The ‘subaltern speak’: can we, the experts, listen?

Abstract

Abstract Knowledge production in peace and conflict research is marked by a disconnect between its ‘expertise-driven’ research inquiries and lived realities of people across the world. In focusing on what knowledge and whose knowledge counts as legitimate among the diverse stakeholders, the article locates the raison d'être of this gap in the epistemic erasures inflicted by imperial knowledge and its lasting legacies, especially that of privileging the primacy and autonomy of the political over the social institutions in maintaining order. This, along with the limiting epistemes of western modernity explain the state-centrism in governmental and academic expertise, especially in post-colonial societies. The article makes a case for historicizing and decolonizing its epistemes and tools of research, and illustrates how this can be done by drawing on the Kashmir conflict as it unfolded in the early 1990s in the Indian part of Jammu and Kashmir state. In a point of departure from the much-acclaimed question asked by Gayatri Spivak: ‘can the subaltern speak?’, the article argues that the subaltern can speak and has indeed never been silent. So, the question it poses is: can we, the experts, listen?