Bringing Critical Sociology of Racism and Race into Peace Scholarship

What is it about?

The present study demonstrates pathways for integrating critical sociology theories and concepts of racism and race into models of peace and conflict to help address the harms and distortions of the field’s racial silence. We also outline how the inclusion of these ideas and the contributions of Black peace activists can inform new ways of thinking about and practicing peace.

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Photo by Edgar Chaparro on Unsplash

Photo by Edgar Chaparro on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Peace activists and public intellectuals in the US, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, and Martin Luther King, and modern-day peace activist organizations like the Black Alliance for Peace, have continually made the case that racial oppression and barriers to peace remain intertwined. Despite the deeply evident relationship between racial justice and positive peace, pathways for conceptualizing and critiquing racism and race in Western models of peace and conflict remain scarce. Insights from the U.S. Black radical tradition and their conceptual analogs in critical sociology have much to offer peace scholars, particularly peace psychologists, with their focus on social scientific inquiry. Peace studies in the US and Europe must address the lack of cohesive, racially conscious, and power-reflexive understandings of peace and conflict and recognize the harms and distortions of the field's racial silence. To this end, we offer Western peace scholars and practitioners further context, evidence, critiques, and conceptual tools. Five critical, holistic, and structural concepts (colorblind racial ideology, systemic racism, the white racial frame, intersectionality, and interest convergence) are well suited for developing epistemologies and praxis within Western peace psychology that challenge rather than ignore racial oppression. Including these insights, critiques, and theories of race and racism upends many core assumptions of peace studies in the metropole of the US and Europe. We call on other scholars to join us in engaging these emerging lines of inquiry and to take seriously racial oppression as a fundamental barrier to substantive peace.