Oliver P Richmond

The guiding principle of peacemaking and peacebuilding over the past quarter century has been "liberal peace": the promotion of democracy, capitalism, law, and respect for human rights. These components represent a historic effort to prevent a reoccurrence of the nationalism, fascism, and economic collapse that led to the World Wars as well as many later conflicts. Ultimately, this strategy has been somewhat successful in reducing war between countries, but it has failed to produce legitimate and sustainable forms of peace at the domestic level. The goals of peacebuilding have changed over time and place, but they have always been built around compromise via processes of intervention aimed at supporting "progress" in conflict-affected countries. They have simultaneously promoted changes in the regional and global order.

As Oliver P. Richmond argues in this book, the concept of peace has evolved continuously through several eras: from the imperial era, through the states-system, liberal, and current neoliberal eras of states and markets. It holds the prospect of developing further through the emerging "digital" era of transnational networks, new technologies, and heightened mobility. Yet, as recent studies have shown, only a minority of modern peace agreements survive for more than a few years and many peace agreements and peacebuilding missions have become intractable, blocked, or frozen. This casts a shadow on the legitimacy, stability, and effectiveness of the overall international peace architecture, reflecting significant problems in the evolution of an often violently contested international and domestic order.

This book examines the development of the international peace architecture, a "grand design" comprising various subsequent attempts to develop a peaceful international order. Richmond examines six main theoretical-historical stages in this process often addressed through peacekeeping and international mediation, including the balance of power mechanism of the 19th Century, liberal internationalism after World War I, and the expansion of rights and decolonization after World War II. It also includes liberal peacebuilding after the end of the Cold War, neoliberal statebuilding during the 2000s, and an as yet unresolved current "digital" stage. They have produced a substantial, though fragile, international peace architecture. However, it is always entangled with, and hindered by, blockages and a more substantial counter-peace framework. The Grand Design provides a sweeping look at the troubled history of peace processes, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding, and their effects on the evolution of international order. It also considers what the next stage may bring.

This encyclopaedia provides a comprehensive overview of major theories and approaches to the study of peace and conflict across different humanities and social sciences disciplines. Peace and conflict studies (PCS) is one of the major sub-disciplines of international studies (including political sciences and international relations), and has emerged from a need to understand war, related systems and concepts and how to respond to it afterward. PCS has become an important site for inter-disciplinary studies, spanning war studies, security and development; state formation and statebuilding; law and human rights; civil society and political authority; philosophy and religion; the anthropology and history of political order; environmental dimensions; as well as the arts and literature, psychology, and material conditions of peace, peacemaking, peace agreements, the peaceful state, the nature of regional and international cooperation, and organisation, and more.

This updated and revised second edition examines the conceptualisation and evolution of peace in International Relations (IR) theory.

The book examines the concept of peace and its usage in the main theoretical debates in IR, including realism, liberalism, constructivism, critical theory, and post-structuralism, as well as in the more direct debates on peace and conflict studies. It explores themes relating to culture, development, agency, and structure, not just in terms of representations of IR, and of peace, but in terms of the discipline of IR itself. The work also specifically explores the recent mantras associated with liberal and neoliberal versions of peace, which appear to have become foundational for much of the mainstream literature and for doctrines for peace and development in the policy world. Analysing war has often led to the dominance – and mitigation – of violence as a basic assumption in, and response to, the problems of IR. This study aims to redress this negative balance by arguing that the discipline offers a rich basis for the study of peace, which has advanced significantly over the last century or so. It also proposes innovative theoretical dimensions of the study of peace, with new chapters discussing post-colonial and digital developments.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: Towards and Orthodoxy of Peace- and Beyond

