Oliver P Richmond | The University of Manchester (original) (raw)
Books by Oliver P Richmond
Edinburgh University Press, 2024
Artpeace represents a conceptual framing of the synergy between the arts and peacemaking, as well... more Artpeace represents a conceptual framing of the synergy between the arts and peacemaking, as well as a methodological strategy for addressing war and political conflict through the arts. Developing the concept of artpeace, this book investigates how local art projects in seven locations across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America have played a role in broader national peace projects. And it examines the blockages that, at times, prevent the arts from making a tangible difference to the variations of peace being designed.
Palgrave, 2023
This introduction outlines the book’s main argument that peace processes across the world have be... more This introduction outlines the book’s main argument that peace processes across the world have become systematically blocked in the post-Cold War era, indicating the emergence of proto-systemic counter-peace processes. Indeed, the dominant trend towards stagna-tion, reversal and collapse of internationally-sponsored attempts to create peace shows that peacemaking is failing. The chapter sketches the inter-national peace architecture (IPA), which the subsequent analysis shows as being entangled with counter-peace processes. Subsequently, some preliminary examples of failed peacemaking and some initial reflections on tactical blockages hint at the scale, scope and effectiveness of contem-porary counter-peace processes. The chapter concludes by introducing the structure of the book and its research questions.
Cambridge University Press, 2023
The international architecture of peacebuilding and statebuilding is currently responding to a sh... more The international architecture of peacebuilding and
statebuilding is currently responding to a shift from ‘analogue’ to
‘digital’ approaches in international relations. This is affecting conflict
management, intervention, peacebuilding, and the all-important role
of civil society. This Element analyses the potential that these new
digital forms of international relations offer for the reform of peace
praxis – namely, the enhancement of critical agency across networks
and scales, the expansion of claims for rights and the mitigation of
obstacles posed by sovereignty, locality, and territoriality. The Element
also addresses the parallel limitations of digital technologies in terms of
political emancipation related to subaltern claims, the risk of
co-optation by historical and analogue power structures, institutions,
and actors. The authors conclude that though aspects of emerging
digital approaches to making peace are promising, they cannot yet
bypass or resolve older, analogue conflict dynamics revolving around
power relations, territorialism, and state formation.
Edinburgh University Press, 2020
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academi... more Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com
Oxford University Press, 2022
The guiding principle of peacemaking and peacebuilding over the past quarter century has been "li... more 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.
ISBN 978-1-5261-4835-3, 2021
The book considers the construction of crises and how some issues are deemed crises and others no... more The book considers the construction of crises and how some issues are deemed crises and others not. A major finding from this comparative study is that EU crisis response interventions have been placing increasing emphasis on security and stabilisation, while neglecting human rights and democratisation. This changes - quite fundamentally - the EU's stance as an international actor and leads to questions about the nature of the European Union and how it perceives itself and is perceived by others.
This book is available as open access (free of charge) here: https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526148346/9781526148346.xml?rskey=mEjZmj&result=2
Contents
1 Introduction: controversies over gaps within EU crisis management policy - Roger Mac Ginty, Sandra Pogodda and Oliver P. Richmond
2 Critical crisis transformation: a framework for understanding EU crisis response - Oliver P. Richmond, Sandra Pogodda and Roger Mac Ginty
3 The potential and limits of EU crisis response - Pernille Rieker & Kristian L. Gjerde
4 The EU's integrated approach to crisis response: learning from the UN, NATO and OSCE - Loes Debuysere and Steven Blockmans
5 Securitisation of the EU approach to the Western Balkans: from conflict transformation to crisis management - Kari M. Osland and Mateja Peter
6 The paradoxes of EU crisis response in Afghanistan, Iraq and Mali - Morten Bøås, Bård Drange, Dlawer Ala'Aldeen, Abdoul Wahab Cissé and Qayoom Suroush
7 The effectiveness of EU crisis response in Afghanistan, Iraq and Mali - Ingo Peters, Enver Ferhatovic, Rabea Heinemann and Sofia Sturm
8 Dissecting the EU response to the 'migration crisis' - Luca Raineri and Francesco Strazzari
This encyclopaedia provides a comprehensive overview of major theories and approaches to the stud... more 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.
