Oliver P. RICHMOND

Professor of International Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Manchester

Theories and concepts of peace have long been scientifically and empirically developed and proven. They exist somewhere beyond practice in the ‘real world’, allowing us to use them to evaluate how states, governments, donors, political leaders, officials, civil society, social movements and others are performing. By all measures, today’s performance is poor and regressing when compared to what we know about peace from a scientific and scholarly perspective. 

The history of peace has revolved around, firstly, a ‘victor’s peace’, which was most common in imperial eras, and then, after World War I, at Versailles, the ‘liberal peace’ in which liberal states were to replace the imperial system and its tendency to collapse into large-scale war. The latter version was nested within what became known as the US-backed ‘liberal international order’ after World War II. It has, over the last decades, provided the most dynamic basis for innovation in peace-making in history: institutions, law, constitutions, rights, civil society, development and trade have been incorporated into its attempt to banish violence as a central tool of politics and to promote the ‘good life’. 

This complex agenda led to the standard liberal elements of a peace agreement, pieced together after 1945 and expanded after 1990 into a more comprehensive form (including, for example, a cease-fire, an elite-level power-sharing agreement, normally of liberal constitutional design, related political and economic reform, democratisation, human rights, non-violence, the rule of law, active civil society, development and international support). This solidified the modern international peace architecture, a layered and complex system of peace-making mechanisms and tools, which was itself finely balanced on the historical victor’s peace and balance of power models of the 19th century. 

As this concept came into contact with more varied types of political entities during decolonisation and again after the end of the Cold War, the liberal peace hybridised and localised. This enabled it to connect more closely with local social movements, cultures and identities, as seen in countries like Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, Colombia, Kosovo, Nepal and Timor-Leste, often in quite different and innovative ways. This also had the effect of widening our understanding of violence and peace, adding more layers to what can be seen as a deeply rooted and layered international peace architecture.

Yet, such expansion of the remit of peace had the unanticipated effect of weakening the liberal peace’s system of checks and balances, as well as sometimes becoming a platform for more conservative and reactionary forces. As the liberal international order fragmented with the mistakes in the American-led ‘war on terror’, and the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s, the liberal peace began to be undermined by what can be seen as often anti-scientific, ‘counter-peace’ dynamics. The subsequent argument that multipolarity and authoritarianism can support peace is not supported by historical evidence. In fact, they tend to undermine the liberal international order’s proscription of violence, return unchecked power to political, economic and military elites, and to block peace’s increasingly science-based, broad rights and sustainability focus, where doctrine and scholarship are closely aligned (as with the UN’s New Agenda for Peace of 2023). This ‘backsliding‘ process can be closely observed in the lack of progress in peace-making in Ukraine since the Minsk agreements in 2014-2015, which then culminated in a Russian invasion aimed at preventing a liberal peace there. It also prefigures the collapse and disregard of any Middle East peace process.

Past and present peace-making: no peace without justice

There is little scholarly doubt that contemporary peace has to be associated with justice. This has been the argument of scholars, social movements and civil society for time immemorial (as well as scholars and leaders from Immanuel Kant to Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela). The link is now well-represented in UN and donor policy documents, although perhaps more rhetorically and hypocritically on the part of individual state donors. In contrast, this linkage has been roundly rejected by power holders, elites, politicians, and officials throughout history, who are focused on what they often euphemistically term the ‘art of the possible’. They often have much to lose by linking peace with justice.

The old tribalisms of nationalism, ideology and authoritarianism, and their relations, regional war, proxy war, oppression and even strategies on (or over) the brink of being genocidal, are reappearing as a consequence. Making the peace-justice linkage even more complex and challenging is that it has become clear from the scholarship that the justice element must be understood in its broader sense, encompassing global justice for peace to be comprehensive and sustainable. This should include material and structural reforms if the outcomes of peacemaking, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and political reform are to be sustainable and widely legitimate with the global and local public, particularly in the Global South. Most peace processes and related tools have only recently begun to engage with such extensions. As I have noted above, however, there is an academic and policy debate which warns against these ambitions, instead suggesting that basic agreements or ceasefires are all that can be achieved. Such arguments tend to see the concept of peace as interchangeable with interests or security, as determined by great powers, rather than by science and scholarship. This instrumental approach characterises US President Trump’s recent dalliances with peacemaking in Ukraine, Gaza and the Middle East.

Counter-peace and an authoritarian international order

What happens when the gulf between what is scientifically understood to be necessary for peace, what politicians can practically implement and what is legitimate for the public, is so great that a peace agreement merely reflects very basic security and rights, if even that? The current direction of travel for peace-making seems to represent a regression towards outcomes built on victory, the utility of violence, long-standing stalemates and their eventual collapse. This framing in practice also means the rejection of human rights, justice and human security, as can be seen in the main recent failures experienced from Syria to Ukraine, and now Gaza. These are, at best, subject to ‘peace-washing’ processes of so-called peace-making, which disguise the escalation of violence by expectant victors. 

