Mural on the process of demobilization in Paoua, Central African Republic, 2017
| © Marius Crépin MouguiaFunded by the De/Coloniality Now initiative, this research project brings together a multidisciplinary team of German, Central African and Congolese researchers.
Comparing peace and security qualitatively across countries is rare in itself and almost exclusively the prerogative of Global North (GN) scholars exceptions notwithstanding. Global South (GS) scholars are valued mostly for their “indigenous” knowledge on “their” case. This reproduces colonial hierarchies as GN scholars extract data often with the help of GS “assistants” from formerly colonized areas to refine (often colonial-era) concepts and then reimpose them as epistemic frames onto how GS scholars should understand their lived realities. In this project, German, Central African and Congolese scholars propose a third decolonial alternative: comparing across GS cases directly without a GN detour.
The project is an explorative study on the merits of this decolonial comparative approach. It aims to compare the results of both similar and different data sources on peace and security as well as processes of demobilization and remobilization in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic. In doing so, it seeks understandings of security for each case, in comparison, and for theory building.
The project brings together different epistemic frameworks to work towards a "collaborative worldmaking". It questions typical knowledge processes in global academic collaboration and tests self-critically an alternative in the form of direct South-South comparison for creating empirical and conceptual findings in peace and conflict studies.
This project is funded by