Routledge, 2020
This updated and revised second edition examines the conceptualisation and evolution of peace in ... 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 aim... more 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 Afg... more 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
Why have states that have emerged from intervention, peacebuilding, and statebuilding over the la... more Why have states that have emerged from intervention, peacebuilding, and statebuilding over the last 24 years or so appear to be ‘failed by design’? How far can local ‘peace formation’ dynamics counteract the forces of violence and play a role in rebuilding the state, consolidating peace processes, and inducing a more progressive form of politics? What emerges from the interplay of local peace agency with the (neo) liberal peacebuilding project? How do local peace actors, networks, and organisations develop their role, influence, and capacity, in the light of internal violence and external intervention? How do local peace actors engage with international actors? This study explores these and related questions in order to understand how local peace actors and networks develop their ability to counteract direct and structural violence, shape the state, and influence international actors. It offers a comparative range of case studies which endeavour to outline the signals peace formation provides for the full range of international actors concerned with peacebuilding.
Routledge, 2011
This book examines how the liberal peace experiment of the post-Cold War environment has failed t... more 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 pea... more 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?
with Jasmin Ramovic This volume is made up of chapters reflecting results from a European Union F... more with Jasmin Ramovic This volume is made up of chapters reflecting results from a European Union Framework project on '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. 1 These two entities have been divided by distance, colonialism, and culture, and yet have recently been brought closer together by the ideas and practices of what is known as liberal peace, new technologies and opportunities for travel, collaboration and exchange in a neoliberal context, and by cooperation over development projects. The differences between India and the EU are obvious in terms of geography, culture, language the nature and shape of institutions, and historical forces: and yet the commonalities between the two are surprising. The depth of cultural variation and scale as well as very significant institutional differences are obvious. Yet, there have not been many attempts to make such a comparison in the context of the post-colonial world order, at least.
Recent developments and debates have shown that there is a need and demand for a book on discipli... more Recent developments and debates have shown that there is a need and demand for a book on disciplinary and regional perspectives on peace, as there is a lot of discussion about the need for more interdisciplinary work in international relations and peace and conflict studies. Scholars, students, and policymakers are often disillusioned with universalist and northern dominated approaches. Universal blueprints on how to promote, build and sustain peace have lead not only to ineffective policy designs, but also to resistance within subject populations. Hence, this book aims to tease out the variations in the understanding of peace and its building blocks in different academic disciplines and across different regions in order to promote a more differentiated notion of peace based on comparative analysis.
Since the early 1990s, the projects of peacebuilding and statebuilding have increasingly been int... more Since the early 1990s, the projects of peacebuilding and statebuilding have increasingly been integrated. Since the early 2000s, this has been mainly an outcome of the United States and the United Kingdom's support for an active, muscular and humanitarian liberal internationalism. This has thrown up similar internal anomalies and inconsistencies that can also be observed in liberal forms of imperialism, as Hobson so accurately characterised at the start of the twentieth century. 1 As such issues have emerged, criticism has become more pronounced from a range of commentators, both local and international, policy and academic. This study examines the discourses of peace implicit in the theoretical and policy literatures relating to these debates, and investigates their impact in the context of a number of specific case studies chosen to represent the range and diversity of liberal peacebuilding. To date, there has been little research that has specifically focused on peace, as opposed to war or order. As a result, systematic inquiries into peace are rare and unsurprisingly there is an inadequate understanding of the contemporary conceptualisation of peace, nor its empirical dynamics. Both academics and policymakers, however, often see the advantage of a clearer understanding of the concept of peace as an alternative, a liberal assumption or an ideal type, both in theory and in empirical terms.
Hybrid Forms of Peace provides cutting edge research and debates from a range of leading experts ... more 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 Relati... more 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.
Edinburgh University Press, 2024
Artpeace represents a conceptual framing of the synergy between the arts and peacemaking, as well... more Artpeace represents a conceptual framing of the synergy between the arts and peacemaking, as well as a methodological strategy for addressing war and political conflict through the arts. Developing the concept of artpeace, this book investigates how local art projects in seven locations across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America have played a role in broader national peace projects. And it examines the blockages that, at times, prevent the arts from making a tangible difference to the variations of peace being designed.
Palgrave, 2023
This introduction outlines the book’s main argument that peace processes across the world have be... more This introduction outlines the book’s main argument that peace processes across the world have become systematically blocked in the post-Cold War era, indicating the emergence of proto-systemic counter-peace processes. Indeed, the dominant trend towards stagna-tion, reversal and collapse of internationally-sponsored attempts to create peace shows that peacemaking is failing. The chapter sketches the inter-national peace architecture (IPA), which the subsequent analysis shows as being entangled with counter-peace processes. Subsequently, some preliminary examples of failed peacemaking and some initial reflections on tactical blockages hint at the scale, scope and effectiveness of contem-porary counter-peace processes. The chapter concludes by introducing the structure of the book and its research questions.
