Room to Grow and the Right to Say No: Theorizing the Liberatory Power of Peace in the Global South

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article builds on feminist and decolonial perspectives and engages with political geography literature to rethink the way that peace and violence are understood in the Global South. Building peace that is coherent with planetary and ecological limits and that does not further direct structural violence necessitates breaking with the extractivist model of development that benefits growth and accumulation over the well-being of humans and more than human lives. By theorising the way that degrowth strategies can be understood as furthering climate resilient peace in the Global South, this article proposes two ways that we can understand peace as a liberatory praxis based on the ‘room to grow’ and ’the right to say no’. Through these two strategies, I aim at centring a liberatory praxis for peace on the need to negate both material and symbolic systems and structures of oppression that produce climate and environmental changes, as well as reproduce direct, structural and cultural violence. A peace praxis focused on the liberation of the Global South identifies that different types of violence linked to climate and environmental changes and underdevelopment are not only connected but that they share their roots in deeper structural systems of extractivism, exploitation and colonisation.