Thinking with Many Souths: Worldmaking against and without ecological and epistemic violence

Second seminar in the Peace and Planet methodology seminar series. 

What discourses of nonviolence are privileged in and by the Global North and Global South? Is it possible for scholars working in the Global North to engage with epistemologies of the South beyond appropriation and extractivism?

This seminar focuses on the global distribution of power and violence, and in particular, on uneven and differential forms of violence operating between the Global North and Global South, or the ‘West and the rest’. We will examine the slow violence of poverty, ecological damage and the long durée of war, as well as the writing of feminist, anti-racist peace activists on pollution and climate, and some of the cultural and religious exclusions that underpin ‘peace studies’, asking how our research is impacted by, or counteracts, these various forms of violence.

Format: Opening presentations by three invited speakers—Nina Möntmann (DE), Pierluigi Musaró (IT), Nikos Papastergiadis (AU), alongside IKK researchers, Sabine Dahl Nielsen and Anne Ring Petersen. The session will be introduced by Marsha Meskimmon. Roundtable discussion among all participants follows the presentations.

Preparatory reading

Yolande Bouka, ’Make Foreign Policies as if Black and Brown Lives Mattered’ in Megan MacKenzie and Nicole Wegner, eds, Feminist Solutions for Ending War, London: Pluto Press, 2021, pp. 121-37.

Winona LaDuke, ‘Selected Essays, 1981-2000’, in Selina Gallo-Cruz, ed. Feminism, Violence and Nonviolence: An Anthology Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024, pp. 241-51.

Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019 [‘Introduction: Worldmaking after Empire’, pp.1-14].

Pierluigi Musarò and Elena Giacomelli, ‘Conclusions. It’s the End of the World as We Know It: Cosmovisional Justice and Decolonial Narratives’, in Musarò and Giacomelli, eds., Climate Mobility Justice: Narratives and Visual Politics of the Panicocene, Palgrave, forthcoming (circulated).

Nikos Papastergiadis, Sneja Gunew, Paula Muraca, Fazal Rizvi, ‘The multiple origins and open futures for global multiculturalism’, in Sneja Gunew, Nikos Papastergiadis, Fazal Rizvi, and Paula Muraca, eds, The Elgar Companion to the Arts and Global Multiculturalism, Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2025, pp.2-12.

Anne Ring Petersen, ‘The art of prefiguration: building a future collectivity at documenta fifteen’ in Sneja Gunew, Nikos Papastergiadis, Fazal Rizvi, and Paula Muraca, eds, The Elgar Companion to the Arts and Global Multiculturalism, Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2025, pp.98-112.

Suggested further reading

Patricia Allmer, ‘Bady Minck’s tourist imaginaries’, in The Traumatic Surreal: Germanophone Women Artists and Surrealism after the Second World War, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022, pp.163-195.

Alycee J. Lane, #nonviolencenow! Living the 1963 Birmingham Campaign’s Promise of Peace, (2015), second edition, Brooklyn, NY: Lantern Publishing, 2020.

Nina Möntmann, Decentring the Museum: Contemporary Art Institutions and Colonial Legacies, Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2023 [ch.2, pp.30-40]

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011 [ch.4, pp.128-49].

Tom Woerner-Powell, Andrew Fiala, ‘Introduction: Falling Between Two Schools. Interdisciplinary Reflections on Eurocentrism and the Neglect of Islamic Nonviolence’, Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence, 2, 2024, pp.153-68.