Cambridge University Press, 2023
The international architecture of peacebuilding and statebuilding is currently responding to a sh... more The international architecture of peacebuilding and
statebuilding is currently responding to a shift from ‘analogue’ to
‘digital’ approaches in international relations. This is affecting conflict
management, intervention, peacebuilding, and the all-important role
of civil society. This Element analyses the potential that these new
digital forms of international relations offer for the reform of peace
praxis – namely, the enhancement of critical agency across networks
and scales, the expansion of claims for rights and the mitigation of
obstacles posed by sovereignty, locality, and territoriality. The Element
also addresses the parallel limitations of digital technologies in terms of
political emancipation related to subaltern claims, the risk of
co-optation by historical and analogue power structures, institutions,
and actors. The authors conclude that though aspects of emerging
digital approaches to making peace are promising, they cannot yet
bypass or resolve older, analogue conflict dynamics revolving around
power relations, territorialism, and state formation.
Edinburgh University Press, 2020
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academi... more Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com
Oxford University Press, 2022
The guiding principle of peacemaking and peacebuilding over the past quarter century has been "li... more 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.
ISBN 978-1-5261-4835-3, 2021
The book considers the construction of crises and how some issues are deemed crises and others no... more The book considers the construction of crises and how some issues are deemed crises and others not. A major finding from this comparative study is that EU crisis response interventions have been placing increasing emphasis on security and stabilisation, while neglecting human rights and democratisation. This changes - quite fundamentally - the EU's stance as an international actor and leads to questions about the nature of the European Union and how it perceives itself and is perceived by others.
This book is available as open access (free of charge) here: https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526148346/9781526148346.xml?rskey=mEjZmj&result=2
Contents
1 Introduction: controversies over gaps within EU crisis management policy - Roger Mac Ginty, Sandra Pogodda and Oliver P. Richmond
2 Critical crisis transformation: a framework for understanding EU crisis response - Oliver P. Richmond, Sandra Pogodda and Roger Mac Ginty
3 The potential and limits of EU crisis response - Pernille Rieker & Kristian L. Gjerde
4 The EU's integrated approach to crisis response: learning from the UN, NATO and OSCE - Loes Debuysere and Steven Blockmans
5 Securitisation of the EU approach to the Western Balkans: from conflict transformation to crisis management - Kari M. Osland and Mateja Peter
6 The paradoxes of EU crisis response in Afghanistan, Iraq and Mali - Morten Bøås, Bård Drange, Dlawer Ala'Aldeen, Abdoul Wahab Cissé and Qayoom Suroush
7 The effectiveness of EU crisis response in Afghanistan, Iraq and Mali - Ingo Peters, Enver Ferhatovic, Rabea Heinemann and Sofia Sturm
8 Dissecting the EU response to the 'migration crisis' - Luca Raineri and Francesco Strazzari
This encyclopaedia provides a comprehensive overview of major theories and approaches to the stud... more 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.
Routledge, 2020
This updated and revised second edition examines the conceptualisation and evolution of peace in ... 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 aim... more 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 Afg... more 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
Why have states that have emerged from intervention, peacebuilding, and statebuilding over the la... more Why have states that have emerged from intervention, peacebuilding, and statebuilding over the last 24 years or so appear to be ‘failed by design’? How far can local ‘peace formation’ dynamics counteract the forces of violence and play a role in rebuilding the state, consolidating peace processes, and inducing a more progressive form of politics? What emerges from the interplay of local peace agency with the (neo) liberal peacebuilding project? How do local peace actors, networks, and organisations develop their role, influence, and capacity, in the light of internal violence and external intervention? How do local peace actors engage with international actors? This study explores these and related questions in order to understand how local peace actors and networks develop their ability to counteract direct and structural violence, shape the state, and influence international actors. It offers a comparative range of case studies which endeavour to outline the signals peace formation provides for the full range of international actors concerned with peacebuilding.
Routledge, 2011
This book examines how the liberal peace experiment of the post-Cold War environment has failed t... more 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 pea... more 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?
with Jasmin Ramovic This volume is made up of chapters reflecting results from a European Union F... more with Jasmin Ramovic This volume is made up of chapters reflecting results from a European Union Framework project on '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. 1 These two entities have been divided by distance, colonialism, and culture, and yet have recently been brought closer together by the ideas and practices of what is known as liberal peace, new technologies and opportunities for travel, collaboration and exchange in a neoliberal context, and by cooperation over development projects. The differences between India and the EU are obvious in terms of geography, culture, language the nature and shape of institutions, and historical forces: and yet the commonalities between the two are surprising. The depth of cultural variation and scale as well as very significant institutional differences are obvious. Yet, there have not been many attempts to make such a comparison in the context of the post-colonial world order, at least.
