Decolonized Human, Gender, and Environmental: HUGE Security and Peace
Publisher: Global Peace and Security
Author(s): Úrsula Oswald-Spring
Date: 2023
Topics: Conflict Causes, Conflict Prevention, Gender, Governance
This article explores diverse peace paradigms from negative and realist to liberal, structural, and cosmopolitan peace. The liberal focus in a multi-diverse world with an occidental cosmopolitan pathway did not prevent global and regional wars, such as the present between Russia and Ukraine. The text focuses on a methodology of an open, dissipative, and self-regulating system on a decolonized bottom-up approach, where indigenous communities, representing 5% of the world population, conserve 80% of the remaining biodiversity. Women produce also half the food for their families and communities. Ethnic, economic, and gender discrimination are related to patriarchy that has devastated societies and the environment. Alternative HUGE (human, gender, and environmental) security is caring for vulnerable social groups and destroyed environments. Women’s care economy, subsistence production, sorority, and social solidarity from the bottom up are transforming violence inside society and families, centering on well-being and not capital accumulation. Reinforcing regional autonomy, gender, and indigenous equity also reduces the impacts of environmental footprints. This decolonized understanding represents an alternative model of the way of life in the Global South, based on engendered and sustainable peacebuilding for a sustainable future.