This chapter brings into conversation aesthetic approaches to International Relations and feminist decolonial scholarship in peace and conflict studies. It develops a reflection on art as an epistemological perspective that disrupts self-referential apocalyptic narratives derived from the very same Western rationalities of redemption, linearity and progress at the core of established peacebuilding practices. Foregrounding art from/about communities touched by war who have been at the sharp end of these logics, we are able to sense a continuum of violence that reverberates across different pasts, presents and futures. Simultaneously, we can harness stories of full humanity, survival and care that persist in the end of times. The chapter discusses cultural artifacts from/about Bosnia and Herzegovina, a context that has problematically served as an object of study and “testing ground” for international peace solutions and their failure. Rather than reproducing this framing, it highlights its epistemic centrality in honoring multiple lived realities that disrupt imaginaries of the apocalypse as a universal event possibly located in the future. Cultivating aesthetic knowledge, we can sense commonalities among communities placed at the margins of the international who continue living amidst the ruins of the liberal (dis)order.

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The End of Whose World? Redemption, Failure and the Power of Aesthetic Knowledge

  • Maria-Adriana Deiana

摘要

This chapter brings into conversation aesthetic approaches to International Relations and feminist decolonial scholarship in peace and conflict studies. It develops a reflection on art as an epistemological perspective that disrupts self-referential apocalyptic narratives derived from the very same Western rationalities of redemption, linearity and progress at the core of established peacebuilding practices. Foregrounding art from/about communities touched by war who have been at the sharp end of these logics, we are able to sense a continuum of violence that reverberates across different pasts, presents and futures. Simultaneously, we can harness stories of full humanity, survival and care that persist in the end of times. The chapter discusses cultural artifacts from/about Bosnia and Herzegovina, a context that has problematically served as an object of study and “testing ground” for international peace solutions and their failure. Rather than reproducing this framing, it highlights its epistemic centrality in honoring multiple lived realities that disrupt imaginaries of the apocalypse as a universal event possibly located in the future. Cultivating aesthetic knowledge, we can sense commonalities among communities placed at the margins of the international who continue living amidst the ruins of the liberal (dis)order.