Peace scholarship and the local turn: Hierarchies in the production of knowledge about peace
| Published date | 01 July 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221088035 |
| Date | 01 July 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
Peace scholarship and the local turn:
Hierarchies in the production of knowledge
about peace
Anna K Johnson
Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies,
University of Notre Dame
Jose
´phine Lechartre
Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies,
University of Notre Dame
S¸ ehrazat G Mart
Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies,
University of Notre Dame
Mark D Robison
Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame
Caroline Hughes
Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies,
University of Notre Dame
Abstract
The ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding has focused attention on the importance of cultural resources available for
peacemaking in ‘local’ conflict-affected contexts, and particularly in non-Western countries. Growing attention is
now also paid to establishing whether the academic field of peace studies itself is inclusive of non-Western voices and
perspectives. This article presents a new dataset of 4,318 journal articles on peace indexed in Web of Science between
2015 and 2018 to discover asymmetric patterns of publication and scholarly gatekeeping between higher-income and
lower-income countries. Analysis of the data collected suggests that 15 years after the ‘local turn,’ higher-income
countries continue to dominate the field across the domains of publishing institutions; scholarship about non-high-
income countries; the conduct and focus of research collaborations; claims to theorization; and the discourse of the
field. However, positive change is being driven by a proliferation of scholarship in upper-middle-income countries,
characterized by intranational collaborations bet ween scholars writing about their own countries in their own
national journals.
Keywords
bibliometrics, coloniality, gatekeeping, knowledge production, local turn, peace studies, web of science
Introduction
Peace studies over the last decade has featured a ‘local
turn.’ This promoted concern for empowering local
communities to resolve conflicts, rejecting West-centric
dissemination of ‘liberal peace’ (Mac Ginty & Rich-
mond, 2013; Hughes et al., 2015; Paffenholz, 2015).
While scholars are increasingly interested in how the
local turn influences discussions of peacebuilding prac-
tice, they have paid less attention to localizing processes
of knowledge production about peace, such that ‘local
knowledge’ informs global scholarly conversations.
This inattention could plausibly stem from the dis-
cipline’s urgent practical concern to address active con-
flicts. Nevertheless, the local turn’s criticism of liberal
peacebuilding interventions as top-down and insensitive
Corresponding author:
chughe11@nd.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2023, Vol. 60(4) 675–690
ªThe Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433221088035
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to context could equally apply to practices of peace scho-
larship. In this article, our objective is to provide an
analysis of scholarship dynamics in the field of peace
studies from a local turn perspective.
We created a dataset of 4,318 articles on peace
indexed by Web of Science, published between 2015
and 2018. Additionally, we collected data from 2005
as a baseline, and from 2010, 2012, and 2014 to provide
time-series data. We identified the country of each
author’s institution and used the World Bank’s four
income classifications to categorize these as either high-
income, upper-middle-income, lower-middle-income,
or low-income. We also collected journal information
and other citation data. We analyzed the data using
descriptive statistics, bibliometric tools, and text analysis
of titles and abstracts.
Drawing on this analysis, we argue that knowledge
production in the discipline of peace studies is domi-
nated by institutions in high-income countries. This
dominance emerges across five domains: (1) the institu-
tional domain of publishing, (2) scholarly production
about specific countries and conflicts, including
non-high-income countries, (3) the focus of research
collaborations, (4) claims to theorization, and (5) the
discourse of the field. These findings suggest that,
despite the diversifying premise of the local turn, non-
Western scholars are still left out of the conversation.
These findings are unsurprising and in line with wider
literatures on epistemic injustice and the coloniality of
knowledge production. However, in drawing attention
to the stark gaps between contributions from scholars in
high-income and lower-income countries, we hope to
empower a call for a shift in academic practices.
Theoretical foundations of the local turn
The local turn in peacebuilding refers to a concern to
facilitate the empowered participation of local actors in
peace processes that affect them, promoted on the basis
that this will offer more effective, culturally appropriate
strategies for promoting peace in particular places. In the
early 2000s, the local turn stemmed from post -Cold-
War critiques of peacebuilding practices, aimed particu-
larly at complex peacekeeping and humanitarian
interventions of the 1990s (Fetherston, 2000; Duffield,
2001; Richmond, 2005; Chandler, 2006; Pouligny,
2006). A central concern was to critique a hegemonic
‘liberal peace,’ promoted by Western powers, which
focused on building institutions associated with
Western-style democracy and market economies in
post-conflict states as antidotes to political violence
(Richmond, 2005; Pugh, Cooper & Turner, 2008;
Newman, Paris & Richmond, 2009).
Local turn proponents put forward two key criticisms
of the liberal peace. First, they saw it as culturally specific
to North American and European contexts (Campbell,
Chandler & Sabaratnam, 2011; Richmond, 2011). Sec-
ond, they claimed that liberal peace policy rhetoric
demonized local actors as ‘spoilers’ (Stedman, 1997) and
‘entrepreneurs of violence’ (Collier et al., 2003), con-
trasted with the image of a benevolent, rational and
technically expert global peacemaker (Autesserre,
2009). Critics of liberal peace called for peacebuilding
strategies to embrace local agency in more substantive
ways that recognized the peacemaking potential of local
contexts. The local turn proposes that the sustainability
of peace lies in the meaningful inclusion of more diverse
voices informed by an intimate knowledge of their own
context, rather than from the deployment of ‘expert’
perspectives (Lederach, 1998; Donais, 2009; Lee &
O
¨zerdem, 2015; Mac Ginty & Firchow, 2016). Locals
are long-term stakeholders of peace, not passive recipi-
ents; therefore, peace must be produced and reproduced
by them as a matter of pragmatic necessity (Rupesinghe,
1995: 81; Fetherston, 2000).
Local turn theorists drew on an intellectual heritage
associated with critical, post-colonial and decolonial the-
ory to suggest that the policy positions and intervention-
ary tactics associated with ‘the liberal peace’ are not only
ineffective, but potentially oppressive. In this reading,
the liberal peace represented an opportunity for Western
policy makers and multilateral institutions to reassert
hierarchical relations of power over populations regarded
as ‘unruly,’ and in so doing, empower a ‘global polity’
based upon Western, liberal modes of governance (Jabri,
2013: 7). Thus, the liberal peace represented a key build-
ing block in a newly oppressive world order built upon
subjugation and exclusion (Duffield, 2001; Chandler,
2006). Emancipatory alternatives, at the very least,
require respect for local agency in creating a ‘hybrid’
peace (Mac Ginty, 2010).
The notion of a ‘hybrid’ peace (Mac Ginty, 2010;
Mac Ginty & Sanghera, 2012) points to a ‘melding’ of
global and local ideas and practices at different levels to
create new peace formations (Millar, 2014). Critical
scholars regard hybrid peace as something that is not
‘plannable,’ since it emerges from contingent and poten-
tially ‘disruptive’ processes of global–local friction
(Tsing, 2005; Millar, van der Lijn & Verkoren, 2013).
Here, global–local interaction appears as a process whose
outcomes need to be discovered ethnographically with
reference to human experience in specific contexts,
676 journal of PEACE RESEARCH 60(4)
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