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Article Excerpt
An elaborate intellectual and policy framework has been constructed in order to preserve and protect "peace." The concept of peace is often used to refer to what Plato would have described as an "ideal form," or to depict a minimalist, realist-liberal version in which there is an absence of overt violence particularly between or within states. These common and differing usages illustrate that the concept of peace has generally been overlooked, and is often deployed in an ill-specified manner, while at the same time implying extraordinary levels of legitimacy. This article explores the consequences of not engaging with the concept of peace and outlines the possibilities inherent in opening up multiple conceptualizations of peace as a critical research agenda central to International Relations. KEYWORDS: peace, violence, conflict, critical research, international relations
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"Peace"--freedom from war, disturbance, or dissension (entered the English Language in twelfth century): quiet, stillness, concord (thirteenth century); peacemaker (fifteenth century) (1) Peace may or may not be a "modern invention" but it is certainly a far more complex affair than war. (2) The savage wars of peace ... (3) War is peace. (4)
Peace, and its conditions, is commonly assumed to be well understood by all who make up what is often referred to the "international community" of liberal states. An elaborate intellectual and policy framework has been constructed in order to preserve and protect that peace, which is often depicted as an "ideal form" (5) or conversely merely the absence of overt violence, particularly between or within states. Such ambiguity is reflected in the fact that war and peace have generally been studied together, but as separate concepts, with the emphasis on war and its management. The establishment of the discipline of international relations (IR) was intended to help elucidate the causes of war and the prerequisites for the attainment of peace, but IR's orthodoxy has been that peace is an unobtainable ideal form at worst and a limited balance of power at best.
The firm differentiation between even a limited peace and war is indicative of this orthodoxy, which increasingly appears to be anachronistic given the claims that many engaged in acts of violence make about peace in the contemporary world. Oppenheim's classic study of international law, dating from the nineteenth century, divided international law into two main bodies associated separately with peace and with war. (6) This classic distinction has generally been maintained as a pivotal difference representing significantly different discourses and conditions. It reaches back perhaps as far as the work of Gentili and Grotius and is aimed at representing peace and war, conflict, and violence, as distinctly different conditions, which need to be regulated. This focus on peace as simply the antonym of war is perhaps the reason why the concept of peace is rarely disaggregated or represented in plural forms in mainstream IR. This has for example, allowed for the contemporary concept of the "liberal peace" (7) to be represented as an objective and universal peace, rather than a product of a long evolution of both the concept and the methods used in its construction stemming from a particular set of experiences, interests, and perspectives. More recent contributions from critically inclined IR theorists have begun to open up a more nuanced understanding of peace and its many possible conceptualisations and issue areas, which offers potential for returning its consideration to a central position in IR.
This article attempts to open up the question of the different conceptualizations of peace--the problem of peace--as a central research agenda for IR. It argues that this represents an important "missing link" in IR theory (and not of the "Piltdown Man" variety). Within the discipline there are various contributions that engage directly and indirectly with the problem of peace. (8) In one way or another, these contributions can be brought together in order to advance our understanding of the problem of peace.