Recent developments and debates have shown that there is a need and demand for a book on discipli... more Recent developments and debates have shown that there is a need and demand for a book on disciplinary and regional perspectives on peace, as there is a lot of discussion about the need for more interdisciplinary work in international relations and peace and conflict studies. Scholars, students, and policymakers are often disillusioned with universalist and northern dominated approaches. Universal blueprints on how to promote, build and sustain peace have lead not only to ineffective policy designs, but also to resistance within subject populations. Hence, this book aims to tease out the variations in the understanding of peace and its building blocks in different academic disciplines and across different regions in order to promote a more differentiated notion of peace based on comparative analysis.
Since the early 1990s, the projects of peacebuilding and statebuilding have increasingly been int... more Since the early 1990s, the projects of peacebuilding and statebuilding have increasingly been integrated. Since the early 2000s, this has been mainly an outcome of the United States and the United Kingdom's support for an active, muscular and humanitarian liberal internationalism. This has thrown up similar internal anomalies and inconsistencies that can also be observed in liberal forms of imperialism, as Hobson so accurately characterised at the start of the twentieth century. 1 As such issues have emerged, criticism has become more pronounced from a range of commentators, both local and international, policy and academic. This study examines the discourses of peace implicit in the theoretical and policy literatures relating to these debates, and investigates their impact in the context of a number of specific case studies chosen to represent the range and diversity of liberal peacebuilding. To date, there has been little research that has specifically focused on peace, as opposed to war or order. As a result, systematic inquiries into peace are rare and unsurprisingly there is an inadequate understanding of the contemporary conceptualisation of peace, nor its empirical dynamics. Both academics and policymakers, however, often see the advantage of a clearer understanding of the concept of peace as an alternative, a liberal assumption or an ideal type, both in theory and in empirical terms.
Hybrid Forms of Peace provides cutting edge research and debates from a range of leading experts ... more 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 Relati... more 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.
Peace praxis reconstituted itself after the Cold War into a liberal peacebuilding form aimed at m... more Peace praxis reconstituted itself after the Cold War into a liberal peacebuilding form aimed at maintaining the Liberal International Order (LIO). This was supposed to represent a comprehensive synergy of the scholarship and practices that emerged since the formation of the states-system itself. Since the end of the brief 'liberal' phase of the post-Cold War order, the focus has been on how to fit 'resilient' local agency, which the structure of global capital and digital technological advances, into international counter-insurgency and stabilisation regimes. This problem-solving epistemology and methodological framework has pitted a failing liberal international order against a burgeoning set of peace blockages and counterpeace strategies, observable in ontological terms as well as in strategic and tactical practices, which have led to the re-emergence of an 'authoritarian international order' (AIO). This paper theoretically examines and compares peacemaking under both the LIO and the AIO. It demonstrates that their mutual and differing weaknesses have muddied the critical and emancipatory potential of peacemaking, as this paper lays out.
With the publication of Agenda for Peace the UN system opened its peace interventions up to criti... more With the publication of Agenda for Peace the UN system opened its peace interventions up to critiques that allowed a tentative incorporation of ethnographic, feminist, and rights-based approaches. Yet, subsequent efforts to reform the International Peace Architecture (IPA) have been more limited. A critical analysis indicates that legitimate political claims from outside Western understandings of peacemaking have been marginalised, despite the growing prominence of non-Western discourses. A liberal or constructivist approach might suggest such differences can be bridged and that a multipolar order might well develop a capacity for peacemaking. In the emerging multipolar order, the 'liberal alignment' appears to have broken down. This paper critically evaluates the potential for peacemaking in a liberal aligned order versus a multipolar misaligned order. In the former, a stalemate dynamic of peacemaking tends to emerge, whereas the misaligned version typically generates an oppressive and unstable victor's peace. Another difference lies in the engagement with critical scholarship: the response of liberal peacemaking to feminist, ethnographic, postcolonial, environmental, and post-liberal critiques was limited and ultimately insufficient.
Millennium, 2024
The following theoretical essay reassesses the critical project for peace and conflict research, ... more The following theoretical essay reassesses the critical project for peace and conflict research, and the implications of the related ‘local turn’. This represented an attempt to connect peace and justice more closely together by uncovering localised and subaltern political claims in conflict-affected societies, drawing on concepts of the everyday and hybridity, and on post-colonial and critical debates. The local turn’s subsequent and wide-ranging applications and appropriation were a reaction to the structural findings that were emerging in the field, which was no longer so clearly organised around hegemonic epistemologies, but was developing new ethico-political groundings (some of which indicated the direction of the emerging ‘sustainable development’ and ‘sustaining peace’ framework). The local turn’s critical implications transcend such doctrines even if its wider application has often been problematic.