1. Peace and the Idealist Tradition: Towards a Liberal Peace

2. A Realist Agenda for Peace: Survival and a Victor’s Peace

3. Marxist Agendas for Peace: Towards Peace as Social Justice and Emancipation

4. Beyond a Idealist, Realist, or Marxist Version of Peace

5. The Contribution of Peace and Conflict Studies

Part II: Post-Positivism and Peace

6. Critical Contributions to Peace

7. Post-Structuralist Contributions to Peace

8. Post-Colonial Contributions to Peace

9. New theories: the environment, actors, networks, mobility, and technology

Throughout history, wherever there has been conflict and violence, institutions and processes aimed at peace stability and order, in and across, society have emerged simultaneously. Conflict often overwhelms them, though in the longer term some form of peace returns, normally of a negative type. Understanding and engaging with the processes of ‘peace formation’, in which localised, networked, political agency is exercised in order to achieve a range of social, political, economic, and public goods, as well as justice, equality and reconciliation, has long been an underlying motif of peace thinking and practices. How to achieve an emancipatory form of peace is a question international actors, including key states like the US, and organisations such as the UN, EU, African Union, and World Bank, and a range of NGOs, have long been confronted with. This book argues that the localised formation of peace has not been examined closely enough. Yet, it provides important ‘navigation points for policymakers’, and the crucial and so far often missing legitimacy for wider peacebuilding and statebuilding. Without an understanding of the practices of peace formation in any given post-conflict context, from Bosnia Herzegovina to Timor Leste, international actors may not understand the roots of a conflict, how local actors may be assisted, how violence and power-seeking may be ended or managed, or how local legitimacy may emerge. Peace formation processes may also hint at new international orders to come.

Western struggles - and failures - to create functioning states in countries such as Iraq or Afghanistan have inspired questions about whether statebuilding projects are at all viable, or whether they make the lives of their intended beneficiaries better or worse. In this groundbreaking book, Oliver Richmond asks why statebuilding has been so hard to achieve, and argues that a large part of the problem has been Westerners' failure to understand or engage with what local peoples actually want and need. He interrogates the liberal peacebuilding industry, asking what it assumes, what it is getting wrong, and how it could be more effective. - See more at: http://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?K=9780300175318#sthash.7Zyd5ZzS.dpuf

This book examines how the liberal peace experiment of the post-Cold War environment has failed to connect with its target populations, which have instead set about transforming it according to their own local requirements. Liberal peacebuilding has caused a range of unintended consequences. These emerge from the liberal peace's internal contradictions, from its claim to offer a universal normative and epistemological basis for peace, and to offer a technology and process which can be applied to achieve it. When viewed from a range of contextual and local perspectives, these top-down and distant processes often appear to represent power rather than humanitarianism or emancipation. Yet, the liberal peace also offers a civil peace and emancipation. These tensions enable a range of hitherto little understood local and contextual peacebuilding agencies to emerge, which renegotiate both the local context and the liberal peace framework, leading to a local-liberal hybrid form of peace. This might be called a post-liberal peace. Such processes are examined in this book in a range of different cases of peacebuilding and statebuilding since the end of the Cold War. This book will be of interest to students of Peacebuilding, Peacekeeping, Peace and Conflict Studies, international organisations and International Relations/ Security Studies.

What is peace and how should it be defined? In a radical critique of the dominant paradigm of peace, Oliver Richmond examines its components and its short-comings in the context of a variety of post-Cold War peace operations and associated peace-building projects. Richmond raises important questions about whether the liberal peace project is universally viable, and internally coherent. If indeed it is then how can its construction as the dominant response to contemporary conflicts be facilitated?

Hybrid Forms of Peace provides cutting edge research and debates from a range of leading experts and emerging voices in critical peace and conflict studies. Drawing on case studies from sixteen countries, it examines the role of everyday activities and hybridization in (re)shaping international peace-building on the ground. This book provides insights into the challenges – and opportunities – of building peace, and the role of localized forms of human agency in this. It is a must-read for scholars, students and practitioners of peace-building who wish to understand the 'on the ground' realities of peace-building in the contemporary era.

This special issue of Review of International Studies focuses on how International Relations (IR) communicates with the world, and vice versa. It opens up the discussion of the politics of communication within the discipline and beyond. With a variety of different mediums ranging from media, film, memory, music, culture, and emotions, this book seeks to accentuate their importance for IR, both as a source of knowledge and as an ideational exchange which shapes IR. It examines the diverse ways that multidisciplinary thinkers try to understand and explain global routes, mobilities, cultures, commodifications, singularities, discourses and aestheticisations. This special issue specifically addresses three interrelated themes: How international and global studies approach the question of communication, how to conceptualise and respond to the globalisation of communication and how global problems get communicated within and across the institutional settings of the epistemic disciplines in general, and the IR discipline in particular.

Critical thinking has prospered in the interdisciplinary study of peacebuilding over the last decade or so, despite (and perhaps because of) the certainties and systems offered by the comfortable, liberal-realist mainstream praxis. As the liberal state system, and the assumptions of the 'international community' and its capacity to control and govern appears now to have begun to unravel, so too the vibrancy of the debate in these areas has gathered pace. Critical agendas for peacebuilding offer an analysis of the deep complexity of rights and needs, and at one end of the scale a certainty in basic human sameness and goodness, while at the other, a more pluralist interest in difference and hybridity. They debate how sensitized and how 'local' such processes may be and ultimately, they seek to reduce the programmatic reliance on hard security, basic rights, dominant a priori institutions, markets, territoriality, and cultural normative systems.

