Essays

Author: Emma Potchapornkul

Thailand’s southern border provinces have been the site of a little-known ethno-political conflict rooted in a centuries old contestation between the historical Siamese Kingdom and the Sultanate of Patani. Since the conflict’s re-emergence in 2004, more than 21,000 incidents have taken place with some 7,200 people killed and 13,500 injured (Deep South Watch, 2021). Efforts to reach a peaceful settlement of the conflict have, so far, failed. This essay draws on the concept of counter-peace to explain why these efforts have yet to yield any positive outcomes. It starts with a discussion of the counter-peace concept before providing an overview of the conflict. It then details the main blockages in the region’s peace process moving through the international, national, and grassroots levels. This essay draws predominantly on existing literature on the southern conflict and on Thailand’s socio-political development from the 20th Century onwards to inform its analysis. This is supplemented with data drawn from government policy documents and civil society reports.

Author: Laura Valentina Ojeda (Bogotá, Colombia)

Gender has become a hot topic and a resourceful analytical tool when approaching peace and conflict studies during the past few decades (Gizelis, 2018). Within the Peacebuilding practices in divided societies summer course from the Peace Academy, there was even a complete module dedicated to the presentation and discussion of this topic. Yet, this module followed a very common and mainstream conception of the term “gender”, where the concept has been reduced or equalized to women, within a binary perspective of gender. This approach may have a lot of sense, since gender studies have been deeply related to women studies, given the unfavorable position when it comes to relational power within the sex-gender system for the feminine gender roles. Yet, understanding gender just as two faces of one coin (that is, female and male) is deeply violent. This essay aims to expose how reducing gender studies to women studies turns out marginalizing and excluding historically invisibilized populations and the potential of queerness within peace studies to address this topic.  The purpose of this essay is, therefore, to expose how a non-binary vision of gender can, from a queer perspective, feed the gender discussion and promote debates within peacebuilding theory and practice.

Author: Catalina Amador (Bogota, Colombia)

The Colombian conflict has been a 52-year conflict between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC and the government (Human Rights Watch, 2020).  It is a complex conflict with diverse actors: criminal and paramilitary groups, civilians, the state, that are tangled in a web of historical claims of rights and equality, illegal economies, and a fragmented democracy since independence. For the length and complexity of the conflict one way it can be understood is as a Protracted Conflict: "hostile interactions which extend over long periods with sporadic outbreaks of open warfare fluctuating in frequency and intensity", involving the whole society and defining the scope of national identity and social solidarity (Azar, Jureidini and McLaurin, 1978, p. 50), and as Policinski and Kuzmanovic (2019, p. 965), point out, it has progressively become normalized, with scenarios as growing-up with the sounds of explosions, displaced families and neighbors and difficulties to fulfill basic needs like water or food.