Peace scholarship and the local turn: Hierarchies in the production of knowledge about peace

Abstract

The ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding has focused attention on the importance of cultural resources available for peacemaking in ‘local’ conflict-affected contexts, and particularly in non-Western countries. Growing attention is now also paid to establishing whether the academic field of peace studies itself is inclusive of non-Western voices and perspectives. This article presents a new dataset of 4,318 journal articles on peace indexed in Web of Science between 2015 and 2018 to discover asymmetric patterns of publication and scholarly gatekeeping between higher-income and lower-income countries. Analysis of the data collected suggests that 15 years after the ‘local turn,’ higher-income countries continue to dominate the field across the domains of publishing institutions; scholarship about non-high-income countries; the conduct and focus of research collaborations; claims to theorization; and the discourse of the field. However, positive change is being driven by a proliferation of scholarship in upper-middle-income countries, characterized by intranational collaborations between scholars writing about their own countries in their own national journals.

Keywords

bibliometrics coloniality gatekeeping knowledge production local turn peace studies web of science

Introduction

Peace studies over the last decade has featured a ‘local turn.’ This promoted concern for empowering local communities to resolve conflicts, rejecting West-centric dissemination of ‘liberal peace’ (Mac Ginty & Richmond, 2013; Hughes et al., 2015; Paffenholz, 2015). While scholars are increasingly interested in how the local turn influences discussions of peacebuilding practice, they have paid less attention to localizing processes of knowledge production about peace, such that ‘local knowledge’ informs global scholarly conversations.

This inattention could plausibly stem from the discipline’s urgent practical concern to address active conflicts. Nevertheless, the local turn’s criticism of liberal peacebuilding interventions as top-down and insensitive to context could equally apply to practices of peace scholarship. In this article, our objective is to provide an analysis of scholarship dynamics in the field of peace studies from a local turn perspective.

We created a dataset of 4,318 articles on peace indexed by Web of Science, published between 2015 and 2018. Additionally, we collected data from 2005 as a baseline, and from 2010, 2012, and 2014 to provide time-series data. We identified the country of each author’s institution and used the World Bank’s four income classifications to categorize these as either high-income, upper-middle-income, lower-middle-income, or low-income. We also collected journal information and other citation data. We analyzed the data using descriptive statistics, bibliometric tools, and text analysis of titles and abstracts.

Drawing on this analysis, we argue that knowledge production in the discipline of peace studies is dominated by institutions in high-income countries. This dominance emerges across five domains: (1) the institutional domain of publishing, (2) scholarly production about specific countries and conflicts, including non-high-income countries, (3) the focus of research collaborations, (4) claims to theorization, and (5) the discourse of the field. These findings suggest that, despite the diversifying premise of the local turn, non-Western scholars are still left out of the conversation. These findings are unsurprising and in line with wider literatures on epistemic injustice and the coloniality of knowledge production. However, in drawing attention to the stark gaps between contributions from scholars in high-income and lower-income countries, we hope to empower a call for a shift in academic practices.

Theoretical foundations of the local turn

The local turn in peacebuilding refers to a concern to facilitate the empowered participation of local actors in peace processes that affect them, promoted on the basis that this will offer more effective, culturally appropriate strategies for promoting peace in particular places. In the early 2000s, the local turn stemmed from post-Cold-War critiques of peacebuilding practices, aimed particularly at complex peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions of the 1990s (Fetherston, 2000; Duffield, 2001; Richmond, 2005; Chandler, 2006; Pouligny, 2006). A central concern was to critique a hegemonic ‘liberal peace,’ promoted by Western powers, which focused on building institutions associated with Western-style democracy and market economies in post-conflict states as antidotes to political violence (Richmond, 2005; Pugh, Cooper & Turner, 2008; Newman, Paris & Richmond, 2009).

Local turn proponents put forward two key criticisms of the liberal peace. First, they saw it as culturally specific to North American and European contexts (Campbell, Chandler & Sabaratnam, 2011; Richmond, 2011). Second, they claimed that liberal peace policy rhetoric demonized local actors as ‘spoilers’ (Stedman, 1997) and ‘entrepreneurs of violence’ (Collier et al., 2003), contrasted with the image of a benevolent, rational and technically expert global peacemaker (Autesserre, 2009). Critics of liberal peace called for peacebuilding strategies to embrace local agency in more substantive ways that recognized the peacemaking potential of local contexts. The local turn proposes that the sustainability of peace lies in the meaningful inclusion of more diverse voices informed by an intimate knowledge of their own context, rather than from the deployment of ‘expert’ perspectives (Lederach, 1998; Donais, 2009; Lee & Özerdem, 2015; Mac Ginty & Firchow, 2016). Locals are long-term stakeholders of peace, not passive recipients; therefore, peace must be produced and reproduced by them as a matter of pragmatic necessity (Rupesinghe, 1995: 81; Fetherston, 2000).

Local turn theorists drew on an intellectual heritage associated with critical, post-colonial and decolonial theory to suggest that the policy positions and interventionary tactics associated with ‘the liberal peace’ are not only ineffective, but potentially oppressive. In this reading, the liberal peace represented an opportunity for Western policy makers and multilateral institutions to reassert hierarchical relations of power over populations regarded as ‘unruly,’ and in so doing, empower a ‘global polity’ based upon Western, liberal modes of governance (Jabri, 2013: 7). Thus, the liberal peace represented a key building block in a newly oppressive world order built upon subjugation and exclusion (Duffield, 2001; Chandler, 2006). Emancipatory alternatives, at the very least, require respect for local agency in creating a ‘hybrid’ peace (Mac Ginty, 2010).

