Von Claudia Brunner
Violence and science, violence and education, it seems, have nothing to do with each other. Where violence is analyzed and theorized, violence does not seem to exist. Especially not in peace research or even peace education. We can use the concept of epistemic violence to investigate this connection. This leads to a number of challenges in peace education and related fields of emancipatory educational work, which also provides resources for this balancing act of
Violence is (not only): somewhere else, someone else, something else
Based on an understanding of violence that is usually focused on direct and physical injury, the field of knowledge production is seen as non-violent and as a place from which violence can be overcome and non-violence brought into the world. Especially in peace research and peace education. The phenomena that we refer to as violence are diverse, dynamic and often ambiguous, as are the ideas of what non-violence means. All too often, moral, political, disciplinary and analytical approaches get mixed up. Structural, cultural, symbolic, cultural, normative and epistemic violence usually remain unconsidered, under-complex or only mentioned in passing. These are closely interwoven with each other and with direct physical violence, and their theorization represents an important resource for peace research and peace education. Nonviolence, I argue, must also be conceived from a broad understanding that takes into account different forms of violence. If we also think about the dimension of knowledge based on the concept of colonial modernity, such an approach also deepens and enriches the debate on active nonviolence. This is of great importance in peace education, but is usually taken for granted. At the same time, nonviolence as a social practice and as a theoretical challenge seems to have been forgotten in the course of the professionalization and institutionalization of peace research.
The concept of epistemic violence is a helpful tool for a critical revision of the understanding of non-violence (as a social goal or self-attribution), non-violence (as an individual or supposed cultural achievement) or even just renunciation of violence (as a situational decision in conflict situations). In the 1970s, the French philosopher Michel Foucault coined the term epistemic violence as part of his theory of power; a little later, the Indian-American literary theorist Gayatri Spivak defined it more precisely in the global post-colonial context of knowledge and violence relations. The term and concept have therefore been around for almost 40 years. Peace research and peace education, on the other hand, have only been using this approach since the gradually increasing reception of feminist-postcolonial and decolonial debates from the Global South. But what is epistemic violence and how does it work?
Epistemic violence
The term epistemic violence calls into question the separation of knowledge and violence, as well as the quasi-automatic link between science and non-violence. It refers to the contribution to relations of inequality, power and domination that is inherent in knowledge itself and has become invisible for the analysis of these very relations. It puts up for discussion what functions scientific knowledge production in particular - which is generally regarded as non-violent and overcoming violence - fulfills with regard to the establishment and maintenance of relations of violence in a world characterized by global inequality. This does not only refer to powerful institutions and practices of knowledge production that have an excluding and hierarchizing effect, such as racism, classism and sexism. It is about the methodological, theoretical and epistemological foundations of knowledge itself that are interwoven with these dimensions. Whose knowledge and which knowledge is heard, counted, appreciated? Whose and what knowledge never seems worth mentioning, canonizing or generalizing? These foundations are closely interwoven with relations of power and violence of a very concrete, manifest kind.
My argument is that knowledge and violence must be analysed and theorized in this context. We need to think about the supposedly self-evident and unambiguous, violence, in a more differentiated and broader way, and identify the supposedly abstract, epistemology, i.e. thinking about knowledge itself, in our very concrete lifeworld and relate it to different forms of violence. Starting from the concept of epistemic violence, it is important to ask and discuss questions that are relevant not only to our understanding of violence, but also to that of non-violence, non-violence and non-violence. No simple answers can result from this. Rather, this perspective leads back to the fact that these important political goals and practices must always - and also conceptually - be struggled for.
Using the term epistemic violence to analyze and criticize global relations of power, domination and violence does not mean ignoring or even relativizing direct violence. Johan Galtung, to whom we owe the broad understanding of structural violence, already had to put up with this accusation with regard to his broad understanding of violence. Rather, the thematization of epistemic violence makes it possible to put supposedly unrelated things in relation to one another. Attention to epistemic violence sharpens the focus on the connection between knowledge and the place of its origin on the one hand and the concrete phenomena of violence under discussion on the other. The latter need to be analyzed and criticized in all their complexity. A simple concept of violence is not sufficient for this, which potentially means many things, but usually remains focused on direct physical violence. Understanding this connection between knowledge and violence only as a problem of the present shortens the analysis and diminishes the power of peace research and peace education criticism. Rather, from a post- and decolonial perspective, it makes sense to locate our institutions and traditions of knowledge production in their historical context of origin. This applies in particular to hegemonic scientific knowledge as well as to that which appears with an authoritative gesture in order to delegitimize marginalized perspectives. Instead of constantly talking about enlightenment and scientific progress in modernity, we should assume that the beginnings of the current capitalist world system, including its sciences, epistemologies and ways of life, do not only lie in the last 200 years of industrial, political and social revolution. These beginnings of a global transformation are not only rooted in resistant struggles for progress and democratization, but also in massive processes of destruction that are even 300 years older and also have their origins on the supposedly so peace-loving European continent: in the colonial expansion of Europe, which has changed the world on a global scale and continues to shape it today.
