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Abstract

Peace processes require societies to break with animosity and violence. Scholars and practitioners have traditionally focused on institutional and structural mechanisms. Recent contributions have stressed the need to address the emotional legacies of destructive conflicts and how they influence peace processes. We build on these contributions by engaging current debates on decolonisation. We advance a three-part argument that places decolonising emotion at the core of peace and conflict studies. First, prevailing concepts and practices of peace rely on collective emotions that are western and colonial in origin. Emotions are central to the power dynamics that sustain colonial legacies and the practices of exclusion and injustice that ensue from them. Second, decolonising emotion requires an openness to different feelings which, in turn, can open up possibilities for creative ways of thinking about and practising peace. Third, these realms – colonial legacies and resistant ways of being and feeling – do not exist in isolation. Potentials for peace-making emerge from complex ‘interfaces’ between them, which we examine through two cases: the emotion of Han (한/恨) in Korean traditions of conflict resolution; and links between mourning and conflict management in the Maluilgal First Nation of the Torres Strait in far northern Australia.

Keywords

affect decolonisation embodiment emotions First Nations Indigenous Korea peace-making

Introduction

Emotions are increasingly recognised as an integral part of peace processes. A growing body of literature appreciates that transitions to peace involve a spectrum of intense emotions.¹ These studies range from earlier examinations of the emotional ‘climates’ necessary for divided communities to work through antagonisms (e.g. de Rivera, 2011; Gobodo-Madikizela, 2002) to more recent work examining emotions in relation to the power dynamics between peace practitioners and the communities in which they operate (e.g. Travouillon, 2023; Wallis, 2023). Emotions and their more ephemeral bodily affects – including fear, anxiety, anger, guilt, remorse, shame and sorrow – are central to how individuals and collectives come to term with violence and work towards establishing peaceful societal relations.

An appreciation of emotion and affect has taken place in the context of other shifts in the field of peace research, most notably the so-called turns towards the local and the everyday. The ensuing research opposes orthodox top-down approaches that impose pre-conceived and often liberal visions of peace on diverse conflict scenarios. Roger Mac Ginty (2008: 157–158), for instance, highlights that most international peace interventions are imbued with a ‘top-down bias’ that prevents them from dealing ‘with the affective and psychological dimensions of conflict and peace-making’. This is why peace studies scholars focus increasingly on local cultural contexts and knowledge practices, emphasising that peacebuilding should, at minimum, include some bottom-up processes centred around everyday experiences of ‘ordinary’ people (see, for example, Autesserre, 2014; Jabri, 2013: 3–16; Mac Ginty, 2014, 2021; Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013; Millar, 2020: 310–325; Randazzo, 2016: 1354–1355; Richmond and Mac Ginty, 2015: 171–189).

What are the exact intersections between this local turn and an appreciation of the roles of emotions in peace processes? Whose and which emotions are at stake and how are they related to the search for sustainable peace? How are we – scholars and peace practitioners – able to listen and learn from individual and collective emotions that lie at the centre of conflict and peace-making? Many of these and related questions continue to be debated. But answers are starting to emerge from literatures that have examined and shown, for instance, how emotions are contingent on their social and cultural environments (e.g. Hochschild, 1983; Lutz, 1988) or how the promotion of peace through dialogue and empathy requires sensitivity to the local and everyday spaces in which these practices are situated (e.g. Head, 2012; Pedwell, 2016).

The main objective of our article is to engage these debates through one of the most important current scholarly and political developments: decolonisation. In doing so, we enter a complex and sensitive political topic. The term decolonisation emerged in a particular context: that of colonised states and Indigenous communities seeking land-rights and sovereignty (Lightfoot, 2016: 33–71; Tuck and Yang, 2012). The term has then been linked to broader efforts to understand and challenge how colonial mindsets and political practices have circumscribed all aspects of modern life (Quijano, 2007: 168–174). Whether it is even possible to decolonise – at least in a full or complete sense – is highly contested, as is the proliferation of the term decolonisation itself. Many scholars worry about a ‘buzz’ or ‘hype’ and the associated risks of ‘bandwagoning’, ‘tokenism’ and ‘whitewashing’. They fear that the current political trend could wind up perpetuating the same colonial hierarchies that the decolonising movement aims to resist and break down (Behari-Leak, 2019: 58; Moosavi, 2020: 332–333; Sondarjee and Andrews, 2022: 4; Tuck and Yang, 2012: 9).

We advance a three-part argument that places the need to decolonise emotions at the very core of peace and conflict issues and related studies.

First, prevailing concepts and practices of peace rely on, and are supported by, collective emotions that are inherently western and colonial in origin. Expressed in other words: emotions – and all forms of feeling – are central to the power dynamics that sustain colonial legacies and the practices of exclusion and injustice that ensue from them.

Second, to decolonise is to work towards transforming not only peace discourses and practices but also the embodied feelings that sustain them. It is to recognise that new opportunities for peace and peace-making will emerge from validating different emotions, emotional experiences and knowledge practices, including Indigenous and non-western ones.

Third, these affective realms – the western legacy of collective emotions and alternatives to them – do not exist in isolation or in a binary. Neither is one affective purview superior or inherently preferable to another. This is why we highlight potentials for peace-making that emerge from the ‘interfaces’ between these different emotional, cultural and political worldviews (Bourne, 2022; Nakata, 2008: 195–212; Ryder et al., 2020: 255–267).

We explore the issues at stake in both a conceptual manner and through two case studies: one focuses on the emotion of Han (한/恨) in Korean traditions of conflict resolution; the other considers an Indigenous way of mitigating and managing conflict that arises from collective mourning within and across kinship relational networks from a Maluilgal perspective of the Torres Strait in far northern Australia.

