Research Information System
in: The Oxford Handbook of Peacebuilding, Statebuilding, and Peace Formation, Oliver P. Richmond,Gëzim Visoka, Editor, Oxford University Press, London , Oxford, pp.190-203, 2021
This chapter looks critically into the exhortations in recent peace thinking to accommodate visions of peace outside European modernity, called the West. The discussion problematizes the premise of a radical distinction in cultural terms between the West and the non-West, questioning for each front the notion of a linear cultural transmission from ancient times onward. The binary, the chapter argues, is premised effectively on an oblivion of hybridities, especially in the Mediterranean basin, already before modernity and, later, under modernity, of the virtual recasting of much of what has been out there in the periphery, however named or classified, in the image of modernity. The chapter then considers some of the characteristic oversimplifications in peace research around the theme, which, albeit with a strong anti-ethnocentric posture to begin with, end up largely reproducing the classical Orientalism in its reductionisms.
Keywords: cultural authenticity, cultural reductionism, ethnocentrism, European modernity, Islam and the West, multiple modernities, non-Western concepts of peace, Orientalism, Western intellectual heritage