Peace processes and international order are interdependent: while the latter provides the normative framework for the former, peacemaking tools and their underlying ideology also maintain international order. They indicate its viability and legitimacy partly by meeting local claims as well as though the maintenance of geopolitical balances. In the emerging multipolar order, the international peace architecture (IPA), dominated by the liberal international order (LIO), is contested through counter-peace processes. These processes contest the nature of the state, state-society relations and increasingly international order itself. This paper investigates the tactics and strategies of regional actors and great powers, where they engage in peace and order related activities or interventions. Given the weakness and inconsistency of the IPA and the LIO, such contestation leads to challenges to international order itself, often at the expense of the claims of social movements and civil society networks.

Art has apparently followed political power for much of history, while
avoiding representations of social, subaltern, and political resistance, or
experimentation with new approaches to emancipation. Less obviously,
however, this article outlines how a creative synthesis of critique, politics,
and representation has led to an evolving form of ‘artpeace’. This concept
appears to have been related to power and was thus limited and Eurocentric
in the past, but more importantly it has also provided a platform for critical
agency, resistance, and experimentation, with implications for the politics
of peacemaking. This article outlines what this means for various strands
of artpeace and their possible conceptual implications.

This article explores the nexus between the International Peace Architecture (IPA) and the Eastphalian Peace. The IPA subsumes ideas, norms, legal frameworks and institutions established for the purpose of maintaining international peace. The Eastphalian Peace encompasses phenomena associated with the rise of Asian powers such as China and India in their efforts to maintain or reform the IPA to meet the challenges of peacebuilding, statebuilding and development assistance in the twenty-first century. This article examines the contributions made by China and India to the IPA and analyses how the emergence of the Eastphalian Peace would impact on Stage Six of the IPA which is supposed to connect Peace with Global Justice (PGJ).

International mediators are often tasked to promote liberal norms. However, dilemmas created in diffusing these norms, influenced by the mediators' interaction with the conflict parties and a decline of the liberal international order, have fueled debates about how norms are diffused through mediation, whether mediators should and can promote norms, and what norms they promote. The IR literature provides rich theoretical frameworks on norms, which could help navigate these questions. Yet, mediation scholars have not systematically integrated ideational aspects in their analyses. This Special Issue fills this gap by providing the first comprehensive analysis of how norms matter in mediation. It thereby not only shares novel analytical insights on norms in mediation, but also enriches the conceptualizations of three central notions in the norms literature: the norm diffusion process, the agency of actors, and the nature of the diffused norms.

Recent critical academic work in Peace and Conflict Studies has concentrated on the agential aspects of peace but has somewhat neglected structural issues and the different types of power that may be an obstacle to peace. Yet, for peace to take root, to be emancipatory and truly transformative, it seems that issues of hard power, geo-politics and the structures of states, societies and economies need to be re-addressed in a new set of contexts. This special issue concentrates on how peace scholarship and agendas can be furthered in an era of realism, hard power, the primacy of geopolitics, nationalism, authoritarianism and unfettered capitalism. This article explores the fluid and multifaceted relationship between power and peace, while also introducing the contributions to this special issue.

The theories and doctrines related to peacekeeping, mediation, peacebuilding, and statebuilding, as well as other tools used to end war and conflict, raise a range of long-standing questions about the evolution and integrity of what might be called an international peace architecture. A narrow version of this term has
begun to appear in the context of peacebuilding through the United Nations, the African Union, the European Union, other regional actors, the international legal system, and the International Financial Institutions. This article proposes a much broader, historical version, with six main theoretical stages, which have, from a critical perspective, produced a substantial, though fragile, international architecture.

This article considers how an increasingly visible set of mobilities has implications for how peace and conflict are imagined and responded to. We are particularly interested in how these mobilities take form in everyday actions and shape new forms of peace and challenge existing ones. The article considers fixed categories associated with orthodox peace such as the international, borders and the state that are predicated on territorialism, centralised governance, and static citizenship. The article can be read as a critique of liberal peacebuilding and a contribution to current debates on migration, space and the everyday. Through conceptual scoping we develop the notion of mobile peace to characterise the fluid ways in which is being constructed through the mobilitiy of people and ideas. Abstract This article considers how an increasingly visible set of mobilities has implications for how peace and conflict are imagined and responded to. We are particularly interested in how these mobilities take form in everyday actions and shape new forms of peace and challenge existing ones. The article considers fixed categories associated with orthodox peace such as the international, borders and the state that are predicated on territorialism, centralised governance, and static citizenship. The article can be read as a critique of liberal peacebuilding and a contribution to current debates on migration, space and the everyday. Through conceptual scoping we develop the notion of mobile peace to characterise the fluid ways in which is being constructed through the mobilitiy of people and ideas.

