Peace Studies and the Color Line [Paperback]

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Peace Studies and the Color Line

Africana Contributions

by Carlos Cordero-Pedrosa , I Jin Jang

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This book contributes to a much-needed critical engagement with peace scholarship, while addressing interconnections between racism and colonialism on one hand, and peace and conflict studies on the other. In so doing, Dr. Jang and Dr. Cordero reach fundamental insights into epistemic inequality and epistemic justice in the field of peace and conflict studies. This book is thus an invaluable contribution to this field and its place between social studies and the humanities.

Dr. Egidio Alcides De Bustamante Azevedo
Cátedra UNESCO de Filosofía para la Paz
Universitat Jaume I, Spain

With remarkable critical adeptness, artistry and adroitness, the authors of this intellectual feast, Carlos Cordero and I Jin Jang, unmask the epistemological blindness to race, racism and colonialism in peace studies and advocate the insights from Africana philosophy as its cure.
Alberto Gomes
Emeritus Professor
La Trobe University
Australia

Providing a genealogical excavation of the foundational narratives of peace studies, I Jin Jang and Carlos Cordero lay bare the epistemic and conceptual problems that arise when the discipline (and beyond) separates race from its colonial roots. Inspired by the Africana critical philosophical tradition, this dynamic duo puts race, racism and colonialism at the center of their disruptive inquiry for rethinking violence and reimagining freedom and notions of being human. An incredible journey into the humanization of the world, this work shows how the problem of the color line is ‘our’ problem, one where race becomes a “rallying site of resistance” for creating “new human relations.”

Dr. Jennifer Murphy
International Studies Department
University of San Francisco

The book aims to continue and expand the conversations emerging from the margins of peace studies about race and racism, and their implications for the field. Especially drawing from the often-overlooked African diasporic critical and philosophical tradition —with an emphasis on Africana phenomenology and existentialism— the book addresses questions that are central in Africana thought yet remain under-explored in peace studies. This enables to rethink peace studies’ assumptions, conceptual frameworks, and epistemic and normative elements. Inter- or transdisciplinary dialogue requires a profound re-evaluation of what constitutes the exclusions in both knowledge and politics. This, in turn, necessitates a critical examination of the structures and organization of knowledge, a deeper understanding of the field’s identity, its foundational narratives and presuppositions, a reassessment of the relations with other disciplines and areas of knowledge, and the histories, the subjects and the forms of agency that it privileges. Taking race and racism seriously through African diasporic thought entails, among others, reconsidering the ties of peace studies with international relations and liberal political theory, bringing to the forefront the question of freedom, examining the relationship between the ethical and the political, and complicating the distinction between violence and nonviolence.

Introduction
Chapter 1
Evasions, resistances, and conceptual confusions
Chapter 2
Race and the rights of the human
Chapter 3
Race, humanities, and social and human sciences
Chapter 4
Fanon, conflicts and pacifism
Epilogue: Fear, anger, and safety in the classroom
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

Carlos Cordero-Pedrosa (PhD) and Jin Jang (PhD) are independent researchers who have been teaching Peace Conflict and Development Studies at Jaume I University in Spain and the International Course on Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding in Muhammadiyah University of Yogyakarta in Indonesia. They are members of the Global DEEP Network (Dialogue, Empathic, Engagement & Peacebuilding). This book results from their common research interests in anticolonialism, black existential and Africana theory and the possible dialogue with peace studies. At the same time, this work is also animated by their teaching experience and the confusion and difficulties of discussing race and racism in the classroom.

anticolonialism, philosophical anthropology, African diasporic theory, phenomenology, human rights, international law, violence, peace, international relations, nonviolence, European modernity, philosophy of science, decolonization, Caribbean, ethnicity, black studies