The dominant research methodologies, conceptual, and practical doctrines of the post-Cold War ord... more The dominant research methodologies, conceptual, and practical doctrines of the post-Cold War order widely related to peacemaking indicated a convergence around limited goals for peacemaking, international mediation, and conflict resolution. These problem-solving approaches, which operate within the contradictory frameworks of the liberal international order, Realism, and geopolitical pragmatism, have led to unintended consequences because of such parsimony. This paper examines these post-Cold War consequences of the dominant epistemological developments in peacemaking.
European Journal of International Relations, 2023
Peace processes and international order are interdependent: while the latter provides the normati... more 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.
Review of International Studies, 2023
In the face of the current decline or spectacular collapse of peace processes, this article inves... more In the face of the current decline or spectacular collapse of peace processes, this article investigates whether peace has become systematically blocked. It investigates whether the ineffectiveness of an 'international peace architecture' (IPA) can be explained by a more potent counterpeace system, which is growing in its shadow. It identifies counterpeace as proto-systemic processes that connect spoilers across all scales (local, regional, national, transnational), while exploiting structural blockages to peace and unintended consequences of peace interventions. It elaborates three distinct patterns of blockages to peace in contemporary conflicts across the globe: the stalemate, limited counterpeace, and unmitigated counterpeace. Drawing on the counterrevolution literature, this research asks: Have peace interventions become the source of their own undoing? Which factors consolidate or aggravate emerging conflict patterns? Are blockages to peace systemic enough to construct a sedimentary and layered counterpeace edifice?
Journal of Resistance Studies, 2022
Art has apparently followed political power for much of history, while avoiding representations o... more 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.
Global Society, 2021
This article explores the nexus between the International Peace Architecture (IPA) and the Eastph... more 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).
Swiss Political Science Review, 2020
International mediators are often tasked to promote liberal norms. However, dilemmas created in d... more 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.
Peacebuilding, 2021
Recent critical academic work in Peace and Conflict Studies has concentrated on the agential aspe... more 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.
JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING, 2021
This article analyses how criminal governance creates blockages that prevent peace formation in L... more This article analyses how criminal governance creates blockages that prevent peace formation in Latin America. Two blockages emerge where criminal governance prevails: criminal structures do not reduce violence and also take advantage of cultural and structural violence; their legitimacy pushes the state away from citizens. Consequently, civil society usually responds in two ways: promoting alternative forms of political praxis against violence; fostering dialogue between political actors and civil society while building broader networks. Our argument shows that local agency has potential competences and the knowledge necessary to address criminal governance discursively, but its capacity to effect structural change is limited in direct terms.
Nature, 2021
PDF version For peace-making, artificial-intelligence and data-driven approaches (see, for exa... more PDF version
For peace-making, artificial-intelligence and data-driven approaches (see, for example, W. Guo et al. Nature 562, 331–333; 2018) should be viewed only as complements to the existing international architecture (see go.nature.com/3q13tpe). To predict and prevent war, political will and policy innovations are still necessary.
Conflict, Security & Development, 2021
While often caused by conflict, crises are treated by the EU as a phenomenon of their own. Contem... more While often caused by conflict, crises are treated by the EU as a phenomenon of their own. Contemporary EU crisis management represents a watering down of normative EU approaches to peace- building, reduced to a technical exercise with the limited ambition to contain spillover effects of crises. In theoretical terms this is a reversal, which tilts intervention towards EU security interests and avoids engagement with the root causes of the crises. This paper develops a novel crisis response typology derived from con- flict theory, which ranges from crisis management to crisis resolution and (critical) crisis transformation. By drawing on EU interventions in Libya, Mali and Ukraine, the paper demonstrates that basic crisis management approaches are pre-eminent in practice. More pro- mising innovations remain largely confined to the realms of dis- course and policy documentation.
European Journal of International Security, 2021
The theories and doctrines related to peacekeeping, mediation, peacebuilding, and statebuilding, ... more 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.
