Co-producing Visual Representations of Dreams as a Gate to Pluriversal Peace Research

Increasingly scholarship within peace and conflict studies acknowledges the limitations of peace interventions due to their elite and western-centric logics (e.g. Autesserre, 2014). Despite a call for closer attention to local contexts, such scholarship still tends to marginalize what is perceived as “feminine” or “native” ways of knowing that take emotional, bodily and spiritual dimensions seriously (Hudson 2016, Cabnal 2019, Andrä et al 2020); as well as continue to reproduce colonial tropes (Sabaratnam, 2013). By engaging with dreams, my paper follows decolonial feminist calls to re-asses what we know, how we know it, and what we take seriously in our own research encounters in peace and conflict research (Tamale 2020, Lugones 2010, Anzaldua 1987). Building on arts-based and decolonial feminist methodologies (e.g. Nakashima 2018, Smith 2013), the paper will discuss paintings, collages and photographs capturing dreams co-produced with Congolese displaced and residents, refugees and expatriates humanitarian/aid workers based in South Kivu, DRC. Seeking an entry point to confront peace interventions to the extensively known but neglected visual, spiritual and bodily experiences and the pluriversal cosmovisions they constitute, the dreamlife appears as an ideal and innovative material. Indeed, a consideration of the non-linear and sensorial texture of dreams (e.g. Mittermaier 2010, 2012) and of their multiples social functions in the awake lives (e.g. premonitory, communication with the dead, curses by third party, spiritual revelation, etc) has the capacity to explore the articulation of pluriversalism, peace and violence. Overall, the paper seeks to interrogate and nuance Western articulations of knowledge about violence and peace interventions; this through a reflection of what it means to undertake pluriversal field research.