We are entering these debates on decolonisation with awareness of the contested and inherently political nature of who can speak about the issues at stake and how and in what context. As we understand it, decolonisation is a deeply unsettling and inevitably incomplete and ongoing process that requires reflection, commitment, and care. As a result, we proceed with caution, with feelings of humbleness and hope, and through a collaboration between four authors from different cultural backgrounds. Two of us are white western scholars who have for long worked on the politics of emotions, including searching to learn from and in cross-cultural contexts. One of us is an Indigenous scholar and mainland Torres Strait Islander, working across public policy and Indigenous governance and leadership. And one of us is Korean with a scholarly background in feminist theory and political science.

Before we start, a brief note on definitions. Some emotions literature makes stark distinctions between emotion, feelings, and affect, placing the former two in the realm of consciousness and cognition and the latter in the more subconscious, embodied realm. We follow these conventions, but do so only loosely and by emphasising the connections between the three phenomena and employing the respective concepts in line with broader everyday language (see Hutchison and Bleiker, 2014: 500–503). By this, we mean that while on can try define and separate emotion, feeling, and affect, they are inevitably intertwined (Åhäll, 2018: 40; Ahmed, 2014 [2004]: 210; Hutchison, 2019: 286). We employ the term decolonisation in an equally broad way. We use it in multiple ways, referring to political practices, to the production of knowledge and to efforts to engage the interaction between them (as suggested by Davis and Blackwell, 2023: 408; Maihāroa et al., 2022: 2).

Emotions in peace and conflict

Peace and conflict scholars have always had ambiguous and complex views on the political roles of emotions and their co-constituted relationship with the social and cultural worlds.

On one hand, peace research has predominantly emerged in the context of western philosophy and the associated historical separation between reason and emotion. The very nature of everyday language makes it difficult to escape this binary (see Ake, 1979; Thiong’o, 1994 [1986]). Consider common phrases in English, such as ‘don’t get emotional, be reasonable’; or ‘don’t let your emotions get the better of you’. Given this widespread everyday framing it is not surprising that emotions and feelings have come to be seen as overwhelmingly ‘negative’. Within peace studies the history is no different. Emotions have traditionally been seen as dangerous phenomena that exacerbate conflict and inhibit conciliatory practices. Scholars and practitioners consequently sought to eliminate emotions from post-conflict peace-making. Development studies scholar Sarah Wright (2012: 1113) describes how emotions have come to be seen as an ‘anathema’, embodying human vulnerability, spontaneity, and passion. As such, they have not been considered part of peace processes nor of the stable social order peace processes are meant to establish and sustain.

On the other hand, an increasing number of scholars have meanwhile started to acknowledge that emotions are central to understanding peace, conflict and international politics in general. More than a decade ago, Roger Petersen (2011: 10–14) depicted emotions as an inescapable ‘residue’ of conflict that must be confronted head on in post-conflict peacebuilding practices. Failing to do so, Petersen argued, leaves divided societies and international actors, such as peacekeepers, incapable of understanding and addressing both the drivers and legacies of violence and unrest. Many studies have since examined the relationship between conflict, emotions and peace. Some, for instance, explore how historical animosity and resentment can linger for generations and turn into violence when political elites manipulate these emotions, as was the case in the Balkans (e.g. Volkan, 2001). Countless other topics have been examined too: the emotions that underpin negotiations, from high-level peacekeeping to local conflict mediations; the links between protest, emotions, and social change; how emotions and power are intertwined and reinforce the preferencing of western frameworks and processes; and the more diffuse affective forces that frame anything from terrorist attacks and their responses to war crimes and reconciliation tribunals (see, for instance, Åhäll and Gregory, 2015; Beattie et al., 2019; Brigg, 2018; Clark, 2019, 2020; Fierke, 2012; Hak et al., 2022: 525–542; Jeffery, 2014; Lawther, 2017; Mihai, 2016; Rösch, 2021).

There is no way we can summarise this complex and meanwhile significant body of literature, except to point out that it emerged in parallel to and is intertwined with one of the most influential recent moments in peace studies: the shifts to the ‘local’ and the ‘everyday’. The respective literatures stress that drawing on local knowledges, customs and practices are fundamental for communities to productively work through antagonisms towards the cultivation of more peaceful social relations. These fields have emerged because of shortcomings with orthodox approaches. Often structured around liberal institutions, processes and traditionally western conceptions of individual rights and justice, orthodox models have frequently proven to be inadequate to address conflicts that are unique in terms of the local, historical and cultural dynamics at stake (for instance, Björkdahl and Höglund, 2013: 289–299; Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013: 763–783).

Work on emotion overlaps with the local and everyday turns because scholars now widely recognise that emotions are social, contingent and contextually bound. How we feel is inherently connected with our surroundings; with the cultural values we subconsciously embrace and the language we use to make sense of the world and communicate this sense to others (Abu-Lughod and Lutz, 1990: 10–13; Lutz, 1988: 6–11). There is no universal model that can help us understand how emotions and peace work. As Karin Fierke (2012: 93) puts it: ‘the meaning of emotions cannot be separated from a relational world and a past’. This is why the roles emotions play in the links between both conflict and peace must be understood in the unique, everyday contexts through which they have emerged and will also continue to evolve (see Beattie et al., 2019: 1–12).

Decolonising peace and conflict studies

We now further explore these links between emotions, conflict and everyday peace-processes by engaging one of the most important current debates: that of ‘decolonisation’. We do so because the connections or paths that can be woven between these understandings and approaches may, as recent work has likewise suggested (Sulley and Richey, 2023), offer a promising place to begin the inevitably ‘messy’ and necessarily ongoing processes of decolonising.

Calls for decolonising western approaches to peace studies and politics in general have become numerous and prominent in recent years. Almost every disciplinary journal has organised a special issue on the topic and more and more books and articles advance conceptual and empirical arguments for challenging and moving beyond the colonial legacies that persist in both the theory and practice of peace studies and international relations (see, among many others, Brigg and Graham, 2023; Capan, 2017; Davis and Blackwell, 2023: 405–421; D’Costa, 2021: 591–603: 407–422; Picq, 2013; Sabaratnam, 2017; Sen, 2023: 339–345; Shilliam, 2021; Seth, 2011: 167–183; Tickner and Blaney, 2012; Weber and Weber, 2020: 91–115).

