect with the land, but also rediscovering the places that they were denied by colonialism—that is the most inspiring.

Conflict, Power, and Peace

KelseyI really liked what Barbara shared about hope being a verb. I was in a conversation with a parent group where we asked, “What brings you hope”? I thought it was interesting that most of the folks who responded were talking about the past. My response was that hope is a futuristic thing and not necessarily something in the past. We look to the past for hope, but that’s limiting our ability to envision what the future could be if we’re only thinking about what has already existed.

What I find inspirational about decolonization is that it stands in friction with existing ideas and structures. Elaine and I have had conversations about how conflicting with existing systems and structures that are extremely harmful and unjust is a necessary component for peace work. Also, conflict doesn’t necessarily mean violence.

Elaine 蘭因Since you brought that up, Kelsey, when we had those conversations, a lot of what we were talking about was specifically nonviolent conflict escalation—one of the things in environmental peacebuilding that is underexplored territory in terms of “how do we do peacebuilding?” Yet, nonviolent direct action is de facto happening widely across the planet to defend territories and cultures and relationships to land and place, and to reconcile relations with non-human kin.

In this moment, a lot of people are returning to strategies of nonviolence or learning new strategies of nonviolence. I haven’t seen this many trainings being offered virtually and in-person in my own region ever. I think people are being reminded of something more powerful than violent conflict and violent oppression. I think of Erica Chenoweth’s work as evidence that nonviolence is more effective to transform oppressive regimes.

To clarify, if we’re thinking about decolonization, it’s decolonization of knowledge, power, identity, and being. That means resistance to all things—capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. I think this is another exciting space. I think it’s so much more creative than military strategy and the use of violence.

KarinaYeah, we call it soft power. We can be powerful without being coercive. For example, some countries project power through militarism. There are other options and strategies to become a powerful nation.

BarbaraComing from Brazil and growing up understanding how the world works in the global periphery and then moving to Sweden to study peace and conflict has been very challenging because the definitions of peace and conflict I encountered at the university did not match my lived experience, the reality of my community, of the people around me, the people in my country, in my whole continent. So, it became an imperative for me to investigate: What does peace actually mean? Who is suffering from conflict? Who is benefiting from peace? As it is not the same for everybody.

Feminists and decolonial scholars have argued that peace and violence do not sit in opposition, but they are better understood as a continuum. There are sliding scales of different types of violence and different types of peace that coexist. You can have pockets of peace during a very violent time, or pockets of violence in peacetime, which is, in fact, how most of us live everyday life, right?

When we collapse everything into a dichotomy in which conflict is bad and peace is good, you end up with strategies of conflict management, pacification, and peacekeeping that are not transformative. It’s suppressing grievances instead of addressing the root causes of conflict and inequality. It’s impossible for us to have a holistic peace if that is the way that peace is understood.

One important thing to note when we’re talking about nonviolence is that there has been a recent study by Manekin and Mitts using the same data as Erica Chenoweth that found that the positive effect of nonviolence is moderated by ethnicity, as this strategy works better for privileged and dominant classes in society. But for other groups, it wasn’t as reliably effective. So, I think there’s so many issues that we still need to dive deeper into and really look at the question of power more broadly as well.

KelseyThere’s a lot to say on how decisions on what peace and violence are made and how that correlates with dominant groups or non-dominant groups. In that, “what’s your perspective to experience something as violence or not?” It’s very humbling for me to think from the perspective of Indigenous communities on what their view of violence is. It’s often something that I wouldn’t have considered violence, namely in the destruction of natural resources as a form of cultural and structural violence for Indigenous peoples on their traditional homelands.

JesseThere are people interested in maintaining violent structures, or who are conflict-avoidant and are using that as a synonym for peace. If you are perpetuating a structure of colonial peace, like if your idea of peace assumes rights to and exploitation of Indigenous land, for example, then that’s not peace. That’s a form of colonialism which uses “peace” as a metaphor and tool for exploitation. Decolonial peace would be at least naming that form of peace as a continuation of injustice.

AdamFor context, I identify as being from the Global South, specifically from Malaysia. We’ve been colonized by four powers since the 1500s. So, we’re very familiar with the rise and fall of empires because we have dealt with various imperialists and colonizers in our lands. Resistance in that context exists in many interdependent forms, from nonviolence to violence.

