Making Space for Feminist Decolonial Geographies of Peace with the Shuar in the Ecuadorian Amazon: A Case for ‘Cuerpo Territorio’

This article follows urgent calls from peace and conflict studies and geographies of peace to be decolonised. Our study shows that for the Shuar communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the concept of peace is quite different from that of the Ecuadorian state. This study demonstrates how 'Western' centric definitions of the term are rooted in colonial logic and power structures. In this article, we explore what it could mean to decolonise theories and spaces for peace. Through encounters with Indigenous Shuar understandings of peace in a community-based participatory research project, we highlight the plurality of possibilities for the term. Using a decolonial lens we conclude with a call to action for scholars in those disciplines to engage with the Feminist Indigenous Latin American and Caribbean methodology and epistemology 'cuerpo territorio' (body-territory) to understand territory from the perspective of Abya Yala, that sees women's bodies as the 'first territory'. We argue that 'cuerpo territorio' is well suited to do decolonial work and help us step outside a Westernized understanding of peace and make strides towards the pluriverse. While typically this Indigenous concept has been used to better understand violence surrounding extraction sites, we propose that engaging with the methodology will prove useful for theoretical findings in spatial understandings of peace and its praxis.