GLOBALIZATIONS, 2020
The international architecture of peacebuilding and statebuilding, with the United Nations’ effor... more The international architecture of peacebuilding and statebuilding, with the
United Nations’ efforts central among them, is currently responding to a shift
from ‘analogue’ to ‘digital’ approaches in international relations. This is
affecting intervention, peacebuilding and development. This article analyses
the potential that these new digital forms of international relations offer for
the reform of peacebuilding – namely, the enhancement of critical agency
across networks and scales, the expansion of claims for rights and the
mitigation of obstacles posed by sovereignty, locality and territoriality. The
article also addresses the parallel limitations of digital technologies, as well as
the risk of co-optation by historical and analogue power structures, existing
modi operandi and agendas of the United Nations, and other international
actors. We conclude that though aspects of emerging digital approaches to
peacebuilding are promising, they cannot yet bypass or resolve older,
analogue conflict dynamics revolving around the state, territorialism, and
state formation.
This article considers how an increasingly visible set of mobilities has implications for how pea... more 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.
Asian International Studies Review, 2021
The evolving connection between peace and justice depends on a long history of expanded rights e... more 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.
Australian Journal of International Affairs
The ‘long peace’ of the last twenty-five years has linked various forms of intervention–from deve... more 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 academ... more 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.
Global Change, Peace & Security, 2020
This article outlines a preliminary perspective of peace in IR resting on analogue and digital ve... more 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.
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies
“Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile... more “Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.”
(Foucault, cited in Dean & Villadsen 2016, p. 92)
It has become increasingly apparent that both the liberal peacebuilding framework of the 1990s (a... more 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.
We know a lot about an emancipatory peace by now, both in terms of war settlements since Westphal... more We know a lot about an emancipatory peace by now, both in terms of war settlements since Westphalia, and in terms of structural violence and inequality after the Cold War. We know that military security and law and order are required. From the post-Cold War, we know that a state and institutions, along with law and public services are necessary. We know that empathy for every conditions and assistance with settlement and sustainable development are needed. We know that a recognition of identity is required, along with complex constitutional, and regional architectures, all lessons of the Twentieth Century. We know that a global agreement on norms and international organisation is also necessary. Finally, we have learned that local agency and the everyday very important, and often in unexpected ways. We also now understand the limitations of political liberalism, of neoliberal approaches to capital and development, the problem of the arms economy, and the limits of technology in achieving peace.
The article I wrote for JISB in 2009 now looks dated, though I am pleased it sparked some debate.... more The article I wrote for JISB in 2009 now looks dated, though I am pleased it sparked some debate. It was of its time, being part of a whole swathe of work I did on peace and its development during the 2000s, drawing on peace and state building examples from around the world, which had concluded with some thoughts on the potential of hybrid peace. 2 It mainly worked within the liberal church, in effect, querying the fit of liberalism contra different conflict-affected contexts. It was nevertheless trying to push beyond the disciplinary borders of political liberalism and neoliberalism. Influenced by my readings of critical and Marxist influenced debates in IR, including Gramsci, De Certeau, Lefebvre, Foucault, JS Scott, Spivak, some IR scholars like Andrew Linklater, Vivienne Jabri, and Rob Walker, and others who had previously worked upon the everyday from peace and gender perspectives, including the Bouldings and Christine Sylvester, it looked at issues of resistance, legitimacy, agency, against a putative ideal state that peacebuilding appeared to propose. Peace at that time was mainly seen in the broad context of the end the Cold War. However, my article's emancipatory intent and gentle criticism of the mainstream, some of the risks of literal understandings of liberalism, and the shift to neoliberalism, are now even more in tension. At the time the debates were just beginning to push against the post-Cold War
To cite this article: Oliver P. Richmond (2015) Security cosmopolitanism or 'securitopia': an ont... more To cite this article: Oliver P. Richmond (2015) Security cosmopolitanism or 'securitopia': an ontological trap and a half-hearted response to structural war?, Critical Studies on Security, 3:2, 182-189,
One of the key problems facing the peacebuilding, humanitarian and development communities is tha... more One of the key problems facing the peacebuilding, humanitarian and development communities is that in an age of structural violence and structural war, the liberal peace/ neoliberal state model of the last quarter of a century has lost access and legitimacy, to greater or lesser degrees, partly in parallel with the apparent decline of the status and reach of the US, EU, and UK. The model has had difficulty dealing with open as well as structural violence, and indeed, may have carried forward structural violence in some cases. Such approaches have lost traction with recipient political leaders (who often have a lot to lose) and can now shop around the "new" (and not so fussy) donors. They have lost clear and progressive direction from international actors (including the US, UK, UN, EU and others), and have lost legitimacy amongst local conflict-affected societies (who often want assistance without political or normative strings attached).
It is widely accepted among those working in, or on, international organisations, from the UN to ... more 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.