The notion of a ‘hybrid’ peace (Mac Ginty, 2010; Mac Ginty & Sanghera, 2012) points to a ‘melding’ of global and local ideas and practices at different levels to create new peace formations (Millar, 2014). Critical scholars regard hybrid peace as something that is not ‘plannable,’ since it emerges from contingent and potentially ‘disruptive’ processes of global–local friction (Tsing, 2005; Millar, van der Lijn & Verkoren, 2013). Here, global–local interaction appears as a process whose outcomes need to be discovered ethnographically with reference to human experience in specific contexts, rather than defined or projected at the outset (Millar, 2018a). The Ethnographic Peace Research (Millar, 2018b) and Everyday Peace Indicators (Firchow, 2018) projects, which focus on eliciting community-level reflections on the nature of peace and peacebuilding, have emerged from this agenda.

For some critics, the local turn does not go far enough – they argue that even in the process of decrying the oppressive practices of the liberal peace, a degree of Eurocentrism persists (Sabaratnam, 2013). Local turn scholars, they argue, portray interventionary projects as formed in a self-contained Western policy sphere, unaffected by the non-Western world. This ignores or downplays the agency of non-Western subjects who are the targets of intervention. Where it is considered at all, non-Western peacebuilding is viewed as emanating from idealized traditions (Sabaratnam, 2013) that are both romanticized (van Leeuwen et al., 2020) and ‘sanitised’ (Hudson, 2016: 196), rather than treated as properly political processes.

Nevertheless, the local turn has important implications for the ways in which the discipline of peace studies itself is embedded in broader power hierarchies and larger epistemological differences (whether between the West and ‘the Rest,’ or the Global North and Global South). More radical variants of the local turn propose peacebuilding practices which challenge hierarchies of power, but doing so requires also considering how, as scholars, our understanding of peace is produced and validated. It requires not only challenging practices of intervention, but also critical examination of how ideas about peace – what it is and how to achieve it – are produced, disseminated and imposed. This requires critically re-evaluating not only the global apparata of peacebuilding and statebuilding interventions, but also the institutions of global academia and the way that these structure the production of knowledge about peace. On one level, the local turn is indeed about what works locally; on another level it is about whether peace requires the empowerment of subaltern voices in contributing to a conversation about an understanding of peace that can meaningfully be regarded as global and ‘pluriversal’ – incorporating many voices and ways of knowing (Escobar, 2018).

The implications of the local turn are thus diverse. In limited form, it can imply a purely instrumental mobilization of local actors, called upon to present relevant local traditions and institutions that can promote the resilience of communities. More radically, however, the local turn implies efforts to discursively and practically dislodge ‘global’ policies, practices and systems of knowledge production that operate to sustain hierarchical relations of power rooted in colonialism.

The local turn and the politics of knowledge production

Since the 1960s, scholars have pointed to the classed, gendered, and racialized hierarchies embedded in conceptions of ‘scholarship’ and ‘expertise’ that are foundational to the functioning of academia (Connell, 2007). ‘Expert’ status requires not merely specialist knowledge but also specific types of ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu, 1983), historically associated with white, middle-aged men of a particular class. The politics of colonialism propagated the view that Western ‘knowledge’ was the key to modernity, rendering non-Western ways of knowing irrational, superstitious, and particular (Connell, 2007; Smith, 2012). This dynamic produced a number of binary bifurcations – between modern and traditional forms of knowledge within Western societies and between colonizers and colonized in the context of colonialism. Here, for methodological reasons explained later in this article, we focus on the emergence of a geographical and economic North–South divide in this regard.

Despite efforts by scholars in the field to be more inclusive, a North–South divide created by systems of colonial domination persists in hierarchies of academic knowledge production. Scholars in the Global North remain central to knowledge production, taking a position of producer of rational and credible knowledge, while the Global South largely continues to be a subject of research. Such practices were embedded in the institutional underpinnings of the academy in the colonial era and reinforced by the militarization of research during the Cold War (Asad, 1973; Engerman, 2010). Even the concepts of ‘global’ and ‘local’ are implicated – since colonial times, Northern knowledge has been regarded as objective and therefore ‘generalizable’ while knowledge from Southern communities is seen as relevant only to a particular time and place. In the post-Cold War era, logics of global governance, globalization and neoliberalization in knowledge production have altered but not fundamentally dislodged the terms of this engagement. Access to publication for Southern scholars is still often dependent upon relationships with Northern collaborators, journals, funders, and the requirements they impose (Ndofirepi & Cross, 2014; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2017; Collyer et al., 2018). Southern scholars are often educated in Northern institutions and attend conferences in the Global North, thus ensuring that ‘the intellectual frameworks developed in the metropole become embedded in the intellectual work of the periphery – not by the exercise of direct control, but by the way the whole economy of knowledge is organized’ (Collyer et al., 2018: 10–11).

Contesting these practices requires including Southern scholars in the global conversation. Our hypothesis is that:

Hypothesis: Given that conflict occurs across the world, the local turn should promote this by prompting greater inclusion in academic discussion by Southern scholars studying their own neighborhoods.

The relative exclusion of Southern scholars from knowledge production offers us one limited, but nevertheless telling, approach for examining continued hierarchies of knowledge. A local turn necessitates greater inclusion of scholars from a wider variety of geographical locations. Therefore, measuring the inclusion of Southern scholars in Web of Science offers a limited but interesting proxy for measuring the local turn, and its implications for global patterns of dominance in knowledge production.

