Give Peace a Chance: Local Experiences for Global Challenges

This book examines the field of Peace and Conflict Studies with a focus on local experiences that pursue a peaceful political and socialagenda. The editors propose to broaden the debate on Peace Studies, presenting a critical view of the mainstream approaches in the area, and addressing the necessity to open the debate to include the views from the “South”.The book offers an alternative approach to violence based on subjects historicallyexcluded from the ontology of international policy debates, which focus on the war between nation-states. It is based on the understanding that the traditional ways of thinking about violence cannot understand the multipleforms of social violence that cut across international relations, particularly affecting black and indigenous populations, migrants, and women. The book proposes to think about such violence in a way connected to the intersecting inequalities of gender, race, class, and territory that have hierarchized theworld's populations since colonization and created the conditions for genocides and “epistemicides”. The book presents a broader spectrum of global challenges by highlighting the inequalities that sustain a profoundly unequal order even in traditionally perceived peaceful periods. To address such challenges, it is necessary, as the authors of the volume argue, to break down the walls of masculinized, patriarchal, white-centric, and elitist structures that continue to guarantee privileges for a reduced portion of the world's population.