The evolving connection between peace and justice depends on a long history of
expanded rights emanating from critical agency and global subalterns. Their political
scripts have partly driven the development of the international peace architecture
(IPA), a series of layers, sediments, and theories built up through international and
local scale peace praxis. It has often required an alliance with powerful actors and
an international consensus. Its evolution challenges the Western framed approach
to peacemaking from various directions – regional, methodological, theoretical, and
ethical. The logical scientific conclusion of this process appears to equate peace with
post-colonial versions of global justice and sustainability, drawing on subaltern perspectives and epistemological advances. However, blockages, counter-peace dynamics, including spoiling and authoritarian outcomes in many peace processes across the world, tend to underline the limited pragmatic traction of the peace-justice nexus.

The ‘long peace’ of the last twenty-five years has linked various forms of intervention–from development to peacebuilding and humanitarian intervention- with human rights. This ‘interventionary system/order’ model has premised its legitimate authority on expanded versions human rights, connected to liberal frameworks of democracy, rule of law, and capitalism in order to connect peace more closely with justice. Human rights offer a tactical way forward for those interested in conflict resolution, but this has led to unintended consequences. Unless conceptions of rights are continually expanded as new power structures and inequalities are uncovered and challenged, philosophical and material matters of distributive and historical justice remain.

There has been frequent reference to the concept of an emancipatory peace in the
critical academic literature on peace and conflict studies in IR, much of it rather naive.
It has developed an ecosystem of its own within debates on peace without drawing on
wider disciplinary debates. Terms such as ‘emancipation’ and its relative, ‘social justice’
are widely used in critical theoretical literature and were common parlance in previous
ideological eras. It was clear what such terms meant in the context of feudalism,
slavery, imperialism, discrimination, a class system, nuclear weapons and racism over
the previous two centuries. Now it is less clear in the context of changing peace praxis.

This article outlines a preliminary perspective of peace in IR resting on analogue and digital versions in mainstream and critical forms. It discusses their implications for long standing key debates in the discipline about war and peace. It argues that digital IR/ international relations were initially thought to be a breakthrough for global civil society and rights, which promised a more emancipatory form of peace by allowing individuals and civil society to challenge power structures more effectively, and by curtailing the bounding effects of territorialism, sovereignty and nationalism. This gave critical forms of agency space to network. However, a brewing ‘counter-revolution’ of what might be now called the ‘ancien regime’ once again, points to digital forms of governmentality, which replicates the liberal and neoliberal governmentalities of the last few decades. This may make the analogue ‘liberal peace’ look like a virtuous high-water mark in recent history. Furthermore, a digital version of peace has yet to be developed.

Recently there have been calls from policymakers around the world for practically engaged research to produce evidence-based policy for peace, security, and development. Policymakers aim to align three types of methodological approaches to knowledge about peace, security and development in international order: methodological liberalism at state and international levels, aligned with ‘methodological everydayism’, in order to constrain methodological nationalism. Policy operates through broad forms of intervention legitimated via the liberal peace framework, spanning military, governmental, and developmental processes, which scholarship is expected to refine. Critical scholarship is sensitive about intervention, however, often connecting methodological everydayism with global justice frameworks rather than methodological nationalism or liberalism.

Contrary to most debates about state formation this article outlines an alternative perspective on the shaping of political community- and the international- based upon the agency of actors engaged in peaceful forms of politics after war. Drawing on long standing critical debates it investigates the positive potential of ‘peace formation’, outlining the theoretical development of this new concept as a parallel process and often in opposition to modern state formation with which it is often bound up in. This perspective on the formation of political order has implications for the international peace architecture and its evolution, including in terms of a shift from analogue to digital form of peace.

The 'long peace' of the last twenty-five years has been marked by various debates on liberal-democratic peace, human rights, and cosmopolitanism. They are all linked with various forms of intervention-from development to peacebuilding and humanitarian intervention. This 'interventionary system/ order' model has come under pressure from a range of different fronts. This article examines how peace and development may be rethought in a global framework if the previous version of a progressive framework (i.e. the liberal peace) is now being revised and intervention has shifted toward neoliberal forms.