How, then, should peace studies realize the radical ambitions of the local turn and how far has it done so? Little work has been done to evaluate the local turn within the realm of peace studies scholarship. This article represents a first, necessarily limited attempt to survey the state of the field. We contend that this is essential to inform an urgently necessary conversation about the structures of hierarchy and privilege that we wittingly or unwittingly reproduce through our everyday scholarly habits and practices. Other scholars have used citation data to examine patterns of geographical and gender bias in a variety of disciplines (Maliniak, Powers & Walter, 2013; Mertkan et al., 2017; Collyer et al., 2018; Wilson & Knutsen, 2020). This article represents the first application of this kind of analysis to peace research, to uncover how far, after 15 years of scholarship calling for a local turn in peacebuilding, the local turn has been helpful in promoting respectful inclusion of Southern voices into the field.

Two trajectories seem plausible for a local turn in peace scholarship: one nominal and one substantive. A nominal local turn would see a diversification of voices in peace research, with more scholars from historically marginalized populations participating in the academic conversation, mainly reporting on their own local situations within the traditional frames and hierarchies of scholarly production set by dominant academic standards. Although we might see more publications by scholars from outside the Global North, in this version, the center–periphery model – in which Northern scholarship represents a ‘core’ towards which Southern scholarship is oriented – persists. Instead of contributing to redefining the frames of peace research to become better attuned to the realities of the Global South, Southern scholars would contribute within intellectual boundaries determined by Northern scholars. A limited local turn would thus see scholars from the Global South engaging at the fringes, their work representing a ‘case’ or ‘variation’ to be accounted for within a Western-owned framework.

This article defends a more ambitious notion of the local turn in peace studies, perhaps better described as a ‘decolonial turn.’ This more substantive turn would see not only an increase in scholars from the Global South, as well as other marginalized ‘localities,’ contributing to the local conversation about peace, but also a progressive equalizing of the voices of scholars from the Global South with voices of scholars of the Global North in the global conversation. We would expect to see the voices of Southern scholars engaging authoritatively on theoretical and epistemological questions, widening the range of questions regarded as important, and commenting critically on peace and violence issues within Western countries from their own perspective. This more radical turn would suggest a recentering of the philosophical foundations of the field around a diversity of knowledges. In this form, we would expect to see Southern scholarship contributing a rethinking of the central/global frameworks and concepts of the discipline and developing a new discourse for the field which could underpin comparative analysis, including analysis of Northern case studies by Southern scholars. In this version of the ‘local turn,’ local geographical and cultural variation is accepted, not just as important locally, for explaining deviations from Northern norms, but also globally, as constitutive of norms themselves.

To establish whether such a turn has occurred, we asked the question: Has there been a local turn in peace studies scholarship and, if so, has it prompted a substantive shift globally, as we describe here? We analyze the extent and ways in which Southern scholars are included in the scholarly conversation as our key proxy variable to answer the question. Our data suggest that a nominal turn has begun, but efforts are needed to develop this into a more substantive transformation. Specifically, we show that there has indeed been an increase in the number of publications in the field of peace studies authored or co-authored by scholars from the Global South, particularly from upper-middle-income countries such as Colombia, Turkey and South Africa, in languages other than English and in journals published in upper-middle-income countries. However, despite this very welcome development, important divisions of labor persist in the field. Southern scholarship is increasingly important in explaining different localities, but also in some sense remains confined there, rather than challenging global frameworks of knowledge about peace. Our findings show, with only rare exceptions, the continued domination of Northern scholars in theory-building and comparative analysis, while publications by Southern scholars focus primarily on their own country or immediate region. Collaboration remains dominated by collaborations between Northern scholars. North–South collaboration has increased, but South–South collaboration barely features. Meanwhile, in North–South collaborations, Northern conceptual frameworks dominate at the expense of Southern frameworks. For these reasons, we conclude that the increased diversity of authors publishing in the field, although welcome and long overdue, represents only a limited step towards a substantive challenge to the exclusionary hierarchies that characterize the field.

Method

Identifying the articles published in ‘peace studies’ for a given time period is challenging due to the fuzzy boundaries of the field. Although dedicated peace studies journals exist – Journal of Peace Research and Cooperation and Conflict, for example – peace studies scholars also publish in discipline- and area-specific journals. Furthermore, some concerns of peace studies are shared by other fields – the causes of war, for example, is a key concern of security studies. Isolating a particular corpus of articles as constituting the field of ‘peace studies’ is therefore difficult.

We regard the defining feature of a ‘peace studies’ article to be a substantive concern with ‘peace,’ and therefore our goal was to generate a dataset of publications indexed within Web of Science (WoS) that exhibit this concern.¹ We generated an initial large dataset of every article published from 2015 to 2018 that included the word ‘peace’ in either the title or the abstract. This might have excluded some articles on, for example, issues of war that might be of interest to peace studies scholars. However, we contend that the study of war without paying attention to the relationship of war to a substantive notion of peace is more accurately described as war or conflict studies, not peace studies. We then reviewed each title and abstract to determine whether the term ‘peace’ was used as a substantive concept.² We were left with a dataset of 4,318 individual articles, of which 2,722 were single-authored and 1,596 were co-authored. We then repeated the process for entries in WoS from 2005, 2010, 2012 and 2014 to provide historical points of comparison.

We coded each authorial entry in our dataset for the income level of the country of author’s institutional affiliation, to distinguish between scholars living and working in the colonial metropoles of the Global North and those living and working in colonial or post-colonial contexts. As a proxy for this, we used the World Bank’s income classification for country incomes. This divides the countries of the world into four levels, as outlined in Table I.³

There are clear limitations to this approach. Conceptually, we resist the equation of ‘Southern’ with ‘local,’ but we contend that the historical exclusion of Southern scholars from the academy offers an opportunity to assess widening inclusion, which we regard as a crude but important proxy for a ‘local turn.’ Furthermore, authors’ institutional affiliations are often different from their country of origin or citizenship, obscuring the important influence of scholars in diaspora. The approach also ignores the complex range of exclusions in academia, within countries as well as between them. Within the USA, for example, only 6% of university professors are African-American, while 76% are white (US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2019). Furthermore, our strategy excludes from consideration treatment of the knowledges of indigenous peoples within North America and elsewhere.