Decolonial thinking starts with challenging the Eurocentrism of knowledge production and the related global legacies that colonialism has left across all aspects of social, cultural, and economic life (Mignolo, 2011; Quijano, 2007: 168–169, 171–174). Despite the end of formal colonialism and processes of territorial decolonisation, the legacy of colonialism lives on. Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (2007: 171–172) writes of the ‘coloniality of power’ or the ‘colonial matrix of power’. Here, it is helpful to distinguish between colonialism and coloniality. Colonialism is typically thought to be a social structure that exists in different historical and geographical locations, while coloniality can be perceived of as the system of power and hierarchy imposed by Europeans that has relegated all other knowledges and peoples. For Quijano and much of decolonial theory, this means that the Global South and the developing world are inherently enmeshed within a system of western modernity – a system that was established by imperialism and has shaped the modern world so much that none of us can escape it (in international relations, see, for example, Barkawi and Laffey, 2002: 109–114; Capan, 2017: 3–9).

Numerous scholars stress the far-reaching epistemological consequences of these colonial legacies. Walter Mignolo (2009) writes of the ‘coloniality of knowledge’ and refers to this phenomena as western modernity’s ‘darker side’. Eurocentric knowledge practices continue to serve as a standard bearer of legitimacy and conduct, shaping how nation-states in both the Global South and North operate and are judged. They also reproduce hierarchies of knowledge and structural exclusions that continuously shape academic practices and scholarly disciplines (Boer Cueva et al., 2023: 423–424, 430; Dzuverovic, 2018: 111–126). Europe and the West have become the central referent in conceptions of politics, ethics, history, and order. Everything happening outside of this epistemological norm is seen as derivative. Take one of many examples: Martin Nakata (2008: 7) outlines how contemporary lifeworlds and practices of Torres Strait Islander peoples have always been positioned ‘in relation to colonial institutions and knowledge’. These practices go back to early academic studies that measured Islanders in relation to their proximity to ‘civilised’ societies (Nakata, 2008: 195).

Decolonisation, then, is ‘a call to action’ (Capan, 2017: 9) that problematises the universal status of Eurocentric knowledges and practices. It opens up, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2013: 340–343) points out other ways of knowing (epistemology), being (ontology) and doing (axiology). Doing so provides space for those from culturally marginalised groups, including Indigenous peoples. In this sense, decolonisation is an ongoing and unsettling approach aimed at dismantling existing power structures to open up possibilities to think, feel, live and do things in new ways (Boer Cueva et al., 2023: 426; Davis and Blackwell, 2023; Picq, 2013: 444–455; Watson and Huntington, 2008: 257–281).

Peace and conflict studies is well-positioned to engage decolonisation and the inevitably incomplete and ongoing task of decolonising. Aspects of this academic discipline have for long critiqued Eurocentric approaches, working to resist ‘the underlying colonial matrix of power’ and to embrace knowledges and methodologies and ethical practices that are more comparable with those found in Indigenous cultures (Cruz, 2021: 275; see also Maihāroa et al., 2022: 7–9).

Decolonial reflexivity

Embarking on decolonial critique is to engage a challenging puzzle. How can we – as individuals and as collectives – really escape colonial legacies and the myriad of ways in which these legacies have left their mark on ourselves and the scholarly and policy environments in which scholars and practitioners seek to understand and address questions of peace and conflict? Are our thoughts, feelings and actions not always already framed by the existing modes of (western, colonial) knowledge? Is ‘complete’ decolonisation really possible? Given the entrenched nature of coloniality across the globe, the task of dismantling colonial structures is, at minimum, and as Leon Moosavi (2020: 341) puts it, ‘not a straightforward undertaking’ (see also Randazzo, 2021: 141–160; Zembylas, 2023: 303–309). There is a risk that decolonial approaches simplify non-western peoples and perspectives and in so doing ‘perpetuate coloniality rather than dismantle it’ (Moosavi, 2023: 139).

The concept of ‘decolonial reflexivity’ can be employed as an important aspect in scholarly endeavours that explore the possibility for thinking outside dominant western ways of thinking, knowing and doing. Moosavi (2023: 138–139) has called on all scholars to cultivate such reflexivity to ‘locate the inadequacies, limitations, and contradictions within our own efforts at academic decolonisation’ (see also Cruz, 2021). Doing so, Moosavi (2023: 139) stresses, is both a crucial, ongoing and a potentially painful experience, for it might lead to the recognition that ‘even those of us who identify as decolonial scholars may not only be the products and beneficiaries of coloniality, but we may also sustain it’. The very nature of an academic article – revolving around a linear defence of a central argument – is linked to scholarly conventions and institutional practices that are western in origin. The ensuing production of knowledge is forced into particular frameworks that do violence and injustice to other ways of knowing and communicating, including those related to story-telling or non-linear and non-verbal embodied expressions (see Martin and Mirraboopa, 2003: 205).

As scholars we struggle with these questions. Even as we work to complete this article, we remain torn, grappling repeatedly with questions of power and privilege, authority and voice.

The two of us who began this project – Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker – are white western scholars. Both of us have for decades problematised western knowledge practices and conventions, critiquing their ethnocentric and gendered nature and exploring possibilities for cross-cultural collaboration. At the same time, we are acutely aware of the privileged positions from where we live and work. No matter how hard we try to imagine how colonialism works – on minds and bodies – we know that we have never directly lived the discriminatory and subjugating realities of colonialism and experienced the violence it has imposed on its ‘subjects’. We are conscious of the problems involved in imposing our own biases. We know of the dangers of ‘extracting’ knowledge from Indigenous peoples (Tynan, 2021: 604–606). At several moments we felt close to abandoning this project, agonising that we are unable to escape the privileges we inherently possess (Boer Cueva et al., 2023: 424) . Even as we work to resist, we remain complicit. We feel stuck, recognising the power dynamics at stake and the need to dismantle western discourses and knowledges but then also questioning the privilege of our own capacity to speak. We feel hubristic and inadequate at the same time.