This gulf can be seen at the state level, in the donor system and within the UN, EU, AU and other organisations, which security interests have often constrained since the ‘war on terror’. International institutions and organisations often acknowledge scientific findings on peace in their doctrines (such as with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals), but in practice, they have increasingly been undermined. The US’s central role has been particularly unstable given that it underpinned the liberal international order since World War II, and yet has often selectively failed to support standards and norms (as with the Responsibility to Protect doctrine) during the war in Syria, and has allowed (or even enabled) human rights standards to collapse in Afghanistan, the Middle East and elsewhere. It is also fairly clear that for the EU, security, markets and the economy matter more than the norms and principles associated with peace in practice. However, it makes a greater effort to disguise the hierarchy that prioritises politics over law and principles.

Peace is now being blocked and undermined by political revisionism around the world, in Russia, China, amongst some of the BRICS, as well as in the West (supported by leaders such as Trump in the US, and his fluctuating cast of counterparts in Hungary, Israel, the UK, and others at various points). This revisionism has sought to re-establish the nation-state, valorise borders and territorialism and undermine global cooperation, as well as exploit the political utility of violence, and can be seen as a kind of counter-peace. This strips peace back to its most basic, Hobbesian qualities: a brief respite before the next war. Thus, the prospects for a peace that matches scientific scholarship in a multipolar, authoritarian world are extremely limited, if not implausible. 

What has become clear is that peace and peace-making practices must carry emancipatory goals to be widely legitimate; otherwise, any ‘authoritarian peace’ will need to be enforced coercively by the political elites whose power it maintains. Historically, similar moments of existential crises have been when the most dynamic thinking occurred about the future of peace, and its linkage to the nature of governance and the reform of political order (as depicted in Lorenzetti’s 14th-century painting, the Allegory of Good and Bad Government).

Future peace

A future peace is imagined in history at its most dangerous moments, often by civil, social, and subaltern groups, perhaps even by war’s victims. Their common equation of peace with justice means that the terms of an agreement and of any subsequent political reform, to be sustainable and durable, would have to address questions of historical justice, economic inequality, gender justice, racial justice, and environmental justice. This is where the most advanced scholarship points, and this pathway is also reflected in the UN’s Sustaining Peace Agenda. Central to these developments is the goal of pushing the utility of violence in all of its forms (structural, cultural, gender, racial and environmental) as a political tool to the farthest edges of politics.

Yet, in an age when wars are returning to the heart of international politics, it is striking how little innovation is emerging in the way peace is pursued. The tools we rely on – diplomacy, mediation, peacekeeping and peacebuilding – are mostly relics of past centuries, designed to maintain the liberal international order rather than reform it. They were designed for the Cold War, or earlier, and are now failing to meet the challenges of today’s fractured and multipolar world. If humanity is to have a sustainable ‘future peace’, we must think beyond patching up a failing system. This requires innovation not renovation, because history shows that political orders without peace-making tools eventually collapse as violence escalates. 

Connecting peace with global justice offers broad legitimacy and sustainability, which conceptually helps to overcome many of the difficulties the liberal peace model faced, because it limited its goals to the renovation of the existing hierarchy of states and refused to expand rights beyond the very basic. This marks the starting point for rethinking peace and political order during this period. 

Breakthroughs in peace-making usually emerge only after devastating wars, when structural innovation becomes possible. During the interim periods, only tactical ‘renovations’ were possible, aiming to moderate violence through ceasefires, modest peacekeeping missions, mediation, and dialogue – typically without addressing more profound injustices. These renovations stabilised the system temporarily but did not resolve the underlying causes of conflicts, meaning that over time, the legitimacy of the system eroded.

This all helps us understand the current situation, where predatory capitalism, wars, illiberal populism, and geopolitical rivalries have hollowed out the liberal international order. In the vacuum that has emerged, authoritarian powers are reviving older models of authoritarian order, characterised by a victor’s peace through force, hierarchy, and domination. Neither approach now offers a credible path toward sustainable peace, though the liberal international order clearly hosted thinking about innovation, even if not practised. A ‘future peace’ – a conceptual vehicle for bridging the gap between scholarly knowledge and practice – entails creating new political, social, economic, and cultural foundations for peace, ones that are inclusive, just, and capable of adapting to past and emerging threats. True innovation in peace-making would confront these structural issues directly.

Photo credits: Steven Zucker, Smarthistory co-founder
(Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0))