By Christopher Ignatius Gyimah

When officials in Washington or Brussels say ‘peace,’ they might picture quiet streets, ceasefire deals, or signed papers. But for many communities in Accra, Bogotá, or Mindanao, peace can sound like something else entirely — a polite demand to keep still while structural injustices continue.

This blog argues that decolonial peace offers an alternative: it centers resistance, memory, and plurality, and insists that peace must grow from people’s lived experiences — not be imposed from above. By shifting the lens away from donor timelines and policy kits, decolonial peace invites us to ask: Who gets to define peace, and on whose terms?

Beyond Ceasefires: The Limits of Traditional Peacebuilding

This polite silence often hides a deeper issue that peacebuilding is still scripted by those who hold power, using tools shaped by colonial logic. Standard peacebuilding practices like disarmament plans, quick elections, market reforms still carry colonial assumptions. As Victoria Fontan (2012) argues, they often treat the state as neutral and capitalism as curative, ignoring how colonial legacies of race, land, and gender injustice continue to wound long after the last bullet is fired.

Johan Galtung’s concept of negative peace (the absence of violence) versus positive peace (the presence of justice) is helpful here. Many international missions settle for the former. Decolonial voices demand the latter asking not just whether guns are silent, but whether people are truly free.

What Decolonial Peace Looks Like

Take Colombia, for instance a country lauded for its 2016 peace accord, but where donor clocks still ticked louder than ancestral rhythms. Many Afro-Colombian, Indigenous, and rural women’s collectives felt unheard. So, they built their own visions of peace — patrolling forests, teaching ancestral languages, performing healing rituals. As Anctil Avoine, Mejía Jerez, and Tillman (2018) show, these acts didn’t follow a policy template. They were rooted in place, culture, and struggle. They remind us that peace is not a blueprint it’s a lived process. And that memory, through story circles or dance, can heal wounds that infrastructure alone cannot.

Colombia is not alone. Across the world, ordinary people are creating peace every day: Indigenous guards in the Amazon film illegal loggers to protect their land; youth in Khartoum run street clinics while demanding civilian rule; women’s groups in Mindanao organize trauma healing through ancestral dance and song; or fisher communities in Kenya replant mangroves to defend coastlines from ecological harm.

None of them wait for UN permission. They improvise dignity, and in doing so, plant the seeds of tomorrow’s justice. These actions may seem small, but systems depend on small routines. Enough joined micro-resistances can shift the larger field. This, too, is decolonial peace enacted not through blueprints, but through everyday courage and collective care.

Room for Plurality

Whether in Afro-Colombian forests or Sudanese clinics, these stories show us peace shaped by the many, not the few messy, plural, and dignified. Decolonial peace accepts friction when power bends. It invites more listening, less lecturing, and admits that justice without humility can slide into a new dominance. If we remember buried stories, honor ongoing struggles, and defend the right to say no, another kind of peace may show up one rooted in dignity rather than silence.

The ask is simple: leave room for plurality, let justice steer design, and recall that imposed calm cracks fast; co-created peace bends and lasts. None of this is neat. Trade-offs appear; contradictions stick around. Still, when communities steer the questions, even partial answers can feel owned. And ownership, some would say, is the strongest cease-fire clause of all.

Peace and Conflict programs often chase ‘policy relevance.’ Pureza and Cravo (2009) warn this race can blunt critique. Adding Fanon, Spivak, or Black feminist thought could widen the lens, keeping the field honest about empire, patriarchy, and race. Courses could send students to grassroots hubs, not just embassies, and share authorship with local co-researchers. This, too, would be part of a peace that remembers and refuses to forget who gets left out when peace becomes silence.

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Cover photograph: @Safi Erneste