Coloniality
Authors from the so-called Global South in particular argue that even after the formal conclusion of violent political decolonization in the second half of the 20th century, we still live in a persistent state of coloniality. This coloniality, so the argument goes, forms the constitutive underside or flip side of modernity, which is therefore called colonial modernity. Post- and decolonial voices point out that today's global implementation of capitalism is closely interwoven with the European project of colonialism, which has shaped the world for 500 years and continues to have an impact to the present day. In this analysis and critique of inequality and violence on a global scale, the dimension of knowledge takes on a central function, because this - Eurocentric - knowledge is also understood as a constitutive component of colonial modernity. This leads to the demand to analyze every form of power, domination and violence in this context of ongoing coloniality and thus also in its epistemic dimension. Racism, sexism, globally asymmetrical class relations and numerous other social markers are then no longer merely political grievances that can be countered with a humanistic universalism and corresponding policies and peace education practices. Rather, they constitute deep-seated epistemological preconditions for our actions, our thinking, our being. Not least through this reflection on the theory of science, it becomes clear that modernity in its asserted linearity, progressiveness, enlightenment, civilizational superiority and resulting non-violence - or at least the assumption of a genuine ability to reduce and overcome violence - is above all one thing: a powerful myth that makes the violent processes of colonial modernity itself invisible, glosses over and legitimizes them. This also applies to the field of peace education and related political pedagogies. The dimension of knowledge, which is neglected in most analyses of violence and in concepts of non-violence, plays a central role in the creation and perpetuation of this persistent myth. It must therefore also be given greater consideration when deconstructing it.
Thinking nonviolence further
Based on these considerations, we should therefore also think again and more deeply about non-violence, non-violence and renunciation of violence, and not take them for granted in peacebuilding and related approaches. For if violence is not only elsewhere, anderswer and anderswas, if it cannot be naturally located beyond knowledge (science), but is also deposited in our resources and practices of knowledge through the naturalization of relations of power, violence and domination, then it follows that epistemic violence is potentially also present where efforts are made to avoid and overcome violence. Simply renouncing violence and claiming not only physical but also epistemic non-violence for one's own thoughts and actions is just as impossible in what Rolando V谩zquez calls the epistemic territory of modernity as it is to completely avoid structural, symbolic, cultural or normative violence. This realization represents an enormous challenge for peace research and peace education. Starting from a productive complication of the question of violence and non-violence based on this, a number of questions arise for a lively further thinking of active non-violence, which should be discussed intensively, especially in peace research and peace education:
If our thinking is also characterized by a coloniality that is permeated by violence in many respects, how can active nonviolence be thought of and, above all, practiced at all? Is something like structural, symbolic, cultural or even epistemic nonviolence even conceivable or even realizable? Does it represent a normative ideal and a productive utopia, or merely an illusion that must be abandoned in the face of omnipresent and numerous forms of violence? Or is active nonviolence possibly something that can be achieved by accepting - epistemic - violence? And what would this then have to do with nonviolence in the sense that means freedom from as many forms of violence as possible and always has its direct and physical manifestations in mind? How can recognizing and analysing the omnipresence of violence become a resource for resisting its various forms? What does it mean to understand oneself as being entangled in different kinds of violent relationships? What intellectual, political and personal shifts in boundaries might this entail? What therefore needs to be problematized and revised in theories of active nonviolence as well as with regard to their practices, and what should and can be held on to?
(Peace) education: What to do? What now?
These very fundamental questions raise numerous contradictions, challenges and obstacles, which can also be opportunities for a strengthening renewal in the field of peace education and related approaches to critical learning and teaching. These approaches - like all other bodies of knowledge (albeit to varying degrees and with varying degrees of problem awareness) - are characterized by androcentrism and Eurocentrism, logocentrism, linear temporality and the development paradigm of colonial modernity. It necessarily follows that peacebuilding also operates on the epistemic territory of colonial modernity, from which it cannot simply renounce, but with which it must wrestle. Finally, it should not be forgotten that critical approaches to educational research and practice are also subject to the increasing commodification of the education sector, which exacerbates the problems mentioned above.
