*CFP* "NARRATIVES IN DISPUTE: EPISTEMOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO CONFLICT, PEACE AND SECURITY", SPECIAL ISSUE, TRIPODOS JOURNAL

The monographic is looking for contributions that offer epistemological approaches to the fields of conflict, peace, and security studies. The understanding of these phenomena is always mediated by who tells the story and the language used for it. As a result, in every context there is always a plurality of narratives that are produced by top-down analysis and bottom-up experiences. How these narratives interact, clash, accommodate and influence each other is of utmost importance to make sense of how international interventions and the deployment of security and peace policies are received or confronted at the local level, and in turn, how bottom-up narratives could be integrated and get a central position. 

This call looks for critical articles –feminist, post-colonial, and/or critical and poststructuralist analysis– that focus on the process of narration and the actors involved in defining the script, as well as on intercultural translations by looking into possibilities of coexistence and tolerance.

 

Introduction

In recent years, critical peace and security studies have called into question the conflict resolution approaches, peacebuilding initiatives and security strategies driven by major international organisations. In general, critical views consider that these types of approaches tend to be built from a top-down perspective, with little participation of local actors in contexts affected by armed violence, and often derive in standardized and depoliticized strategies that do not take into account the complex nature of conflict.

One of the main problems raised by the critical literature on conflict, peace and security is epistemological: the contexts in which international stakeholders intervene are usually understood on the basis of the worldviews and values of Western actors, leading to narratives that impose a certain understanding of the root causes of conflict, and hence a certain type of “solution”. Regarding the analysis of African conflicts, for example, the Sierra Leonean Zubairu Wai (2012) considers that when conflicts are interpreted and analysed from certain fields, the production of knowledge is not an innocent intellectual exercise but a political, temporal, spatial and ideological act. The act of interpretation is not only harmful for what counts and how it is constructed, but also for what does not count, for everything that omits and does not give voice (the silences), as well as for its inability or unwillingness to incorporate voices that start from a different worldview and a framework that questions the dominant thinking. For Michael Shapiro (1992), the relationship between knowledge and power “is a form of imposing meanings and interpretations and a form of subjugation”. In short, this “epistemic violence” referred to by authors such as Gayatri Spivak and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (the latter through the idea of “epistemicide”) highlights the problematic nature of this approach and its insufficiency to explain reality to us.

Precisely, post-colonial, feminist and post-structuralist scholars, from critical peace studies and critical security schools, have developed approaches that challenge, deconstruct and problematise the existence of these dominant narratives in the understanding of current conflicts.

This call for contributions aims to bring together theoretical and empirical work that analyses three specific aspects: first, what aspects are key to the construction of dominant discourses and what limits, problems, contradictions and impacts the discourses of the main international organisations render when tackling conflict and peace dynamics; second, to what extent dominant discourses try to incorporate local voices and sensibilities into their understanding of the context and what limits they find in that purpose; and finally, how local actors resist, counter, accomodate or build their own narratives of conflict in the face of dominant discourses.

 

Objectives

Proposals addressing the following topics will be considered: 

• The study of power-knowledge and power-resistance dynamics within the field of peacebuilding and security. 
• Articles addressing the discursive power of Western actors and interventions. 
• Discourse analysis of the contents of certain international policies and strategies in contexts of conflict, peacebuilding or where security is a central element. 
• The study of the standardization of academia and international bureaucracy in the assessment of conflicts and the design and evaluation of interventions. 
• The assessment of the design, implementation and/or evaluation of participative peace policies. 
• Ethnographic works that address the role of local communities and civil society organisations in shaping narratives about conflict. 
• Methodological discussions on how narratives are constructed at the international, national and local levels. 
• Mapping of emerging narratives in the midst of armed conflicts or the peacebuilding phase, and how they have managed to surface. 
• The study or comparison of emancipatory local projects that advocate for a potential pluriverse in which a multiplicity of narratives can coexist. 
• Articles discussing the plurality of narratives around peace and peacebuilding and the interaction among them. 
• Works on intercultural translation between international and national narratives. 
• Discussions on everyday narratives of conflict, peace and security. 
• Discourse analysis of how armed conflicts and peacebuilding processes are portrayed in the media. 
• Discourse analysis of how labels and naming create stereotypes about actors involved in security and conflict dynamics. 
• Articles looking into the process of (de)securitization focusing on the issuance of speech acts, counter-speech acts, and their interrelation in the public space.

 

Papers should be sent by June 30, 2021. In order to submit original papers, authors must be registered with the journal as authors. Following this step, authors must enter their user name and password, activated in the process of registering, and begin the submission process. In step 1, they must select the section “Monograph”.

Rules and instructions regarding the submission of originals can be downloaded at www.tripodos.com. For any queries, please contact the editorial team of the journal at tripodos@blanquerna.url.edu.

Tripodos is a international scholarly journal published by the Blanquerna School of Communication and International Relations at Ramon Llull University. Since 1996, the pages of this biannual publication have offered a forum for debate and critical discussion with regard to any discipline related to the world of communication: journalism, cinema, television, radio, advertising, public relations, the Internet, etc

 

Tripodos:

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