Despite our hesitation we decided to proceed, agreeing with Meera Sabaratnam (2011: 801) that ‘we should not shrink from recognising the limits of our own perspectives and the value of trying learn from others’. So we have persisted both because we felt taking risks is better than to stay silent and because we worked not in isolation but in collaboration – and dialogue – across cultural difference with our co-authors, Josephine Bourne and Young-ju Hoang.

As a First Nations person who struggles to embrace the label ‘academic’ I – Josephine – still seek the right label for my own peace of mind. This very act of even thinking about an alternative label is in itself a colonial practice. My whole life has been full of micro and macro internal and external conflicts that could be and sometimes are perceived by me and those in my kinship network as a threat to who I am as a First Nation’s person. The daily question for me is whether to participate or not participate in the very power structures and institutions that de-legitimise and de-value me and my community; First Nations Peoples should be recognised as autonomous sovereign beings with their own social and political order and knowledge practices. While I had concerns about my participation in this project being tokenistic and extractive, the thought was fleeting. What took precedence is the commitment to my relationship with the two lead authors and their commitment to our relationship as well. Through an approach of humbleness and vulnerability we have practised reciprocity and opened ourselves up to understanding each other’s story. Projects like this are the beginning of collaborating as Indigenous and western knowledge practitioners. My feeling is that we must be courageous at this point in western civilisation and help each other to un-do things that we now know to be destructive, immoral, unethical and unjust. We do so through shared understanding and collaborative meaning-making and by building on the First Nations scholars we engage in this article. If we can admit to ourselves that we have made mistakes because we were not aware of the entirety of what we were or are upholding then surely once we are conscious of our complicity we must create ways and means to work with each other to create something new.

Finally, being Korean and based in Korea, I – Young-ju – first struggled to figure out how I could best contribute to this project. The Korean situation seems so culturally specific that it felt almost impossible to convey my ideas in English and to outsiders. The notion of Han is embedded in how I speak and feel in a uniquely Korean way, so much so that I too feared that our Korean case study could be seen as a form of tokenism. Add to this that the Korean experiences with colonialism has been different, centring around our country’s occupation by Japan, which imitated western imperialism but is distinct. This colonial legacy has been deeply traumatic and also intersected with other forms of imperialism when great powers clashed over the geopolitical importance of the Korean peninsula. I feel that I found a way to make our collaboration possible by focusing on how Han has become a symbol to express traditional Korean emotions and oppose colonial mindsets, no matter their nature and provenance. This is precisely why I see potential in our cross-cultural resistance of ethnocentrism and in our commitment to make space for feeling and thinking differently. My hope, ultimately, is that the Korean case and our collaboration will help to send out small ripples that travel from the periphery to the centre.

The four of us have collaborated over years, listening to and learning from each other and from our different feelings and experiences in a way that, hopefully, has allowed us to move beyond our own positionality. By doing so we hope that we have managed to develop insights that are of broader relevance to the study of peace and conflict.

Decolonising affect: three implications for peace studies

Keeping the ethos of ‘decolonial reflexivity’ in mind we now move on to the roles that decolonising emotions can play in peace-making processes. We do so because, as flagged earlier, emotions and affect are powerful phenomena situated at the heart of both conflict and attempts to solve them.

Our argument comprises three interrelated aspects that are central to the relationship between decolonisation, emotions, and peace. These aspects can be seen as sequential and part of an ongoing struggle to reckon with and transform the emotionally-laden colonial legacies through which peace-making has been traditionally conceptualised and practised.

First is to recognise that prevailing conceptions and practices of peace rely on emotional structures and affective logics that are western and colonial in origin. There is meanwhile widespread recognition that the major peace architectures are Eurocentric in nature, ranging from realist foreign policy interventions to liberal peace-building and neo-liberal state building initiatives (see Richmond, 2022). Less recognised is that peace architectures revolve not only around vested cultural and political interests, but also around emotions that accompany and support ensuing regimes of colonial power. These loosely connected but powerful emotional practices are conceptualised in diverse ways, from ‘affective economies’ (Ahmed, 2004) to ‘emotional cultures’ (Hutchison, 2016: 297–301).

Decolonial scholars have already outlined compellingly how emotion and affect are central to the racial and gendered hierarchies of empire. Following Quijano (2007), many called this the ‘coloniality of affects’ (e.g. Zembylas, 2023: 306–309; see also Berg and Ramos-Zayas, 2015: 654–677; Gunew, 2009; Kim, 2016; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Palmer, 2017: 31–56; Sithole, 2022; Wynter, 2003). Dian Million (2009: 54) outlines how social discourses take on political gatekeeping function by circumscribing how ‘we feel our histories as well as think them’. Constituted socially, culturally and historically, emotions are engendered in part through the same western colonial frames and discourses that tell individuals and collectives how to think and behave. In this way, colonialism or coloniality is as much about ‘habits of feeling’ as it is ‘habits of mind’ (see, for example, Blickstein, 2019: 152–158; Khanna, 2020: 2–6; Palmer, 2017: 33–39). As such, emotion and more ephemeral embodied affects can reinforce colonial legacies because they are subsumed into the broader value systems that construct, legitimise and mask internalised power relations. As Anna Agathangelou (2019: 212) puts it: the imperial world order and its legacies are made possible by the simultaneous promotion and destruction of ‘particular ways of feeling, being, desiring, and knowing’.

Second, and by consequence: decolonising would require transforming not only the peace discourses and practices but also the emotional cultures that legitimise and sustain them.

