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Aamir Jamal is an associate professor in the Faculty of Social Workatthe University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Omer Jamal is a research assistant at the University of Groningen, 'Netherlands. Khwaja Naveed is a postdoctoral fellow at UAE University, United Arab Emirates. Email address: aamirjamal@ucalgary.ca, omer.jamal@gmail.com, & khwajanaveed@uaeu.ac.ae
Introduction
Indigenous institutions and social processes have long been viewed as focal spaces for peacebuilding, conflict resolution, transformative learning, and social change among many cultures and communities across the world. However, due to a multitude of issues relating to colonization, the enforcement of neocolonial and neoliberal models of governance, and armed conflicts, the role and essence of indigenous institutions, structures, and processes have been underappreciated, underutilized, and largely relegated to merely symbolic structures. Most disciplines within international development and social sciences that focus on peace and conflict studies have cultivated a bureaucratic interpretation of peacebuilding, closely aligned with liberal and subsequently neoliberal approaches to statebuild-ing. This evolution has contributed to a robust international peacebuilding architecture. However, its integration with local and indigenous contexts has been comparatively underwhelming. Critics contend that liberal peace models have overly emphasized elite power dynamics and colonial legacies, relying on problem-solving methodologies and positivist epistemologies. Such models have been inadequate in addressing the complexities, agency, and hybridity inherent in human societies, including local and tribal institutions (Groom, 1991; Richmond, 2018) Furthermore, they often overlook how inequality can foster conflict. To enhance peacebuilding, there is a pressing need to prioritize cultural relevance and adopt decolonial strategies, moving beyond the constraints of neoliberal epistemological frameworks.
The twentieth century witnessed the development of an international framework of peace, centered around liberal interpretations of law, institutions, norms, economic systems, and intervention practices. Since the Cold War, Western/Eurocentric models of conflict-resolution and governance have been heavily applied as a universal approach, with the most prominent being the liberal peace model (also known as liberal peacebuilding) in the Global South. Mainly utilized in the post-Cold War period, and built upon the Western Enlightenment framework, liberal peacebuilding holds universal values as its ethos, arguing that one can view the world through a "universal and ahistorical matrix" (Tanabe, 2017, p. 449). Essentially, the liberal peace model ignores local actors, historical contexts, cultural processes, and indigenous institutions, opting instead for state-led processes...