Praxis of Emerging Liberations: a Transdisciplinary Knowledge-Making of How to Liberate Within-Against-and-Beyond Systems of Violence

Abstract

This article advocates a system-critical approach to pacifism and nonviolence studies, one that affirms a liberation-oriented praxis that mobilizes revolutionary pacifism and nonviolence. Liberation from violence needs to be a multi-dimensional, multi-scalar and continuous process, at least based on three interconnected dimensions: (1) transdisciplinary knowledge-making through cooperation between different traditions of liberation, facilitating (2) creative combinations of self-transformation, constructive programs and resistance, and mobilizing through (3) translocal and intersectional network collaborations between communities. Such a Praxis of Emerging Liberations would be relevant for those most targeted by systemic violence and for ongoing struggles for a just peace and against a multitude of increasing threats including militarized nationalism, the proliferation of racism and whiteness, the acute climate crisis and ecocide, the imperialism of capital, neocolonialism, and weaponized heteropatriachy. This recommendation involves returning to the Gandhian roots of nonviolence, rejecting much of the mainstreaming of the academic field in recent decades.