Epistemological and normative challenges of peace research

The article addresses three epistemological and normative challenges that should define and guide peace research. If we define peace with Levinas as an awakening to the precariousness of the other, peace research has a clearly critical, transforming telos that will determine the epistemological and normative challenges of the discipline. In this sense, a first challenge will be to cultivate a synergistic and "two-way" relationship betweenpeace researchandpeace education, social intervention and pacifist activism, following the proposal that Elise Boulding enunciated more than half a century ago. The second challenge will have to do with the reconciliation of the critical perspective - polemological-, and the constructive - irenological-perspective, of peace research. To overcome the perverse effects of a unilateral and reductionist polemological approach, which may end up naturalizing and reproducing the statu quo masked behind a false realism. Finally, the third epistemological and normative challenge of peace research is crossed by the concern about, what in the terminology of postcolonial studies, comes to be known as the locus of enunciation and the importance of rescuing the legacy and knowledge of silenced and marginalized voices, not only socially but also epistemologically, by the hegemonic discourses.