International relations theory, with a few honourable exceptions, has generally
avoided drawing attention to the biases of the ‘Greats’ and their contributions
on the politics of social order, change, and progress within the state or the
international system. Yet, they have been deeply – and somewhat problematically
– influential in providing the basis for a contemporary ‘international peace
architecture’ (IPA). The limitations of the ‘Greats’ help explain its conceptual and
practical instability, as the following essay outlines. Work on the state, international
system, justice and rights, and intervention, did not anticipate the limited
scope of such concepts and have themselves become sources of instability
‘after liberalism’.
Part II of this article develops the argument that in a century of industrialised
warfare, the international peace architecture (IPA) was caught in a series of
contradictions. It was drawn into a delicate balancing act of expanding rights
and decolonizing former empires, building law and international institutions,
making peace and managing war. Critical arguments emerged about appropriate
responses to these issues, drawing on, but also heavily constrained by,
their genesis in the ‘Greats’. Part II of this article examines this contradictory
process in greater detail.

This article reviews the recent academic and policy interest in hybridity and hybrid political orders in relation to peacebuilding. It is sceptical of the ability of international actors to manufacture with precision hybrid political orders, and argues that the shallow instrumentalization of hybridity is based on a misunderstanding of the concept. The article engages in conceptual-scoping in thinking through the emancipatory potential of hybridity. It differentiates between artificial and locally legitimate hybrid outcomes, and places the ‘hybrid turn' in the literature in the context of the continued evolution of the liberal peace as it struggles to come to terms with crises of access and legitimacy.

IR and related social science disciplines focusing on peace and conflict studies have enabled a bureaucratic understanding of peacebuilding of a liberal form of peace. This has extended into a neoliberal type of statebuilding. There is now an impressive international architecture for peace, but its engagement with its subjects in everyday contexts has been less impressive. This is partly due to the fact that IR has concentrated on elite power, problem-solving methodology, and positivist epistemologies, and has failed to understand the dynamics and agency of human society when it comes to peace. It requires an anthropological and ethnographic sensitivity to decolonise itself.

What does it mean to mediate in the contemporary world? During the Cold War and since various forms of international intervention maintained a fragile strategic and territorially sovereign balance between states and their elite leaders as in Cyprus or the Middle East, or built new states and inculcated new norms. In the post-Cold War era intervention and mediation shifted beyond the balance of power and towards the liberal peace, as in Bosnia Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Timor Leste. In the case of Northern Ireland, identity, territorial sovereignty, and the nature of governance also began to be mediated, leading to hints of complex, post-liberal formulations. This article offers and evaluates a genealogy of the evolution of international mediation.

Policy debates on conflict research, which are mostly directly used to develop practices of intervention, conflict resolution, peacebuilding, and statebuilding, emanate from common epistemic and ontological frameworks. All have been produced and perpetuated by key institutions in the global north through their encounter with historical direct and structural violence, both north and south. Power has followed Enlightenment knowledge, along with its various biases and exclusions. Its progressive normative, political, economic, and social assumptions about a 'good society' and an 'international community', have been fed through social science into the building of international institutions, IFIs, and the donor system. Using a method called ethnographic-biography, this article charts how the thrust of policy responses based on such assumptions have long tended to veer between interventionism, trusteeship, 'native administration' in disguise and the attempt to establish 'cordon sanitaires' around conflict zones.  It argues that in reality, peace thinking is mutually constructed as both positive and hybrid, confirming earlier critical work, but the research methods deployed to engage with social actors are sorely underdeveloped. This is illustrated through an analysis of the work of ‘local’ conflict scholars on their own peacebuilding and statebuilding processes in Cyprus, Kosovo, and Timor Leste.

As a response to the dynamics of state formation, statebuilding has not created
model states in the last twenty years as was intended. Instead, the states that have emerged
around the world are heavily contextually contingent. This is despite international
attempts to shape them according to a common pattern, dominated by neoliberal models of
statehood. This raises the question of what kind of hybrid states are actually forming as a
result of the encounter between international statebuilding and local political dynamics?
This article argues that international statebuilding aims to create neoliberal states and
treats local political dynamics as dysfunctional. Yet from a local perspective the limitations
of the statebuilding model are also apparent, as is the need for any locally legitimate state to
be grounded in its context.

Hybrid forms of peace represent a juxtaposition between international norms and interests and
local forms of agency and identity. A first stage may be tense forms of hybrid politics that maintain
structural violence, fail to resolve the contradictions between local and international norms,
and reflect the outsourcing of colonial style rule. This could be characterised as, or lead to, a
negative form of hybrid peace. A positive form of hybrid peace would have the advantage of
having resolved such contradictions through active rather than passive everyday agency. This
article examines this range of dilemmas surrounding debates about hybrid peace.