An important task for peace and conflict studies, then, is to explore, understand and validate different knowledge practices and emotional experiences. In a first instance, this would need to entail diversifying debates on emotion and opening up a field that has so far been largely dominated by scholars who are western and/or based in western institutions. Key as well would be to learn from Indigenous and other non-western contexts and, in particular, from the role of emotions in the respective local cultural authority and governance structures. Starting from Indigenous emotions and epistemologies, some stress, opens up new possibilities, including those that emerge from learning how peace has been ‘lived, modelled and taught within indigenous communities’ (Maihāroa et al., 2022: 9).

Neetu Khanna (2020: 1–3) writes of undoing ‘the emotive lessons’ of coloniality and of the need to ‘feel new feelings’ (Khanna, 2020: 1–3). This process is far from straightforward. Some scholars question if affect can ever be completely decolonised (e.g. Zembylas, 2023: 304). Collective emotions – and more ephemeral affective cultures and relations – that surround us always already frame the boundaries of how and what we can feel and think.

But there are always possibilities for transformation. Emotions and emotional cultures are never static. They shift and change, providing opportunities to generate new ways for emotions, bodies and societies to interact. Drawing on these potentials for change, scholars have suggested tangible ways of decolonising emotion and affect. This includes engaging the inherently ambivalent nature of racialised emotions (Bonilla-Silva, 2019: 13–14; Kim, 2016: 441–448; Matias, 2016: 163–177); validating different experiences and their ‘affective dissonance’ to generate transnational cooperation (Johnson, 2020: 183); using discomfort to unsettle and re-negotiate Indigenous-Settler power imbalances (Boudreau Morris, 2017: 456–473); and transforming seemingly instinctive, automated and immobile sensory reflexes of the body (Khanna, 2020: 4).

Third is the recognition that emotional cultures do not exist in isolation – neither those linked to colonial legacies nor those that capture resistant ways of being and feeling. Following the work of Indigenous scholars we seek to overcome this dualism and explore the ‘interface’ between these realms (e.g. Bourne, 2022; Nakata, 2008: 195–212; Ryder et al., 2020: 255–267). In today’s globalising age different emotional legacies are inevitably intertwined. That is, forms of feeling neither exist in a vacuum nor are they homogeneous. They always overlap complement or complicate our realities. They sometimes clash but they can also come into a constructive conversation with each other.

It is difficult to know exactly what the process of decolonisation at this interface would look like. To determine this a priori would be to hark back to traditional western rationalist thinking and assume an exact decolonising process can be known before it takes place. It would be to ignore the profoundly unsettling nature of decolonisation and to forgo the very opportunity of being and feeling differently and of relating to others in changed ways. To re-imagine our emotional engenderment is to be awash with unease and discomfort. It is to be released of our existential moorings and set adrift emotionally.

An ethics of decolonial reflexivity is valuable here since it can avoid re-imposing deeply entrenched western dualisms, such as those between mind and body, emotions and reason, west and non-west, or individual and collective feelings. Reaching beyond these entrenched dualisms would entail something that is exceptionally difficult and impossible to pre-determine at the outset: to feel beyond and outside of how we have been conditioned to think and feel; to find and legitimise different ways of speaking and writing about emotion and their role in peace-making processes (see Blickstein, 2019: 152–165; Gunew, 2009; Million, 2009: 53–76; Pedwell, 2016: 27–49).

Exploring alternative understandings of emotions and peace through the Korean concept of Han (한/恨)

We now empirically illustrate how the Korean cultural tradition can offer a different lens to understand the links between emotions, conflict and peace. To do so, we focus on the concept of Han (한/恨), which refers to emotions that are usually considered unique to Korea. Our illustration is inevitably brief and thus unable to offer a comprehensive overview of the history and politics of Han or the even more complex ways in which different Korean traditions deal with conflict (for more details, see Bleiker and Hoang, 2011: 248–269; Yamamoto, 2022: 1–18).

Han is defined as a ‘deep sense of suffering accompanied with anger’, emerging from injustices inflicted on individuals or collectives (Park, 1999: 195, also 197, 201). All societies experience sorrow and anger and other intense emotional reactions to suffering triggered by unjust actions. But what makes Han and Korean traditions unique is how these emotional grievances are understood and addressed in the context of finding a path from conflict to peace. Han, in this sense, is more than just an expression of frustration and resentment. It is an emotional process that explicitly avoids retaliation and, instead, sets in place possibilities for enduring pain and sorrow and lamentation in a way that eventually leads to both emotional transformation and peaceful social change (You and Cheon, 2009: 162).

Three aspects distinguish Han from how western approaches tend to conceptualise conflict and peace.

First and most importantly: Han places emotions at the very centre of conflict and attempts to solve them. It is embedded in a complex conceptual framework supported by the Korean language itself, which harbours an unusually extensive vocabulary to express emotions and associated social relations (Lim, 2003: 147–161).

Placing emotions at the centre of conflict sits in contrast to a long western tradition that has elevated ‘rational’ ways of solving conflict to the extent that emotions are demonised. Han offers unique insights into a cultural practice of peace-making that focuses on emotions themselves, rather than merely the issues that are perceived to cause emotional grievances. The latter approach is epitomised in one of the most influential western approaches to mediation and conflict negotiation: Roger and William Ury’s Getting to Yes. Fisher and Ury (1999) recognise the need to deal with emotions, pointing out that ‘emotions typically become entangled with the objective merits of the problem’ (p. 11). Aiming to ‘separate the people from the problem’, Fisher and Ury (1999: 17–39) then assume that conflicting parties can emotionally detach from the traumatic experience they face and reach more objective and rational agreements. Possibilities for peace then emerge once emotions are removed and people focus on solving the ‘real’ problems that underlie emotional outbursts and ensuing conflict.

Conflict management traditions based on Han differ starkly from these western approaches. They assume that emotional wounds live on long after the initial conflict. They can take on a life of their own, generating new forms of conflict. No peace will be lasting unless these emotions are addressed head-on at the centre of peace processes. Or, as Park Jae Soon (1999: 216) puts it: ‘the knots of Han should also be untied in the outside world’.