Last year (2021), on the occasion of some interdisciplinary lecture invitations with a focus on (peace) education, I articulated preliminary reflections below, with which I try to make my preoccupation with epistemic violence and the coloniality of power, knowledge and being usable for this context. As an interdisciplinary political scientist who has been working in peace research for about 10 years, but is by no means systematically familiarized with the field of peace education, I would like to emphasize that my reflections have developed from precisely this position of an interested neighbourhood, collegiality or kinship. So, we very much welcome your opinions and contradictions, especially on this blog. The more discussion, the better in terms of a path of critical peace-building that aims to address the often contradictory and uncomfortable relationship between knowledge and domination in colonial modernity. A path is created by walking it - preferably with critical companions...
Challenges of peace education:
- Peace education must recognize the implications of the coloniality of a humanist universalism that promises peace and at the same time is entangled in peacelessness.
- Peace education must subject its sometimes essentialist understanding of culture and interculturality to a revision that is critical of racism.
- Peace education must dedicate itself to the further development of a diversity-oriented paradigm that is compatible with neoliberalism towards a power-critical perspective of intersectionality.
- Peace education must fend off the pressure for individual 'improvement' of often culturalized subjects in order to better address structural factors of glocal violence against the background of (not only) epistemic racism/sexism/classism.
- Peace education must place the focus on interpersonal conflicts and individual scope for action in recognition of ongoing colonial modernity in a global context of multiple relations of violence and orders of domination.
- Peace education must move away from the positivist empiricism of today's narrow application orientation and become more aware of its socio-critical tradition and function by returning to its theoretical foundations and developing them further.
- Peace education must question the myth of its own non-violence and become aware of its own potential entanglement in power relations and the internalization of their supposed normality.
Peace education resources:
- Due to its predominantly normative-critical self-image, peace education is a suitable terrain for raising objections and opposition to invocations and orders that stabilize domination.
- Peace education has many voices of experience and didactic professionalism to harness resources beyond the supposedly purely cognitive-rational for critical educational practice.
- Peace education has the potential to rewrite the rules of articulability and audibility of marginalized and critical voices if it opens itself up to these perspectives and rediscovers its own roots as a critique of domination.
- Peace education is suitable for addressing the historical entanglement of educational institutions in organized policies of violence and systems of domination and drawing lessons for a less violent present.
- Peace education can ally itself with social movements and civil society initiatives at local and global level in order to make transformation processes tangible and to learn from and with them.
- Peace education is able to promote and support forms of self-organization and anti-authoritarian educational practice.
- Peace education can make it plausible that its agenda is a task for society as a whole, which must be shaped on a global scale and, at times, with the necessary contradictions.
UnDoing Epistemic Violence
Even the most reflective peacebuilding takes place on the epistemic territory of colonial modernity. It thus also participates in epistemic violence, which is involved in the maintenance of existing power relations. At the same time, peacebuilding is also a good place to become aware of the extent of ongoing coloniality, to practice self-criticism of hegemony, to articulate a critique of domination based on this in the theory and practice of peacebuilding and to sound out the potentials and limits of its potential decolonization. It is obvious that there can be neither quick nor easy solutions. Privileges must also be unlearned and contradictions recognized. An examination of the processuality, relationality and complexity of violence based on post- and decolonial as well as feminist and anti-racist approaches can also contribute to developing a deeper understanding of non-violence, non-violence and non-violence in the field of (peace) education and knowledge production. Taking on this task in all its contradictions can contribute to strengthening intersectional and power-critical peace education and related theories and practices.
Literature on epistemic violence and nonviolence in colonial modernity
Footnotes
Thanks to Joschka Dreher and Melanie Hussak for corrections and comments.
Literature
[ Michel Foucault (1973): Archaeology of Knowledge. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. Translation of the text first published in French in 1969.
[ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2008): Can the Subaltern Speak? Postcoloniality and subaltern articulation. Turia + Kant, Vienna. Translation of the text first published in English in 1988 with a foreword by Hito Steyerl.
[ Rolando V谩zquez (2011): Translation as Erasure. Thoughts on Modernity's Epistemic Violence. In: Journal of Historical Sociology 24 (1): 27-44.
About the authors
漏 Photo Riccio, Klagenfurt
Claudia Brunner is a social scientist and professor at the Center for Peace Research and Peace Education at the Institute for Educational Sciences and Educational Research at the University of Klagenfurt. For (mostly freely accessible) texts, lectures and other information, see