This article outlines the often countervailing forces and norms of state formation, statebuilding, and peacebuilding according to their associated theoretical approaches, concepts and methodologies. It introduces a new concept of ‘peace formation' which counterbalances the previous concepts' reliance on internal violent or externalised institutions' agency, reform and conditionality. Without incorporating a better understanding of the multiple and often critical agencies involved in peace formation, the states which emerge from statebuilding will remain as they are- failed by design, because they are founded on externalised systems, legitimacy and norms rather than a contextual, critical, and emancipatory epistemology of peace. Engaging with the processes of peace formation may aid international actors in gaining a better understanding of the roots of a conflict, how local actors may be assisted, how violence and power-seeking may be ended or managed, and how local legitimacy may emerge. It may also provide an understanding of how newly forming peaces may influence international order and the liberal peace.

Peacekeeping was a major contribution to the Twentieth Century project of peace in the sense of providing a tool through which a preliminary, negative peace could be consolidated in a state-centric world. Upon this basis an elite level peace agreement could then be mediated between states. However, integrated missions and peacebuilding interventions since the end of the cold war adopted a radically different approach, indicating an ambition to create a liberal state without necessarily receiving local consent. This indicated a shift towards a trusteeship framework, used to install more progressive forms of politics from the west’s perspective while enhancing regional security. The latest iteration of this has led to what might be described as neoliberal statebuilding. This has proven to be a dead-end, having done much to discredit the connection between intervention and peace, raising the question of what might replace it, especially in world of structural war and violence?

In debates about peace most discussions of power implicitly revolve around four types: (1) the hegemonic exercise of direct power related to force, and (2) relatedly, the existence and impact of structural power related to geopolitics or the global political economy; (3) the exercise of international governmentality, soft or normative power, by IOs; (4) and local agency, resistance, discursive or physical. Each of these types of power may be exercised from different sites of legitimate authority: the international, the state, and the local, and their legitimacy is constructed via specific understandings of time and space. Each type of power and its related site of authority has implications for making peace, especially given that they are often not well aligned with each other. ‘Ungovernmentality’, meaning resistance from subjects is the result if power and peace are misaligned. This paper examines in theoretical terms how types of power may be used to block, contaminate, or enable peace of various sorts.

It has become increasingly apparent that both the liberal peacebuilding framework of the 1990s (as defined by the UN’s Agenda for Peace), and the more critical responses since (as outlined in the recent High Level Panel Report on UN Peace Operations), have been surpassed by current events and new dynamics.

It is widely accepted among those working in, or on, international organisations, from the UN to the EU, UNDP, NATO or the World Bank, that statebuilding offers a way out of contemporary conflicts around the world: local, civil, regional and international conflicts, as well as complex emergencies, and for developmental issues. Most policymakers, officials, scholars and commentators involved think that they are applying proven knowledge unbiased by cultural or historical proclivities to the conflicts of others.

What is peace according to IR theory? This question appears to have been settled in favour of the liberal peace. This comprises a victor’s peace aimed at security, an institutional peace to provide international governance and guarantees, a constitutional peace to ensure democracy and free trade, and a civil peace to ensure freedom and rights.2 Though the concept of peace is often assumed to be central, it is rarely defined in IR theory. This raises issues related to an ontology of peace, culture, development, agency and structure, and their implications for ‘everyday life’.3

This volume is made up of chapters reflecting results from a European Union Framework project entitled ‘Cultures of Governance and Conflict Resolution in the EU and India’. In it the authors examine the intersection of governance, culture, and conflict resolution in two very different but connected epistemic, cultural, and institutional political settings: the world’s largest democracy and the world’s most ambitious regional organisation, the former resistant to the echoes of British colonialism and eurocentrism, and the latter strongly influenced by British and American thinking on the liberal peace....

RESUMO A ortodoxia familiar de construção da paz liberal depende da transplantação e da exportação de condicionalidade e dependência, com vistas a consolidar um contrato social entre populações, seus governos eo Estado, em que repouse uma paz liberal legítima e consensual. O que, com frequência, ocorre, é uma forma híbrida de paz liberal, sujeita a críticas locais poderosas, à resistência, por vezes, e à percepção de que a construção da paz internacional está fracassando em corresponder às expectativas.