Conceptualizing Peace
Peace is rarely conceptualized, even by those who often allude to it. Not only has it rarely been addressed in detail, but also the theorization of peace in IR is often hidden away in debates about war and conflict. This is so even in the states, institutions, organizations, and agencies whose officials and representatives often present peace as an ideal form worth striving to achieve, and which dominate the discourses of IR in policy and in intellectual terms. (9) Making peace in the international system has mainly been conceptualized as Western activity derived from war, from grand peace conferences, and more recently, the sophisticated contemporary institutionalization of key norms and governance processes associated with the liberal peace. (10) Where theorists do attempt to engage with peace as a concept, they often focus upon units such as states or empires, thus broadly discounting the role and agency of individuals and societies in its construction and sustainability. (11)
For many individuals and actors within the international community, peace is reasonably well described by its Christian interpreters: "Peace is the tranquility of order" according to Saint Augustine. (12) These interpretations, like many, do not exclude lawful self-defense, meaning just war, once all peace efforts have failed. (13) War and peace are, of course, closely connected. This can be traced back throughout history, but specifically relevant to contemporary IR are two main waves of intervention by European states. The first was in the name of Christianity during the Crusades of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, and during the conquest of the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The second was a result of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialism, which was, of course, conducted in the name of "European civilization." (14) This tension continues to be reflected in contemporary debates about humanitarian intervention. One only has to examine the ideological formulations of the twentieth century to see how violent peace and its attainment might be. War has always been used to establish, expand, and objectify a specific version or conceptualization of peace, a peace that is just in the eyes of defenders or aggressors, as the 1990 Gulf War over Kuwait's sovereignty, or the Crusades over the possession of the Holy Land might illustrate. Defining and constructing peace has therefore always been a self-interested endeavor, even for idealists, though it may also be the case that violence deployed to attain a specific version of peace may be relatively less than the violence that would occur if an intervention did not take place (as with the argument commonly made over the US use of atomic weapons against Japan at the end of World War II). Many would agree with the assertion that "the logic of strategy pervades the upkeep of peace as much as the making of war." (15) Indeed, according to this view, war has the virtue that it prevents its own continuation by exhausting participants and resources, thus being the "origin of peace." From this somewhat tautological perspective, war has a "natural course" which is impeded by the practices of the "international community" relating to peace. (16)
Though there are many different terms for war in the English language, peace remains a sole denominator. (17) Though it may be subject to multiple interpretations, these are rarely made explicit even beyond orthodox approaches to IR. Though critical versions of peace research, conflict studies, development studies, cultural studies, other related areas, and IR are now implicitly converging on a disparate notion of emancipation as a prerequisite for peace, only peace research really entails an explicit conception of peace as being either negative or positive in character as a focus for its research and normative agendas. One of the problems that soon becomes apparent in any discussion of peace is the concept's tendency to slip into either a universal and/or idealistic form, or to collapse under the weight of its own ontological subjectivity. For this reason, a historical narrative of peace is fraught with difficulty and orthodox approaches to IR are forced to retreat behind rational problem-solving approaches to order, albeit self-interested and unashamedly rooted in a specific context, which are then projected globally on the basis of a claimed universalism.
As a consequence what has emerged has been an orthodox assumption that first the management of war must be achieved before the institutions of peace can operate, at a global, regional, state, and local level. Peace has, in Western political thought in particular, been enshrined first in the belief that only a limited peace is possible, even despite more utopian leanings, and recently that peace can now be built according to a certain epistemology. Militarization, force, or coercion have normally been the key mechanisms for its attainment, and it has been imbued with a hegemonic understanding of universal norms, now increasingly instilled through institutions of governance.
It is generally assumed by most theorists, most policymakers, and practitioners, that peace has an ontological stability enabling it to be understood, defined, and thus created. Indeed, the implication of the void of debate about peace indicates that it is generally thought that peace as a concept is so ontologically solid that no debate is required. There is clearly a resistance to examining the concept of peace as a subjective ontology, as well as a subjective political and ideological framework. Indeed, this might be said to be indicative of "orientalism," in impeding a discussion of a positive peace or of alternative concepts and contexts of peace. (18) Indeed, Said's humanism indicates the dangers of assuming that peace is universal, a Platonic ideal form, or extremely limited.
An emerging critical conceptualization of peace rests upon a genealogy that illustrates its contested discourses and multiple concepts. This allows for an understanding of the many actors, contexts, and dynamics of peace, and enables a reprioritization of what, for whom, and why, peace is valued. Peace from this perspective is a rich, varied, and fluid tapestry, which can be contextualized, rather than a sterile, extremely limited, and probably unobtainable product of a secular or nonsecular imagination. It represents a discursive framework in which the many problems that are replicated by the linear and rational project of a universal peace (effectively camouflaged by a lack of attention within IR) can be properly interrogated in order to prevent the discursive replication of violence. (19) This allows for an understanding of how the multiple and competing versions of peace may even give rise to conflict, and also how this might be overcome.
One area of consensus from within this more radical literature appears to be that peace is discussed, interpreted, and referred to in a way that nearly always disguises the fact that it is essentially contested. This is often an act of hegemony thinly disguised as benevolence, assertiveness, or wisdom. Indeed, many assertions about peace depend upon actors who know peace then creating it for those that do not, either through their acts or through the implicit peace discourses that are employed to describe conflict and war in opposition to peace. Where there should be research...
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