The second key feature of Han is its emphasis on the emotional relationship between individuals and the society in which they are embedded. Rather than addressing individual grievances or mediating conflict between individuals, as western approaches tend to do, Han-inspired processes revolve around a collective responsibility to reintegrate grieving individuals into a harmonious yet deliberately changed social order (Choi, 1993: 17–18).

Third, processes that deal with Han outline a detailed step-by-step and culturally specific way to break cycles of violence. A core part of this is an attempt to prevent feelings of anger leading to revenge and violence. Although acknowledging anger, Cheon i-tu (1993: 4) believes that Han is about avoiding resentment towards those that caused harm. Some go as far as speaking of an ‘absence of vindictiveness’ and a compassion for those who have caused Han (see, for example, Park, 1999: 204). Others explicitly contrast the ensuing cultural attitude with western practices of revenge that often generate cycles of violence (e.g. Cheon i-tu, 1993: 5).

One of the most famous examples of Han is captured in a Korean folk tale: the story of Chunhyang. Set in the Choson Dynasty during 18th century, and retold countless times, it is the story of a couple – Chunhyang and Mongryong – who fall in love against social conventions and secretly marry (Jeon, 2003: 241). To summarise a long and complex story: a newly appointed magistrate – Byeon Hakdo – becomes attracted to Chunhyang and wants to make her his concubine. But Chunhyang refuses to give up her love and, as a result, is tortured, imprisoned and threatened with execution. She is eventually rescued, re-united with Mongryong and redeemed by the king and rewarded for her loyalty. The moral of the story – and its illumination of Han – is that conflict is not solved by revolution or by individuals breaking free, but through patience, compassion and forgiveness, which eventually leads to grieving individuals being reintegrated into a harmonious emotional and social order.

We can find numerous contemporary examples of Han. Consider one of most traumatic post-war events in post-war South Korea: the so-called Gwanju upraising. On 18 May 1980 citizens in the city of Gwanju protested against a recent military coup d’état that brought general Chun Doo-whan to power. The protest was violently suppressed, leading to the death of several hundred people and a reinforcement of authoritarian rule. For years this event led to suffering and sadness and resentment until, eventually, Gwanju became associated with resistance to authoritarianism and, today, is celebrated as a symbol of democracy. Part of this transformation involved – in the spirit of Han – an ongoing process of reconciliation and forgiveness that places responsibility on both individuals and collectives. Decades after the original massacre, the grandson of Chun Doo-whan offered a public apology, which was then accepted by victims and their families as part of a Han-letting process (Lee, 2023).

Korean engagements with emotion are neither superior to western models nor void of problems. Many aspects of Han could be critiqued as well, including how an emphasis on societal harmony can force individuals to accept their unjust fate, further entrenching systems of exclusion, such as those based on gender. Nor do we claim that Han is the only concept that explores the role of empathy, forgiveness and healing. Many western approaches do so too (Head, 2012: 33–55).

What our brief exposé shows is that the Korean tradition offers the possibility of listening to and learning from alternative ways of conceptualising the role of emotions in peace processes. These alternatives, including the concept of Han, exist not in some reified past realm. They inevitably intersect with the realities of contemporary Korean politics and the western values that have framed global interactions over the past decades (see Kang, 2022: 9; Shim 2017: 251–278). But the very nature of this interface – complex and everchanging as it is – demonstrates that the links between emotions and conflict are cultural and need to be addressed in their context. Universal conflict resolution and transition mechanisms inevitably miss the ensuing nuances and, in doing so, might further entrench, rather than address the grievances that drive conflict.

Emotions and conflict management in the Maluilgal Nation of the Torres Strait

We now present our second brief case study, which is derived from the lived experience of Josephine. She discusses how emotions are regulated to manage conflict in a Maluilgal way of being in the Torres Strait in northern Australia. Josephine focuses on a series of customs that are practised to mitigate against conflict from the intense emotions that emerge after a traumatic event, such as the death of a person. She examines, in particular, the interface between these customs and traditional western practices of managing conflict.

Because the case study draws on Josephine’s own personal experiences, this section is written in the first person. Torres Strait traditions stress the importance of introducing one’s self. Doing so positions the speaker in relation to their cultural location, which enables social and political connections and relations to be forged (see Martin and Mirraboopa, 2003: 203–204; Tuhiwai Smith, 2023 (1999): 15).

I am a Torres Strait Islander. I was born and grew up on the mainland of Australia, in a large regional centre in North Queensland. It is now ‘home’ to one of the largest Torres Strait Islander communities outside of our ancestral homelands. My grandparents moved there in the 1960s, once they were no longer restricted by a state act that controlled the movement of all Islanders. Before then, colonial legislation restricted all aspect of Indigenous lives.

Torres Strait culture is diverse and dynamic. We have five regions or nation-groups in the Torres Strait, two main languages and five dialects. The majority of Torres Strait Islanders live on the mainland of Australia with the largest portion residing in the State of Queensland.

The brief case study I present here focuses on the Maluilgal community and is based on my personal experiences and observations as well as on knowledge handed down to me by the elders that socialised me in the ways of being a Torres Strait Islander post-contact.

My interpretation is one of many. Our knowledge system makes room for multiple perspectives that exist simultaneously. They form shared understandings of diverse phenomena stored in stories, song, dance, and our relationship with the natural environment. This governs ‘the way’ and ‘the why’ we do everything. In the contemporary context this pluralistic approach inevitably entails daily navigating between the natural and the ‘un-natural’ environment, that latter includes negotiating and not negotiating between our governing principles and the imposed principles of colonial order. This means we are constantly negotiating and re-negotiating frames of being and ordering in an effort to keep the peace – in every sense: socially in terms of customs and rituals; politically in terms of questions of power and legitimate decision-making: and so of course affectively as well in terms of how we consequently feel.