The Oxford Handbook of Peacebuilding, Statebuilding, and Peace Formation, 2021
This chapter outlines the development of the concepts of peace, peacebuilding, and statebuilding'... more This chapter outlines the development of the concepts of peace, peacebuilding, and statebuilding's relationship with critical theory, and what this means for the development of peace formation. The latter is a more contextually sensitized, ethico-political and every day praxis also connected to policy doctrines, the state framework, and the international architecture. Indeed, it is formative of such political frameworks. We argue that critical theory has made very significant contributions in holding peacebuilding and statebuilding praxis to account and creating a platform for the emancipatory expansion, perhaps via peace formation from below and cognizant of postcolonial renderings of power. In theory, this allows for a more substantial and critically oriented praxis of peace, one which may influence global politics as statist, neoliberal, and geopolitical frameworks lose their legit imacy.
The Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice, 2024
Debates about peace and justice have long been locked into a stalemate over whether one negates o... more Debates about peace and justice have long been locked into a stalemate over whether one negates or supports the other. The legitimacy of peacebuilding was based originally on human rights and democracy, and later upon local ownership and social claims. Increasingly geopolitics and geoeconomics have blocked the deepening of the peace agenda in the light of subaltern claims, postcolonialism, law, and global justice. Transitional justice debates can be seen as both a palliative and the outcome of this stalemate. This debate cannot be resolved without advancing our understanding of peace from the agreement or state level to a contemporaneous understanding, and extending the concept of justice that is generally referred to from a micro to a global level to take account of temporal, historical, distributive, environmental, and related matters on a local to global scale.
The Palgrave Handbook of Disciplinary and Regional Approaches to Peace, 2016
What is peace according to IR theory? This question appears to have been settled in favour of the... more 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
Liberal Peace TransitionsBetween Statebuilding and Peacebuilding, 2009
Manchester University Press
This volume is made up of chapters reflecting results from a European Union Framework project ent... more 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....
A Requiem for Peacebuilding?
Palgrave Advances in Peacebuilding, 2010
Whose Peace? Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding, 2008
Bahar Rumelili (ed.), Conflict Resolution and Ontological Security: Peace Anxieties, Routledge, 2015.
Concepts in World Politics, 2016
These two books can be seen as embodying the current critical backlash within the Peace Studies f... more These two books can be seen as embodying the current critical backlash within the Peace Studies field that is directed against the universalist approach to peace widely applied in international interventions. The Transformation of Peace is a concise yet thorough genealogy of the liberal peace paradigm, which forms the discursive backdrop and methodological blueprint for action by the 'international community'.
Taken together, these two volumes represent variations on the mainstream of peace and conflict re... more Taken together, these two volumes represent variations on the mainstream of peace and conflict research in international relations, normatively based on liberal assumptions, and focused on the key areas of peacebuilding and statebuilding. They equate sustainable peace with a state framework for market democracy and civil society, and will no doubt be widely read and appreciated for some good reason. In the case of the Paris and Sisk volume, this will be so especially in North America where the language and methodology employed is perhaps most resonant. The work of many of the authors included in these two books has been influential. Chapters summarise the range of issues in mainstream debates well, bringing together an interesting range of papers. Yet, to my mind the dilemma that they represent for scholars and practitioners involved in international intervention, whether conflict management, resolution or transformation, mediation and negotiation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding or statebuilding, is an old one which these two volumes, able and scholarly though they are, ultimately skirt around.
RESUMO A ortodoxia familiar de construção da paz liberal depende da transplantação e da exportaçã... more 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.
International Peacekeeping, Jan 1, 2009
Global society, Jan 1, 2007
International Peacekeeping, Jan 1, 2003
Since UN peacekeeping and associated forms of international intervention in conflict zones took o... more 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 ...
New Perspectives on Liberal …, Jan 1, 2009
This agenda-setting series of research monographs, now more than a decade old, provides an interd... more 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.
Peacebuilding is a peer-reviewed international, comparative, multidisciplinary journal open to a... more Peacebuilding is a peer-reviewed international, comparative, multidisciplinary journal open to articles on making peace in contemporary and historical cases of conflict-affected societies. It aims to provide in-depth analyses of the ideologies, philosophies, interests, and policies that underpin programmes and initiatives designed to build peace, security, and order, and to connect with debates being held by policymakers, civil society, scholars and students. Our interest spans, but is not confined to, critical interrogations of international and local, formal and informal, peace processes, peacebuilding, mediation, peacekeeping and peace-enforcement, development, and statebuilding. We seek to support the examination of these concepts and policies against the backdrop of interdisciplinary theorising connected to realist, liberal, constructivist, critical, post-structural, post-colonial, and non-western theories, as well as encouraging an engagement with emerging theories of global justice, digital international relations, and new materialism, among others.