Nevertheless, we consider that mapping contemporary scholarship in peace studies, and considering the extent to which a North–South or West–Rest divide is indicated by national-level affiliations, makes a significant starting contribution to the project of promoting a

Table I.

World Bank income categories

Category	Gross National Income (GNI) per capita	Example countries
High-income countries (HICs)	Greater than $12,055 USD	USA, Australia, much of Europe, Argentina, Chile, Japan
Upper-middle-income countries (UMCs)	Between $3896 and $12,055 USD	China, Russia, Colombia, Turkey, Venezuela, Brazil, South Africa
Lower-middle-income countries (LMCs)	Between $996 and $3895 USD	Indonesia, Ukraine, Bolivia, El Salvador, Ghana, India
Low-income countries (LICs)	Less than $996 USD	Haiti, Burundi, South Sudan, Nepal, Somalia

local turn. Our study thus comprises an initial examination of the inclusion of voices from outside the HICs in the scholarly conversation that constitutes the field of peace studies, using publications in WoS to approximate that conversation. From this, we mapped the geography and political economy of knowledge production in peace studies.

The use of WoS as the sampling frame for our dataset necessarily limits the kinds of research publications considered part of ‘peace studies.’ It rules out, for example, the ‘grey literature’ of reports and policy documents that are significant modes of research output for many institutes and scholars, particularly those dependent on consultancy revenues rather than public funding for research. However, since our research focuses in particular on academic scholarship and theory building, considered separately from the local turn in policy or practice, it is appropriate to take as a starting point a dataset that is increasingly regarded as synonymous with the academy and which plays a part in establishing and policing academic quality standards (Bakkalbasi et al., 2006; Shah & Mahmood, 2017). WoS metrics are key measures of success in academia, awarded authority by librarians, research financiers, selection boards, appointing authorities, and others (Shah & Mahmood, 2017: 59). Information from WoS about patterns of publication and citation is used to calculate international university rankings, for example through the Shanghai-Jiaotong Index. WoS brands itself as ‘the world’s most trusted citation index for scientific and scholarly research’ and claims that its curation process removes ‘any potential bias or conflict of interest’ (Clarivate, 2022).

Individual and group judgments surrounding the scholarliness, relevance, significance of content cannot, however, be separated from questions of positionality and epistemology (Fricker, 2007; Mignolo, 2009). Since these hierarchies are themselves grounded in post-colonial distinctions of race, gender, and class, WoS might thereby be expected to contribute to sustaining the privilege and authority of Western scholarship through exclusionary practices such as excluding journals that do not feature Western-style practices of peer review (Bar-Ilan, 2007) and journals that do not provide a bibliography in Roman script. These practices represent a first round of gatekeeping (Coser, 1975) of what is ‘interesting’ and ‘worthy of attention’ (Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988) in any given field. Thus, we do not uncritically claim that WoS is representative of the entire field of peace studies or that WoS is equally important to peace scholars everywhere around the world. On the contrary, we aim to highlight the power dynamics that enable WoS to claim to be the most reliable and inclusive resource and to govern Western academic competition even while privileging Western output.

Findings and discussion

Finding #1: Scholars from HICs dominate the domain of publications

Our findings show that HIC-affiliated authors numerically dominate the WoS conversation about peace, across the years in our dataset. Figure 1 shows the contributions of different groups of countries over time. The dominance of HICs is evident, but declines from almost 90% in 2005 to just over 70% in 2018. Outside of the high-income category, UMCs have increased their share of the contribution to the peace literature in WoS most significantly, from only 6% in 2005 to more than 22% in 2018. For LMCs the change has been positive but much less significant. LMCs increased their share from 3.9% to 5.8%, while LICs reduced their share from 1.9% in 2005, to 0.7% in 2018, a trend that in large part reflects the graduation of China from the LIC group in 2005 to LMC by 2010 and UMC by 2012.

Figure 2 shows the overall breakdown of articles about peace in WoS between 2015 and 2018, compared to population, GDP and GDP per capita. HIC-affiliated authors are heavily over-represented when compared to

Figure 1.

Contributions to peace literature by scholars from different country income groups

Figure 2.

Total number of authorships from each income group related to population, GDP and GDP per capita

the distribution of world population, since they produce 72% of world output but comprise only 15% of the population. When we factor in total GDP, the differences are somewhat less pronounced, while comparison of authorships to GDP/capita suggests that authors located in upper- and lower-middle-income countries are more productive in relation to available resources than those in HICs and LICs. This suggests that funding is a significant aspect of the problem. The following sections elaborate on the effects of this overall quantitative over-representation of HIC-affiliated authors on the scholarly conversation that constitutes the field of peace studies.

The relationship between resource inequalities and the quantitative dominance of HIC output must be situated within the institutions that structure the academic field. These partially determine distributions of resources as well as gatekeeping publication requirements. PhD committees, funding bodies, tenure requirements, research institutions, and publishing houses form part of this institutional matrix. Journals and their editorial and advisory boards offer one insight into how HIC-affiliated authors dominate publishing. Our 2015–18 dataset shows that peace studies, as represented in WoS, is a diverse field in disciplinary terms, with 1,477 different journals appearing at least once in the dataset. Eighteen of the journals contributed more than 20 articles, at least 0.5% of the total, constituting among them 16.5% of the total number of articles (see Table II) and may therefore be considered as important peace studies journals.

