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Y. G. Acar et al. (eds.), Researching Peace, Confict, and Power in the Field,
Peace Psychology Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44113-5_18
Chapter 18
Recovering the Everyday Within
and for Decolonial Peacebuilding Through
Politico-Affective Space
Shahnaaz Suffa, Nick Malherbe, and Mohamed Seedat
To study the everyday is to wish to change it. To change the everyday is to bring its confu-
sions into the light of day and into language; it is to make its latent conficts apparent, and
thus to burst them asunder. It is therefore both theory and practice, critique and action.
(Lefebvre, 2002, p. 226).
Taken as ideology, as well as political, economic and moral philosophy, liberal-
ism locates ‘the good life’ in individual freedoms (Richmond 2009a). Accordingly,
liberals champion unregulated market forces, and the assumption that democratiza-
tion always follows marketization (Paris 2010) as ideal in allowing for the fourish-
ing of such freedoms (Brown 2006). Today, the hegemonic, most visible and best
funded modes of peacebuilding rely signifcantly on the tenets of liberalism (Hudson
2016). In adhering to such liberal doctrine, the liberal peace is underpinned by the
base assumption that democratic, capitalist societies are likely to engender the
greatest levels of peace in local affairs and international relations (Rampton and
Nadarajah 2017; Vásquez-Arenas 2018). From this perspective, “the liberal peace
can be understood as a set of particular ideas and practices intended to reform and
regulate polities in the global South” (Sabaratnam 2013, pp. 259–260).
Richmond (2011) notes that resistance to colonial domination is often interpreted
by liberal peace frameworks as wholly ‘violent’, and therefore denotes anathema to
peace. It is in this sense that the liberal peace remains in large part indifferent to
coloniality as an analytic in the conception of confict and violence prevention. This
includes comprehension of the way violences reproduce and transmute in everyday
lives, as well as the ontological (re)production of racial, gender and other differ-
ences in the construction of relations of domination and subjugation. If we under-
stand coloniality as a collection of systems that emerged out of
Euro-North-American-centric modernity and are, today, observed in the colonial
S. Suffa (*) · N. Malherbe · M. Seedat
Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa, Lenasia, South Africa
South African Medical Research Council-University of South Africa Violence, Injury and
Peace Research Unit, Tygerberg, South Africa
e-mail: Shahnaaz.Suffa@mrc.ac.za; Nicholas.Malherbe@mrc.ac.za; Seedama@unisa.ac.za