Postcolonizing the Peace?: Towards a Perspective

Abstract

It is notorious the large and increasing material and intellectual efforts that are dedicated to conflict transformation and to the construction of peace throughout the globe in our time. It is also patent the centrality of the UN in the formulation as much as in the implementation of public policies concerning the international peace. These public policies, namely the peacekeeping, peacebuilding and the state-building, highly based on the conflict resolution problematic, having as the paradigmatic core the conflict, even though being directed to peace. This problematic can bring some dangerous consequences concerning the reflection about peace, namely a technical and bureaucratic reflection about it; or even not to problematize these dynamics as violences. Here lays the core of this article. Its objective is, from a critical position, to discuss and to deconstruct the UN response to the conflicts around the globe. It aims to observe the possible contributions of a reflection about the peace resting in a different problematic, the postcolonial reflection; having thus as paradigmatic core the emancipation instead of the conflict. In this way, it opens the possibility to a reflection about peace that is sensitive to a much larger number of violences; outside a binary logic; giving voice and a protagonist role to whom is normally the mere in locu executer of outside reflections about peace, or even excluded of its construction. As a result, it seems possible to begin a reflection about peace that lays foundations to the construction of a more sustainable peace, invariably more plural and inclusive than the liberal peace.