Über den affirmative turn in der Friedensforschung und Friedenspraxis im Anthropozän (On the Affirmative Turn in Peace Research and Peace Practice in the Anthropocene)

Abstract

The current climate crisis and the extreme weather phenomena associated with it have a massive impact on everyday human life and thus also on armed conflict and peace. The recognition of the human origin of these biospheric instabilities introduces the geological age of the Anthropocene. While this is based on the recognition of the human capacity to irreversibly alter the physicality of the earth, it does not celebrate the sovereignty of humanity, but rather implies the dissolution of its agency within the complex web between the human and non-human worlds. The Anthropocene and peace are obviously linked. This essay describes the Anthropocene not only as a useful concept for the subject of peace, but also as its sine qua non, calling for an affirmative turn in the practical and scholarly engagement with peace - a productive engagement with the complexities of violence, the contradictions of everyday horror in armed conflict, and the limits of human possibilities. The ontological implications of the Anthropocene highlight the essential contribution of non-human agency and non-human complexity to armed conflict and peace through extreme weather phenomena, while its epistemological innovations demonstrate the indispensability of the dissolution of the modernist transcendental ego for thinking about and practising peace. Following this, an affirmative turn in peace-guided thinking and action in the Anthropocene imposes itself, calling for a shift in focus away from idea-driven (critical) thinking and action in the world towards engaging with and doing something in common with the world.

Keywords: climate crisis, climate change, nature, peacebuilding, decolonial, subalterns