These journals are mostly concentrated in a handful of high-income countries – the USA, UK, Norway, Sweden, and Spain – with only three located in upper-middle-income countries – Mexico, Colombia, and Romania. Examination of the institutional affiliations of editorial board members for these 18 journals shows further dominance by HIC-affiliated scholars (see Figure 3). Of 559 editorial and advisory board members listed on the home webpages of these journals, more than 80% have HIC affiliations. This dominance is particularly pronounced in the 15 journals produced in HICs, where HIC-affiliated scholars make up 92% of editorial and advisory board members. In the three UMC-produced journals, by contrast, 75% of editorial and advisory board members are affiliated with institutions in UMCs, and only 25% with institutions in HICs. Within HICs, a small number of countries are particularly dominant. Anglophone countries provide more than half the board members: 48% of board members are affiliated in the USA or the UK alone, and a further 8% are located in Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Sweden, Norway, Spain and the Netherlands account for a further 15%. Board members affiliated in LMC institutions comprise only 2% of the total and LIC institutions were not represented on these boards.

This pattern of dominance by HICs in the top peace studies journals and editorial boards reflects the pattern of publication in the dataset generally. About 81.5% of all articles published in the field between 2015 and 2018 were published by publishing houses in HIC locations, while 16.9% were published in UMC locations and less

Table II.

Journals contributing ≥ 0.5% of total articles in dataset

Journal title	Number of articles	Location of editor	Language of publication
International Peacekeeping	66	Sweden	English
Journal of Peace Research	60	Norway	English
Peace & Conflict	54	USA	English
Peacebuilding	54	UK	English
Journal of Peace Education	50	USA	English
Revista Paz y Conflictos	49	Spain	Spanish
Third World Quarterly	38	UK	English
Revista Ra Ximhai	36	Mexico	Spanish
Conflict, Security & Development	32	UK	English
International Affairs	32	UK	English
Journal of Intervention & Peacebuilding	31	Sweden	English
International Studies Quarterly	27	USA	English
Cooperation & Conflict	25	Sweden	English
Journal of Conflict Resolution	25	USA	English
Ciudad Paz-Ando	25	Colombia	Spanish
Conflict Studies Quarterly	24	Romania	English
Conflict Management & Peace	22	USA	English
International Negotiation	21	USA	English

Figure 3.

Editorial board members of the 15 most prevalent journals in the dataset, by income level of country affiliation

than 2% in LMC or LIC locations. We also noted a phenomenon of authors publishing in locations that are as rich as, or richer than, their own location. HIC-affiliated authors rarely publish outside the HIC zone – nearly 95% of their publications were published by HIC publishing houses, with a further 4.9% published by UMC publishing houses. Publications by UMC-affiliated authors are evenly divided between HIC publishing houses (49%) and UMC publishing houses (50%), with less than 1% published in LMC or LIC locations. For LMC-affiliated authors, 65% of articles were published in HIC locations, 22% in UMCs and 13% in LMCs. For LIC-affiliated authors, 87% of articles were published in HICs, 8% in UMCs and 5% in LMCs or LICs. The gatekeeping functions of HIC editorial boards and publishing houses thus constitute part of the institutional foundations of an unequal field of academic knowledge production.

Finding #2: Scholars from HICs dominate conversations about lower-income categories

To understand more about how these patterns of dominance affect the content of the field, we extracted 2,710 articles that referred to particular countries in their abstracts and analyzed emerging patterns of authorship and content. The abstracts of these articles made 3,793 separate references to 155 different countries named as a focus of analysis and source of empirical data. Three clear findings emerged. First, the field as a whole is far more interested in high-income and upper-middle-income countries than in lower-middle-income or low-income countries. Secondly, whereas authors outside the HIC zone tend to focus more on their own country than on other countries, thus possibly exemplifying a ‘local turn,’ HIC-affiliated authors continue to study peace elsewhere. Finally, authors at all levels overwhelmingly study countries with lower GDP per capita than in their own location, replicating the hierarchical structure of global knowledge production.

Of the 155 countries written about, six countries appear in more than 100 articles in the dataset and account for 35% of the total number of country references. These are Colombia, Israel, Palestine, the UK (including Northern Ireland), China, and Russia. Mentioned in 347 articles, Colombia (UMC) is by far the most studied country (9% of total country mentions), reflecting the excitement within the field about the groundbreaking Havana Accords. Israel (HIC) and Palestine (LMC) are the next most commonly studied, with 202 and 182 mentions (roughly 5% each) respectively, reflecting the centrality of this conflict to contemporary geopolitics. Next is the United Kingdom (HIC), including Northern Ireland, with 164 mentions, the USA (HIC) with 161 mentions, China (UMC) with 137 and Russia (UMC) with 108.

Overall, 30% of total country mentions in the 2,863 article abstracts refer to HICs, 33% to UMCs, 23% to LMCs and 14% to LICs. This suggests a trend in the field towards rich and emerging economies – the 12 countries that comprise the G7 and the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) account for 26% of country mentions, despite the widely held view in the post-Cold War era that conflict is concentrated in lower-income countries (Panic, 2005; Cortez & Kim, 2012). By way of comparison, the 26 countries on the World Bank’s list of fragile states in 2015 accounted for only 22% of references to specific countries in articles published in peace studies over the subsequent four years. Fragile states such as Eritrea, Yemen, Chad, and Madagascar featured fewer than five times each.

This emphasis mirrors the geographical concentration of peace studies researchers in HIC countries; and yet only a minority of HIC-affiliated researchers study their own backyards. Overall, although 37% of HIC-affiliated authors write about HIC countries, only 16% of references to specific countries made by HIC-affiliated authors were references to their own country of affiliation. These researchers tended to be clustered in countries with active or recent wars, such as Northern Ireland, Israel, and Spain. HIC-affiliated researchers within peace studies tend not to research other issues relating to peace within their own countries. For example, authors with US affiliations contributed almost 1,000 articles to the dataset, but only 70 of these discussed the USA, and fewer than 30 (3% of US output) discussed internal issues of violence and peace within US society, most preferring to address US engagement abroad.

