Reimagining Social Transformation Through Decolonial Frameworks and African Perspectives: Rethinking Security and Sustainable Peace

Dominant approaches to security and peacebuilding in Africa concentrate on preventing violence, stabilising the state and concluding peace agreements. These aims are significant, but they can overlook colonial legacies, African ways of knowing, and ordinary people’s understandings of safety and peace. This article asks what security and sustainable peace mean in a transformative sense, and how decolonial approaches and African perspectives can help to develop them. It uses a conceptual, literature-based method: it does not collect or analyse primary data and makes no empirical claims. The article clarifies four concepts (social transformation, security, sustainable peace and conflict transformation), critically reviews decolonial theory and both foundational and contemporary African political thought, and compares the resulting position systematically with human security, liberal peacebuilding, critical (local-turn) peacebuilding and conflict transformation. It then proposes an integrated framework with five dimensions: historical and structural analysis, epistemic justice, relational and ethical foundations, institutional transformation, and collective agency. Each dimension is defined, the interactions among the dimensions are specified (including which are necessary conditions), and the framework is expressed as an analytical model with operational definitions, causal links, moderators and five testable propositions. Its distinctive claim is that epistemic justice contributes to sustainable peace only when it is converted, through meaningful participation and accountable institutions, into legitimacy and trust, and only when rights safeguards constrain both state and customary power. The article also examines its own risks: romanticising tradition, neglecting present-day political responsibility and producing new exclusions. It ends with implications for research, policy, practice and education, and a call for comparative empirical testing across African contexts.

Social transformation; decoloniality; African perspectives; security; sustainable peace; peacebuilding; conflict transformation; epistemic justice

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