Decolonising emotions, for us, means that we draw from our knowledges – culturally specific, multipole and dynamic as they are – to mitigate against social unrest and spiritual unrest. In a colonial setting this process is not always straightforward. We now live at the interface of our Indigenous cultures and the imposing order that arrived with settlers. Our existence is determined by our own traditional definitions of what it means to be human as well as by practices imposed by and grounded in western interests, values and ideology. This colonial regime continues to interfere with the ability of Indigenous peoples to be the autonomous beings they have been for thousands of years.

While colonial legislation disrupted and controlled our lives, it did not stop us from maintaining the principles that uphold our institutions and structures, including a Maluilgal worldview. Related activities often took place in covert ways and, in my experience, this covert approach remains the nature of how we continue to protect and maintain our knowledges and cultures today. Navigating this ongoing interface with colonial domination and control requires know-how from old knowledges and lived experiences.

I now focus on the culturally embedded role and practice of – Mariget, the direct translation of the word in the Maluilgal language of Kala Lagaw Ya is spirit-hand. Illustrating the guiding hand of the Mariget in maintaining the emotional, spiritual and social well-being is fundamental to peaceful relations.

Mariget is carried out by the in-laws of a deceased person. The aim is to re-establish a spiritual order – and by extension an emotional and social order – when a deceased person departs this world. There are primarily two stages to the practices that follow a person’s death: the burial (or cremation) and the unveiling of a tombstone. Both stages are grounded in acts of reciprocity. Sharp (1993: 15) notes that for Torres Strait Islanders ‘the essence of being human is the reciprocal being of the “me” and the “you”’. As a consequence, Sharp (1993: 150) stresses, to ‘lose the “me” is to be without anything to give in exchange: to cease to be human. That is social death’. Key here is a recognition of what makes people human and how circles of giving and receiving are expressions of the principle of reciprocity. Reciprocity regulates conflicts and maintains peace. Our belief is that the spirit needs to be guided when departing from the human vessel and then proceeds through a metamorphosis to ultimately join ancestors who have followed the same journey.

Mariget regulates the dangers associated with this social and spiritual process of mourning, which is carefully mediated by the in-laws of the person who died. There is a period after death when the spirit is unsettled and can be vengeful and dangerous (see Beckett, 1987: 180). Mariget are mindful of this. They support the family carrying out funeral arrangements and provide emotional and spiritual support. They mediate disagreements if they arise and accept gifts and offerings from others as contributions to supporting the mourners. The mourners are then able to focus on grieving, remembering, and honouring the deceased, with other families forming a supportive and respectful environment. Because this time is sacred, mindfulness of behaviour and expression of emotion is paramount to the metamorphosis that the deceased is going through: an experience of rebirth when the spirit joins the ancestors.

A year or more after the funeral the principal mourners decide when it is time to erect a tombstone on the grave. This marks the end of the mourning period and a time to celebrate the person’s life and be happy and jovial. It involves an unveiling ceremony where gifts are given to the Mariget. Families come together to eat in a traditional feasting and traditional dancing and overt expressions of happiness.

Our ceremony enables individuals to process their feelings and come to a sense of inner peace for the benefit of our kinship networks. As part of this we explicitly recognise that responses to a trauma, such as the death of a person, are inherently emotional. These responses can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’, causing expansion or contraction. This is why it is key that people must be able to feel what they feel. It is the denial of feelings and emotions that cause problems. Emotions are a natural characteristic of our existence and our humanity. But, at the same time, we also acknowledge that emotions need to be managed – not repressed or denied by other parties – but understood and accepted by others – which is why the role of Mariget is essential to the process of peace-keeping in Maluilgal society.

At the interface between different ways of feeling and knowing, being and doing

The implications of emotional conflict management practices associated with Mariget go far beyond what they initially appear to be: personal interactions limited to intra- and inter-family relations. Numerous scholars, including Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2014: 338) and Martin Nakata (2008: 2014) highlight that these and other Indigenous practices have much wider implications.

The lessons of Mariget and other Indigenous practices can be seen as broader methodologies that point to radically different ways of feeling, knowing, being and doing. The ensuing insights offer opportunities to rethink how communities engage one another, how politics is conducted, and so of course how conflict has been viewed and sought to be resolved (see also Maihāroa et al., 2022: 9).

Indigenous practices of managing conflict often face – and clash with – western traditions that are deeply entrenched in legal, political and social institutions. Nakata writes of a multi-dimensional cultural and emotional interface that is made up of constantly shifting, co-existing and contesting discourses, thought processes, and socio-political practices (Nakata, 2008: 10; 195–214). Consider how the arrival of colonialism has inevitably led to a tension between traditional Mariget conflict management processes and the western legal order that has been imposed, including Australian family and marriage law regulations. Western law primarily provides power to the spouse of the deceased. This legal system is unaware off and clashes with traditional kinship relations, which set-up social structures and norms that help to manage emotions and power relations that are associated with grief and work towards preventing or mediating conflict. Torres Strait families in the Strait and on the mainland today have no choice but to navigate this intersection – a non-customary ‘interface’– between traditional practices/worldviews and contemporary political, social and legal reality.

Negotiating this interface is a challenging process. There is an inevitable tension – laden with power and hierarchy – between different emotional cultures and traditions of mitigating conflict. This tension needs to be reflected on with care and in turn mindfully negotiated, since colonial values (and power) will inevitably frame the social, political and legal context in which traditional relationships operate. But awareness of this framing, and the alternatives that exist prior and in parallel, goes a long way to creating new opportunities – via the interfacing of relations and norms, cultures and emotions, practices and policies. In this respect, and for those who stay open-minded, it can be seen to generate, as Martin Nakata (2008: 220) puts it, ‘. . .endless instances of learning and forgetting, of melding and keeping separate, of discarding and taking up’ (see also Ryder et al., 2020: 255–267). This is therefore precisely where potentials and the hope of ‘un-doing’ colonial affects takes place. It is in these complex and ever changing interfaces, and in the refusal to recognise one position as ultimately superior, that new possibilities for feeling, seeing and practising peace emerge.