By contrast, 58% of UMC-affiliated authors who referred to a country by name referred to their own country. Our data suggest that these expanding national

Figure 4.

Who studies whom? Country content by income level, relative to income level of author’s country of affiliation

research programs, in the context of the rapid expansion of research capacities in UMCs such as China, Colombia and Turkey in recent years (UNESCO, 2017), has driven the expansion of scholarship on UMC countries in 2015–18 compared to earlier years. For LMC-affiliated authors, 56% of country references were to their own country, whereas for LIC-affiliated authors, the figure was 52%. This suggests that while authors in lower-income countries engage extensively in own-country research, HIC-affiliated authors more often study countries other than their own.

A top-down aspect to this gaze is demonstrated by Figure 4, which shows the income level of countries referenced by different authors. For each income level, the vast majority of countries discussed in published work are countries in the same or a lower income category than that of the author. Because of this, while almost all published work discussing peace issues in HICs is by an HIC-affiliated author, the same is not true for other income levels. HIC-affiliated authors produce more published work about UMCs than UMC-affiliated authors, and far more published work about LMC and

Figure 5.

Relative contribution by authors affiliated at different income levels to different collaboration types

LICs than LMC- and LIC-affiliated authors, dominating the global conversation about peace and conflict in low-income countries. HIC-affiliated authors are responsible for 88% of authorships for abstracts that discuss an HIC; 53% of authorships for abstracts that discuss a UMC; 67% of authorships for abstracts that mention an LMC; and 76% of authorships for abstracts that mention an LIC. By contrast, few UMC- and LMC-, and almost no LIC-affiliated authors comment on peace and conflict issues in HICs, producing a hierarchical, center–periphery gaze within the field.

Finding #3: Scholars from HICs dominate collaborations

The dataset allows us to compare patterns of research collaboration geographically and over time, suggesting the extent to which research partnerships can help to diversify scholarship in the field. Of the 4,318 articles published between 2015 and 2018, 37% are co-authored, and of these, 40% are international collaborations while 60% are collaborations between scholars at institutions in the same country. The contributions of scholars in countries at different income levels to single-authored articles, international collaborations, and intranational collaborations are shown in Figure 5. HIC-affiliated authors dominate all categories of collaboration but dominate particularly strongly in the category of international collaborations, while UMC- and LMC-affiliated authors make a stronger showing in the category of national collaborations. LIC-affiliated authors are poorly represented across the board, but appear a little more frequently in the international collaboration category as partners of higher-income affiliates – there were no instances of LIC-LIC international collaboration in the dataset.

One trend evident in the field is an increase in research collaboration both in absolute and relative terms. The most significant increases have been in intranational collaborations by scholars within UMCs – which expanded from 3 in 2005 to 100 in 2018 – and international collaborations between scholars in different HICs – which increased from 9 in 2005 to 111 in 2018. The number of collaborations between HIC-affiliated scholars and scholars from outside the HIC zone also increased substantially and consistently from 8 in 2005 to 65 in 2018. Similarly, the number of international collaborations between scholars in different countries outside the HIC zone has also increased dramatically but from a very low base of 1 in 2005 to 17 in 2018: it remains rare overall in the field.

Cross-income collaboration has been promoted as a matter of policy to foster ‘capacity-building,’ and thereby inclusion, of scholars in lower-income countries (Adriansen, Møller Madsen & Jensen, 2016). However, our data suggest caution is warranted. UMC- and LMC-affiliated scholars feature far more prominently among single-authored articles and among collaborations between authors within the same country, than among international collaborations, suggesting that international collaborations with HIC-affiliated authors are not necessarily the best way to help authors from lower-income countries to get published. LIC-affiliated authors, by contrast, do slightly better in international collaboration than in single-authorship, suggesting that partnering with an international collaborator in a higher-income country does open doors, to some extent, for this group. For LMCs and UMCs, national collaboration has been much more significant as a means for promoting their participation in the global conversation.

Collaborations between authors located in different-income-level countries reproduce the trend of higher-income countries studying lower-income countries, rather than challenging it. Between 2015 and 2018, 192 articles involving 446 country affiliations were produced as international collaborations between scholars in countries of different income levels, and mentioned one or more specific countries by name in the abstract. Analysis of these articles shows that 172 were collaborations between authors in an HIC and a non-HIC country: only 19 of these (11%) featured an HIC in the content as described in the abstract, while 153 (89%) featured one or more middle- or low-income countries. Indeed, among HIC–non-HIC collaborations, 77% focused on the lower-income country in the content of the article; 4% focused on both authoring partners’ countries in the content of the article; and only 3% focused on the high-income partner. A further 17% focused on countries that were not party to the collaboration. This suggests that ‘North–South’ collaboration is rarely a vehicle for scholars in low- or middle-income countries to study peace and conflict issues in northern countries; it is far more frequently a vehicle for facilitating HIC study of lower-income countries. A similar pattern emerges in the few articles in our dataset that resulted from multilevel ‘South–South’ collaboration. Out of 17 articles that were the result of multilevel international South–South collaboration, the content of 65% of the articles was about the lower income country represented in the research collaboration, while the content of only 12% of the articles was about the higher income country represented in the research collaboration. The content of the other 24% of articles was focused on different countries from the countries of affiliation of the research collaborators.