Since UN peacekeeping and associated forms of international intervention in conflict zones took on a new significance at the end of the Cold War, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have also emerged as a vital part of the mechanisms of intervention, both in conjunction with traditional forms of peacekeeping, but more importantly in longer term prevention and peacebuilding tasks. These roles are intended to contribute to the construction of neoliberal, democratic entities in conflict zones, but they also raise a series ...

This volume analyzes various strategic choices and consequences resulting from NGO's dilemmas in peacebuilding interventions, relating to participation in peace negotiations, the development of post conflict institutions, as well as neutrality in monitoring and advocacy ...

This agenda-setting series of research monographs, now more than a decade old, provides an interdisciplinary forum aimed at advancing innovative new agendas for approaches to, and understandings of, peace and conflict studies and International Relations. Many of the critical volumes the series has so far hosted have contributed to new avenues of analysis directly or indirectly related to the search for positive, emancipatory, and hybrid forms of peace. New perspectives on peacemaking in practice and in theory, their implications for the international peace architecture, and different conflict-affected regions around the world, remain crucial. This series' contributions offers both theoretical and empirical insights into many of the world's most intractable conflicts and any subsequent attempts to build a new and more sustainable peace, responsive to the needs and norms of those who are its subjects.

Course description

This interdisciplinary MA explores the processes through which actors have attempted to define and build peace in areas affected by war and violence, particularly since the end of the Cold. Drawing on expertise from the fields of history, politics, anthropology and the arts, this new course will offer students the opportunity to engage with conflict management, conflict resolution, conflict transformation, peacebuilding and statebuilding theories and practices. Moreover, the programme will critically address the conceptualization of peace and the implementation of peacebuilding projects by global, regional, national and local actors, including the UN, the International Financial Institutions, development agencies and donors, INGOs, and local organisation in conflict-affected environments. In particular, it will focus on social agency for peace, the question of the nature of the ‘peaceful state’, and the ever-fraught question of the reform of the international system. The dynamics of these various contributions to peace will be the focus of a guided engagement, via local partner organisations, with the range of peace and conflict management actors present in either Bosnia Herzegovina or Cyprus (in Semester II).

Aims
Students will be able to show a critical understanding of:

1. Key issues and debates related to the theories of peace and practices of peacebuilding, statebuilding, conflict management, resolution, and transformation. Students will show familiarity with different theoretical approaches, practical problems and an appreciation of the diversity of policies at international, regional, national and sub-national levels. They will become familiar with the range of international actors and organisations, their policies and practices, and their pros and cons.

2. The range of social science topics which influence peacebuilding, statebuilding, conflict management, etc, (including political, historical, anthropological understandings of peace and related programming strategies).  Students will become familiar with the methodological and normative underpinnings of these disciplines and their concomitant effect on peacebuilding and a broad range of interventionary processes aimed at producing peace.

3. The analytical and policy literature concerning the related issues of peacebuilding, including international governance structures, the concept of statebuilding, foreign policy analysis and the role of  key actors and institutions including the state, multilateral and bilateral agencies, international and domestic NGOs as well as the military and other security actors. Concurrently, students will be able to evaluate the theory and policy tools in the context of the recent history of peacebuilding and statebuilding since the end of the Cold War, in a range of examples, including across the Balkans, Cambodia, Timor Leste, Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, the recent and various Arab Revolts, and others.

4.  An understanding of local approaches to peacebuilding, including an awareness of the problems and critiques associated with `bottom up' approaches. Student will also  engage with the current debates surround the nature of everyday peace and hybrid forms of peace, related questions about ‘local agency’ and forms of resistance, activism, and social mobilisation.
5. Students will experience the on-the-ground realities of peacebuilding and statebuilding through a guided visit to the range of actors involved in Bosnia-Herzegovina or Cyprus. This will form a key part of one of the core modules of the programme and will be run in association with local partners in either country.

6.  The development of a range of academic and professional/transferable skills through both independent and group-based work. Students will attain a detailed understanding of a specific conceptual and/or policy-related area of peacebuilding along with  implications and limitations of research findings on this subject, and of how to produce an original piece of academic research. This will be delivered via the dissertation module.

7. A detailed understanding of a specific conceptual and/or policy-related area of peacebuilding along with the implications and limitations of research findings on this subject, and of how to produce an original piece of academic research. This will be delivered via the dissertation module.


Special features

The Institute is developing a novel configuration for research and teaching which will uniquely associate practitioners, non-governmental organisation (NGO) partners, theoreticians, policy makers and analysts in sustained intellectual engagement. Combining a targeted programme of research with the provision of timely analysis on current emergencies and conflicts, the institute will seek to develop new methodologies in the emerging field of humanitarian and conflict response research.