Peacebuilding is open to quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and particularly welcomes submissions that are prepared to challenge orthodox views and add new empirical insights into scholarly debates. For example, we are interested in submissions from a post-colonial perspective of peace and order, or utilising ethnographic methodologies able to highlight subaltern voices, positionalities, and local claims in the context of hybridity and related power-relations. Contributions from the ‘subjects’ of peace processes, peacebuilding, etc., as well as theoretical and methodological innovations (for example creative, critical and ethnographic work, whether on or in conflict-affected societies, or on donors and international actors) are particularly welcome.
The editors are interested in how dominant ‘peace’ paradigms produce political subjectivity, and how this is responded to by their recipients. Rethinking approaches to peace is particularly crucial if this area of study is to move beyond its current liberal or neoliberal position. Peacebuilding periodically includes reports and field notes on the work of major donors and peacebuilding organisations. We publish collective discussion pieces that decentre and challenge dominant knowledge on peace and conflict studies, and promote new, critical alternatives on peacebuilding.
Pax In Nuce (Peace in a Nutshell) is designed as a forum for the exchange of ideas on the latest ... more Pax In Nuce (Peace in a Nutshell) is designed as a forum for the exchange of ideas on the latest thinking in relation to peace and conflict studies. The articles are short (hence ‘in a nutshell’) and accessible, and include contributions from some of the leading thinkers and practitioners on peace and conflict.
Pax In Nuce was established by a group of scholars in the UK, but is not aligned with any one institution or person. It is a site for debate, argument and the floating of ideas.
The site was established out of frustration at the high pay-walls erected by commercial academic publishers. These pay-walls mean that many academic articles are only available to those who are affiliated with (well-funded) academic libraries. This goes against the notion of academic freedom, and we hope that Pax In Nuce can help circumvent the privatisation of knowledge and help with the sharing of ideas and opinions. We welcome contributions from anyone – whether articles or responses to articles. Submit to paxinnuce@paxinnuce.com
The global and regional dimensions of many contemporary conflicts, as in the Middle East, and the... more The global and regional dimensions of many contemporary conflicts, as in the Middle East, and the persistence of poverty and insecurity across many conflict-affected and underdeveloped countries have triggered millions of people to seek refuge in Europe and other secure regions. For many individuals and communities’ mobility has become the only viable option to escape conflicts, material inequality, and structural violence, given the limits of sovereign diplomacy, international humanitarian intervention, and development. The protracted refugee crisis and the constant movement of economic migrants continue to dominate the international security agenda and are directly challenging global institutions as well as the modern state, and social affection towards those in need. The contemporary security regimes of states and international actors have become both the solution and obstacles to the protection of civilians affected by protracted conflicts and the emergence of peace. The politics of denial and mistreatment of conflict affected subjects and economic migrants are eroding the basis of the international trust and cooperation and highlighting their failure to uphold to international human rights obligations. The mobility of people intermeshed with growing insecurities from transnational terrorism and economic crisis have triggered multiple securitisation, discrimination, and disintegration processes, which have far-reaching implications for those seeking refuge and host communities. On the other hand, liberal and neoliberal versions of peace are predicated on static citizens, states, borders, and institutions. This conference seeks to explore the nexus between mobility, networks, scale, and (in)security. It aims to expand our knowledge of the conditions for peace under more mobile and networked forms of agency, and the role these processes have in shaping contemporary security, development, and peacebuilding policies. What type of peace and security might mobile and networked forms of agency imply, and what facilitates and blocks such aims?
Course description This interdisciplinary MA explores the processes through which actors have ... more 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 praxis reconstituted itself after the Cold War into liberal peacebuilding aimed at maintain... more Peace praxis reconstituted itself after the Cold War into liberal peacebuilding aimed at maintaining the Liberal International Order (LIO). This was supposed to represent a comprehensive synergy of the scholarship and practices that emerged since the formation of the states-system itself. Since the end of the brief ‘liberal’ phase of the post-Cold War order, the focus has been on how to fit ‘resilient’ local agency, which the structure of global capital and digital technological advances, into international counter-insurgency and stabilisation regimes. This has pitted a failing liberal international order against a burgeoning set of peace blockages and counter-peace strategies, which have led to the re-emergence of an ‘authoritarian international order’ (AIO). This has muddied the potential of peacemaking, as this paper lays out.
Peace is rarely celebrated, noted, or described, except in passing, or in juxtaposition with viol... more 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, ... more 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.