In sum, international collaboration, including between HIC-affiliated scholars and non-HIC-affiliated scholars, has expanded rapidly over the past 15 years, but the data suggest that this has expanded the dominance of HIC-affiliated authors, even while it may have facilitated the inclusion of scholars in LICs. The prevalence of studying countries of lower-income than one’s own suggests that partnering with scholars in lower-income countries assists HIC-affiliated scholars in studying lower-income countries. However, partnering with HIC-affiliated scholars does not assist scholars in lower-income countries in studying HICs. It is an important limitation of this study that we cannot draw conclusions as to the quality of interactions between HIC-affiliated and non-HIC-affiliated authors – this requires further qualitative work. Overall, the increased contribution of UMC-affiliated and LMC-affiliated scholars to the field has been through collaborations within countries and by increased production of single-authored articles, rather than through collaborations with HIC-affiliated scholars. South–South collaboration is extraordinarily limited.

Finding #4: Scholars from HICs dominate theorization

To understand how income level affects the type of scholarship produced, we analyzed the content of all abstracts in the dataset and coded whether an article claimed to engage in theoretical work. Coding an article as ‘theory’ is an act of authorization in itself: theory-building is considered the backbone of knowledge production, and consequently ‘theoretical’ articles are regarded more highly than mere ‘case studies’ in the hierarchy of knowledge production. In examining the relationship of scholars in the field to the business of theorizing, we acknowledge that theory itself is regarded by critical scholars as a technique of power, used to organize particular experiences into manageable data (Collyer et al., 2018: 2).

Our concern here was not to impose a view of what a ‘contribution to theory’ consists of, but to uncover how scholars from countries at different income levels situate themselves within the field of knowledge production. Our coding strategy, therefore, focused, first, on whether authors explicitly claimed to build theory in their abstract. If they did not make this claim explicitly, we examined whether they claimed to engage in subpractices of theory-building: namely, challenging or refining the theoretical claims of other works; proposing analytical models; or developing conceptual frameworks. All of these tasks contribute to the role of theory in that they ‘present a systematic view of phenomena by specifying relations among variables, with the purpose of explaining and predicting phenomena’ (Kerlinger, 1986: 9). By coding the claims of authors to be engaging in theory building, we measured how often authors from different levels claimed to be contributing to the overarching theoretical production about peace. Using these criteria, we recorded a total of 562 ‘theory’ articles.

Patterns of authorship amongst these articles showed an increased dominance of HIC-affiliated authors, even compared to the dataset overall, suggesting that HIC-affiliated authors are more likely to claim to be ‘theorizing’ than authors in lower-income countries (see Table III). This implies that scholars from higher-income countries are more likely to claim that the frameworks they develop apply generally to peace as a whole, and not just to specific case studies, than scholars from non-HIC countries.

Finding #5: Scholars from HICs shape the discourse of the field

Relatedly, we sought to understand whether authors from higher-income countries have disproportionate influence in shaping the overall language of peace studies. Power relations embedded in collaborative relations may be revealed in patterns of language used to articulate

Table III.

HIC contribution to theory articles compared to all articles

	‘Theory’ articles	All articles
% of author/country affiliations that are HIC	80%	72%
% of articles with at least one HIC-affiliated author	86%	73%
% of articles produced exclusively by HIC-affiliated authors	78%	68%
% of articles produced exclusively by non-HIC-affiliated authors	21%	27%

Table IV.

Comparisons of most frequent words by income group

Income group comparison	Overlap
Overlap between lexicons of HIC-affiliated authors and UMC-affiliated authors	72.0%
Overlap between lexicons of HIC-affiliated authors and LMC- and LIC-affiliated authors	66.0%
Overlap between lexicons of UMC-affiliated authors and LMC- and LIC-affiliated authors	62.0%
Overlap between lexicon of HIC-affiliated authors and lexicon of articles produced by cross-income collaborations including HIC-affiliated authors	68.0%
Overlap between lexicon of UMC-affiliated authors and lexicon of articles produced by cross-income collaborations including HIC-affiliated authors	64.0%
Overlap between lexicon of LMC- or LIC-affiliated authors and lexicon of articles produced by cross-income collaborations including HIC-affiliated authors	58.0%

issues of peace and violence. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) frames language as an aspect of human social practice and holds that discourse constructs and reproduces power and domination: it is ‘socially constructive’ (Fairclough, 2004). CDA presumes that language can reveal insights about how humans create and reproduce power dynamics, and thus how they create and reproduce ideologies. Who then sets the international research agenda for peace studies? If the local turn had been successful, one would expect to find a great deal of independence among the peace studies scholars of the world, apparent in a wide diversity of concepts and ideas appearing in their respective discourses. Alternatively, an incomplete local turn would be characterized by homogeneity among discourses, even across income levels, indicating ongoing ideological dominance by scholars from wealthier nations.

To examine this question, we employed a critical discourse analysis approach to examine the abstracts of the articles in our sample. From the dataset of 4,319 individual articles, we extracted the abstract of each article according to five income-level classifications: HIC; UMC; combined LMC and LIC; HIC cross-income collaborations; and UMC cross-income collaborations. An article was included in the ‘HIC’ group if it had one or more HIC-affiliated author(s) and no authors from other countries. Similar logic applied to the ‘UMC’ group. We combined the LMC- and LIC-authored articles into one category for the sake of generating a sufficiently large sample. We included an article in the ‘HIC cross-income collaborations’ group if it had one or more HIC-affiliated author(s) and also any author in a country of a different income level.

The abstracts for each of the five income-level classifications were compiled into a large text file. Following Ignatow & Mihalcea (2017), we performed text processing on each list, to create an initial list of the top 300 words, removing words that were ubiquitous as a result of our sampling strategy (like ‘article’ and ‘peace’). After text processing, we sorted the words by frequency and identified the top 50 words for each of the five income-level classifications. The authors then compared the five groups’ top words, to determine a percentage of overlap between each pairing of the five groups.

