Exploring opportunities for decolonial cross area comparison – Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of the Congo

Comparing peace and security qualitatively across countries is rare in itself and almost exclusively the prerogative of Global North (GN) scholars exceptions notwithstanding. Global South (GS) scholars2 are valued mostly for their “indigenous” knowledge on “their” case. This reproduces colonial hierarchies as GN scholars extract data often with the help of GS “assistants” from formerly colonized areas to refine (often colonial-era) concepts and then reimpose them as epistemic frames onto how GS scholars should understand their lived realities. In this application, we, German, Central African and Congolese scholars, propose a third decolonial alternative: comparing across GS cases directly without a GN detour.