Peace and violence are opposites, but they do not exclude each other entirely. Taking this observation as starting point, this book investigates why there is so much violence in what we call peace. If peace and violence necessarily coexist, what does that mean for the idea of peace, and how is violence to be thought of? The contributors reflect on the ambivalent relations between peace and violence and discuss that while full peace cannot be achieved, efforts against violence and the prospects for peaceful coexistence never completely disappear. This interdisciplinary debate combines points of view of the Global North with perceptions from the Global South.

Joachim Michael, born in 1966, is a professor for InterAmerican and Romance studies at Universität Bielefeld. His areas of research are media cultures in Latin America, apocalypse and time regimes in literature and film, as well as cultures of peace and violence in Latin America. Sebastián Martínez Fernández, born in 1985, has a degree in philosophy from the University of Santiago de Chile and a master's degree in InterAmerican Studies from Bielefeld Universität, Germany. Currently, he is a research assistant at Leibniz Universität Hannover. His areas of research include the philosophical analysis of peace and violence, literature and violence, aesthetics and peace.