Table IV presents the results of these comparisons. The results revealed a great deal of overlap among all income groups, suggesting a generally accepted global understanding of what constitutes peace studies – and what sorts of concepts and ideas are worth publishing in peace studies journals. These rates of overlap also suggest that HIC-affiliated scholars influence the language used in the field. Two findings support this claim. First, the top 50 words used by authors in countries outside the HIC zone overlap more with the top 50 used by HIC-affiliated authors (72% for UMC- and 66% for LMC/LIC-affiliated authors) than they overlap with each other (62%). This suggests that HIC-affiliated authors are providing a core of key words used by authors from countries in other income groups, but that UMC-, LMC- and LIC-affiliated authors are not influencing one another in the same way.

Second, this influence is more apparent in articles involving collaborations across these groups. The data here suggest HIC-affiliated authors have an outsized role in shaping research projects. If all collaborating partners had equal influence on a shared project, we would expect to see similar percentages when calculating the overlaps between cross-income collaboration abstracts and those from single-income groups. This is not the case. Rather, articles produced through cross-income collaborations that include at least one HIC partner overlap significantly with articles produced by HIC-affiliated authors only – at 68%. They overlap less significantly with the language of articles produced by UMC-affiliated authors alone, at 64%, and even less so with articles produced by LMC- and LIC-affiliated authors, at 58%. This suggests that UMC-, LMC- and LIC-affiliated authors bring different vocabulary to the field, but that when an HIC-affiliated scholar is involved with a project, the language used in that project will more closely adhere to the lexicon common in HICs rather than the language coming from UMCs, LMCs or LICs.

Conclusions

In this article, we investigated whether a local turn has occurred in knowledge production regarding peace studies. We argue that scholars in high-income Western countries dominate the discipline of peace studies in multiple ways. First, HIC-affiliated scholars (still) dominate the domain of publications. Most of the articles on WoS are authored by scholars located in HICs. Additionally, most of the predominant journals and publishing houses are managed and edited by HIC-affiliated scholars. This domination is intensified by a hierarchical scholarly gaze: non-HIC-affiliated authors tend to write about the country where they are located, whereas HIC-affiliated authors study each other and lower-income countries. In demonstrating this, we expose a center–periphery pattern in which HIC-affiliated scholars dominate the empirical conversation about peace and conflict issues in lower-income countries. However, over the past few years, UMC-affiliated scholars have begun to challenge this domination. Third, we show that HIC-affiliated scholars dominate scholarly collaborations, quantitatively and qualitatively, by directing scholarly collaborations at conditions and problems in lower-income countries rather than at issues of peace and violence in the Global North. Fourth, we show that HIC-affiliated authors are more likely to claim theoretical implications for their work than other authors. Finally, we show that HIC-affiliated authors more heavily influence the language used in discussing peace, contributing to a qualitative dominance of the discourse of the field. These findings clearly indicate a stark, continuing inequality between HICs and lower-income countries in regard to several aspects of scholarship in the field of peace studies, notwithstanding the significance of ideas about a local turn in peace practice. However, this continued inequality is under challenge through the recent rise of UMC scholarship and UMC publishing, a phenomenon which calls for further research.

We acknowledge that as scholars in a US institution, claiming to survey the field from ‘above’ and to draw generalizable conclusions, we take part in the practices that we criticize. We also acknowledge the limitations of equating WoS with ‘the field’ – in so doing, we privilege Western-style academic institutions as repositories of knowledge, thereby minimizing the work of scholars who engage in knowledge production in different ways that are not ‘seen’ by the academy. However, despite these limitations, we put forward this research as a critique directed at continued exclusionary knowledge production practices in Western institutions.

We understand the issue of domination in scholarship as a multifaceted one, bound up in historical and political divides embedded in coloniality and prejudice. Examining these divides at the national level overlooks the dynamics of internal discrimination and exclusion, such as the underrepresentation of minority groups, as well as networks of facilitation and mutual aid, for example between diaspora scholars and scholars in their homelands. Further research should investigate qualitatively how available material resources, active conflict, or governance structures affect research and publication. This study invites peace studies scholars to further investigate the interplay and intersection of different levels of oppression within the academy and within the field.

Our findings suggest that journals and publishers should ensure their publication criteria do not discriminate against non-HIC-affiliated scholars and should actively support these scholars’ contributions. Moreover, HIC-affiliated scholars should critically evaluate their practices when co-authoring with non-HIC-affiliated scholars. Further research can help with identifying more concrete responsibilities and solutions. For example, statistics on how many articles non-HIC-affiliated scholars submit to journals and what percentage gets accepted could provide further information about scholarly gatekeeping practices. Moreover, research on patterns of pursuing doctoral degrees in high-income countries and international graduate student training could better illuminate hierarchies of participation in global conversations and publication trajectories.

In this article, we aimed to expose general patterns of publication in the field of peace studies. We call for qualitative research to provide a deeper understanding of scholarship practices and the system of knowledge production in the field. Despite their limitations, the findings we present indicate that a substantive decolonizing local turn is still yet to happen in the domain of peace scholarship and an urgent change in scholarship practices is necessary. Thus, we call scholars to engage in this conversation not only through more publications but by advocating for change in their respective institutions.

Footnotes

Replication data

The dataset and do-files for the empirical analysis in this article can be found at . All analyses were conducting using Google Sheets.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the dedicated work of Noah Imel as the lead Research Assistant on the project. Funding for research assistance was provided by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. The authors would like to thank faculty and students at the Kroc Institute, particularly Dr Jason Quinn, for advice on the project as it developed.

Funding

Funding for this research was generously provided by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, in the Keough School for Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame.

ORCID iDs

Anna K Johnson

Joséphine Lechartre

Şehrazat G Mart

Caroline Hughes

Notes

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