Conclusion: towards affective and decolonial peace-making

Over the past couple of decades scholars have increasingly placed emotions at the centre of understanding both histories of violence and political efforts to transform and overcome them. The ensuing body of literature has emerged in parallel with a focus on local and everyday peacebuilding, which offers alternatives to prevailing top-down approaches.

Our main objective has been to enter these debates through an engagement with decolonisation. We have sought to question and figure out, in at least a preliminary way, what would be entailed in decolonising emotion and affect in studies and practices of peace-making.

The key argument we have advanced is that decolonising emotions touches on the very core of peace and conflict. It does so in three ways:

First, colonialism and its legacy has been carried out and maintained not only though explicit force and power politics, but also though the ‘emotional cultures’ (Hutchison, 2016: 297) that legitimise and normalise colonial power relations. Affective decolonisation involves recognising the deep-seated ensuing implications for the study of peace and conflict, including how emotional mindsets and embodied affects condition what individuals and collectives can and cannot feel, think, be and do.

Second, new opportunities for peace and peace-making can emerge from validating different emotional experiences and knowledge practices. We have explored one such alternative through the Korean concept of Han (한/恨), which deals with legacies of pain and sorrow that can emerge after conflict. Han lays out a path that prevents these emotions from turning into retaliation by acknowledging and transforming them in a way that eventually re-establishes a social order. Some of these traits can also be found in many Indigenous approaches, including Navajo and Native Hawaiian Ho’oponopono ones, which are community-oriented and tend to address conflicts ‘in ways that heal relationships and restore harmony to the group’ (Walker, 2004: 528, 534–545).

Third, we highlighted how traditional western-centric and wider approaches do not exist in isolation. To illuminate the complex interfaces we examined how Indigenous communities in the Maluilgal Nation of the Torres Strait deal with emotional conflicts after death. In an age of globalisation, these unique Maluilgal practices inevitably clash with prevailing western and Eurocentric practices and the powerful legal and political institutions in which they are embedded.

It is at this emotional, cultural and political interface that decolonisation takes place. It is a complex, lengthy process where obstacles and opportunities will intersect. There are no easy solutions to overcoming the ongoing legacies of colonialism and the practices of exclusion that they have perpetuated. Sceptics might question whether genuine and complete decolonisation of emotion and bodily affect is even possible. Nor is there a universal counter-narrative that can somehow step-out of power relations and offer an alternative and uncontested path forward towards a more inclusive, peaceful and just world.

For us it is precisely this messiness and uncertainty that has the potential to disrupt power relations and open up different ways of feeling, thinking and doing peace work. Embracing uncertainty and contingency frees peace processes from static, universalised assumptions about what peace is and how it can be achieved. Such affective decolonisation inevitably involves an emotional ‘undoing’. Feeling differently is unsettling. It involves challenging who we are and how we sense, experience, and evaluate our surroundings and also – most challenging of all – ourselves. However, this very process of emotional undoing – uncomfortable as it is – contains potentials to re-imagine and re-constitute peace. Decolonising emotion, in this way, unhinges understandings of peace from colonial legacies and opens-up spaces through which divided or unreconciled communities can work towards more inclusive and sustainable social and political relations.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Emma Hutchison would like to acknowledge funding from an ARC DECRA Fellowship (DE180100029) and a University of Queensland Foundation Research Excellence Award. Roland Bleiker’s research was supported by an ARC Linkage Grant (LP200200046) and by the Core University Program for Korean Studies of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2021-OLU-2250002).

ORCID iDs

Emma Hutchison

Roland Bleiker

Young-ju Hoang

Notes

Author biographies

Emma Hutchison is an Associate Professor of International Relations and Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the University of Queensland. Her work focuses on emotions and trauma in world politics, particularly in relation to security, humanitarianism and international aid. Her book, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions After Trauma (Cambridge University Press, 2016) was awarded the British International Studies Association Susan Strange Book Prize, the ISA Theory Section Best Book Prize, and the Australian Political Studies Association Crisp Prize.

Roland Bleiker is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, where he directs a Visual Politics Research Program. He explores the politics of aesthetics and emotions, which he examines across a range of issues, from humanitarianism and peacebuilding and the conflict in Korea. His books include Visual Global Politics (Routledge, 2018), Aesthetics and World Politics (Palgrave, 2009/2012) and Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (University of Minnesota Press, 2005/8).

Josephine Bourne is a First Nations scholar and policy advisor. She is a Torres Strait Islander from far North-Eastern Australia and currently an adjunct academic in Political Science at the University of Queensland. Her research focuses on Indigenous Nation Building and examines multi-sector responses to complex problems at the Indigenous-State political interface. She is co-author of Australian Politics in the Twenty-First Century: Old Institutions New Challenges (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Young-ju Hoang is Professor of International Relations at Busan University of Foreign Studies, South Korea. He has published numerous articles in Korean and English on feminist theory, security, state-identity and reconciliation including, in Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journa, an essay with Noël O’Sullivan on ‘Gendered militarisation as state of exception on the Korean Peninsula.’ He has translated a range of books from English into Korean including J. Ann Tickner’s Gender in International Relations and Roland Bleiker’s Divided Korea.

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Decolonising affect: Emotions and the politics of peace

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Emotions in peace and conflict

Decolonising peace and conflict studies

Decolonial reflexivity

Decolonising affect: three implications for peace studies

Exploring alternative understandings of emotions and peace through the Korean concept of Han (한/恨)

Emotions and conflict management in the Maluilgal Nation of the Torres Strait

At the interface between different ways of feeling and knowing, being and doing

Conclusion: towards affective and decolonial peace-making

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iDs

Notes

Author biographies

References