So, when people ask, “What does decolonization look like?,” for me, it is supporting resistance in whatever form that manifests, as the colonized understand the very brute and pervasive nature of what colonialism is. Those narratives we emphasize are important, as within the global structure of capitalism nothing is ever “neutral.” Hence, the bare minimum for those of us who are situated in the Global North is to amplify and embody these narratives as part of a wider struggle for humanity in collective solidarity.

AmandaIn thinking about what you said, Kelsey, about not looking back, I agree because if you look back, you’re only basing your ideas on what’s happened before and you can get trapped in the same patterns versus innovating and thinking creatively and differently. I think what’s important about decolonization is to allow room for different perspectives.

I’ve had several conversations recently about Everyday Peace Indicators as community-developed indicators of peace […] that are people-centric and based on lived experiences. We still need to know about what we all think about peace to make progress.

An essential part of decolonization to me is the creativity, the innovation, the transformation based on having space for everyone to share and contribute and to be in relationship with one another versus the violence that is caused when someone has and uses power over others.

BarbaraI think that’s so true that it feels like we can’t do things otherwise because we’ve never done it before. We’ve only done things in one way, so there’s no alternative. Once we started with this system, with this world, we can’t move away from it. I think that’s totally true when we’re looking at it in this direct, unidirectional, linear way. When you talk to other communities that have other understandings of time and space, they talk about the past all the time. And the past and the present and the future, and they’re all together because they build on each other. It is a circular understanding of time and of processes.

The mainstream view of peace and conflict is that it moves linearly from conflict to peace. But the actual timeline is a lot more complicated and complex than that. There’re spirals and there’s ups and downs, and we’re going to go back to conflict and we’re going to have peace for a little while, etc.

It’s also very important that we demystify the straightforwardness of building peace. I think it’s important that we work with the contradictions and with the different conflicts, the different cycles, the different people, which is what I have learned in trying to understand this from a feminist and anti-colonial perspective. This topic always brings me back to the idea of the Zapatistas in Mexico: that we should build the world where many worlds fit in. That we should be able to exist without this colonial impulse to homogenize everything and everyone.

KarinaDecolonization work is counter-cultural to the present status-quo and is hopeful. Through deep collective decolonial reflection, I believe we can create a better future for everyone.

Conclusion

This conversation does not end with a set of policy recommendations or a theoretical framework. It ends, as decolonial work often does, in motion—with more questions opened, more relationships deepened, and more futures imagined than when we began. Two follow-up conversations will be available on the Peace Science Digest website that explore (1) Where are we in decolonial peace? and (2) What is the future of decolonial peace?

Contributors

Adam Zikri is a Program Associate at the War Prevention Initiative of the Jubitz Family Foundation.

Amanda Woomer is the Founder & Principal of Baobab Tree Consulting.

Barbara Magalhães Teixeira is a peace researcher and educator. Her work focuses on environmental conflicts in the Global South and feminist and decolonial strategies for building liberatory peace.

Elaine (Lan Yin 蘭因) Hsiao is an Associate Professor at Kent State University’s School of Peace and Conflict Studies.

Jesse Matas is a musician, songwriter, and PhD student in peace and conflict studies at the University of Manitoba.

Karina Higa is the Founder of Empathea Blue Ltda., working at the intersection of policy, science, and communities. She builds bridges across knowledge systems and sectors, turning diverse perspectives into dialogue, collaboration, and action for sustainable cities.

Kelsey Coolidge is the Director of Environmental Peacebuilding with the Jubitz Family Foundation.

References

Freire, Paulo. 2018 (1968). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury Publishing. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/pedagogy-of-the-oppressed-9781501314131/.

Chandler, David. 2026. “Hope: A Worldly Politics in an Uncertain World.” Paper presented at the annual convention of the International Studies Association, Columbus, Ohio (USA), March 23.

Chenoweth, Erica, and Maria J. Stephan. 2011. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. Columbia University Press. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/9780231156820/

Manekin, Devorah, and Tamar Mitts. 2022. “Effective for Whom? Ethnic Identity and Nonviolent Resistance.” American Political Science Review 116 (1): 161-80. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/effective-for-whom-ethnic-identity-and-nonviolent-resistance/D78EE1F9EE3B41D6F1500311F17B8EA6

Organizations

Everyday Peace Indicators: https://everydaypeaceindicators.org/

Notes

1. See “Hope: A Worldly Politics in an Uncertain World” by David Chandler in References. Back to text