Additional voluntary workshops and events throughout the year further enhance study including:

    The evidence of objects, a trip to the Imperial War Museum North
    Other Case Briefings (eg. Cyprus, Arab Uprisings)
    Policy Sessions: UN system and INGOs (Professor Dan Smith, International Alert)
    Manchester Peace Walk
    Working with Governments (Professor Dan Smith, International Alert )
    Regular `Leading Voices' workshops, with key thinkers in the field

Students studying this programme will also benefit from possible additional activities, such as:

    Student organised trips to London ( International Alert ), New York ( UN/IPA ) and Brussels
    Case Study Internships
    Attendance at annual Peacebuilding conference and potential participation in student panels.

Teaching and learning
Delivery of the course will take a range of forms, including lectures, seminars, tutorials, directed reading, and independent study.  Much of the delivery will be problem based/enquiry based learning.

This MA will be influenced and informed by the research of both staff and post graduate research students at the institute including research projects on:

    Political space in the aid industry
    Local/hybrid approaches to peacebuilding
    The contribution of BRICS nations to peace and security programming
    Critical peace studies
    The role of the state in peace and security programming
    Ethnographic approaches to understanding violence
    Refugees and internally displaced persons
    The political economy of conflict
    Performance in conflict and disaster zones
    Historical analyses of aid

Coursework and assessment
Students will assessed through several methods, with the aim of building up numerous academic and professional skills.  Forms of assessment will include:

    Research essays (3000 words +)
    The running of group workshops
    Reflective journals/learning logs
    Contribution to group discussion boards (electronically)
    Oral presentations
    Literature reviews/research design

Course content for year 1
Core Modules (15 Credits Each)  Students must take all of the following:

Peace and Social Agency, Security and Intervention: Theories and Practices                           

This module will introduce students to key theories and concepts related to the study of peace, security and conflict.  It will expose students to key debates related to these topics (both conceptual and practical) and provide students with an appreciation of the diversity of relevant policies at the international,  regional, national and sub-national levels. It will provide them with an analytical tool box which can be used to explore issues related to peacebuilding in theory and practice-tools which can be used in this module, other modules on the degree and in their professional lives.

Practical approaches to studying conflict-affected societies

This module explores issues of epistemology, positionality and research methods associated with field research in peacebuilding environments. This unit will involve a compulsory engagement with partners working in a conflict-affected society (BiH or Cyprus) that is intended to challenge the notion of a conventional fieldtrip and to expose students to the practical and ethical dilemmas of ‘field’ research.

    Reconstruction & Development (IDPM)
    Humanitarian Practice in Situations of Armed Conflict
    Dissertation (12 000 - 15 000 words) (60 Credits)

Optional Modules:  Students to choose 60 credits from the following:

    Arab Revolts and Revolutionary State Formation (15 Credits)
    Humanitarian and Conflict Response: Inquiries  (15 Credits)
    History of Humanitarian Aid (15 or 30 Credits)
    Global Health (15 Credits)
    Conflict Analysis (IDPM) (15 Credits)
    Ethics in World Politics (Politics) (15 Credits)
    Security Studies (Politics) (15 Credits)
    Human Rights in World Politics (15 Credits)
    Performance Theory and Practice (Drama) (30 Credits)

Please note that this is an indicative list and course modules may vary from year to year.

Peace is rarely celebrated, noted, or described, except in passing, or in juxtaposition with violence, a celebration of glory, or as a depiction of the horrors of violence. Much art depicting war and peace is related to power and to just war thinking. Depictions of the higher ethical dynamics of peace, in parallel to those of often repeated virtues of war, are rarely referred to. On the one hand it is clear that aesthetic and visual representations of peace, and the support of peace, has been a recurrent interest for artists, but on the other hand these representations have traditionally followed predictable and relatively limited themes. Yet, peace has been documented as a key part of human history, politics, and relations from very early on and has engaged a multidisciplinary group of thinkers. More recently, it has become clear that 'artpeace' may offer forward looking insights and may be able to identify inequality and injustice from below. Yet, such sources are easily lost though they may signal the emancipatory qualities that peace requires.

This article outlines a preliminary perspective of IR resting on analogue and digital processes, and discusses their implications for long standing key debates in the discipline about war and peace, sovereignty, order, and legitimacy. It argues that digital IR was initially thought to be a breakthrough for global civil society and rights. However, a brewing ‘counter-revolution’ of what might be now called the ‘ancien regime’ once again, instead points to digital forms of governmentality closely connected to older, analogue hierarchies.