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The concept of peace has always attracted radical thought, action, and practices. It has been taken to mean merely an absence of overt violence or war, but in the contemporary era it is often used interchangeably with 'peacemaking', 'peacebuilding', 'conflict resolution', and 'statebuilding'. The modern concept of peace has therefore broadened from the mere absence of violence to something much more complicated. In this Very Short Introduction, Oliver Richmond explores the evolution of peace in practice and in theory, exploring our modern assumptions about peace and the various different interpretations of its applications. This second edition has been theoretically and empirically updated and introduces a new framework to understand the overall evolution of the international peace architecture.

The guiding principle of peacemaking and peacebuilding over the past quarter century has been "liberal peace": the promotion of democracy, capitalism, law, and respect for human rights. These components represent a historic effort to prevent a reoccurrence of the nationalism, fascism, and economic collapse that led to the World Wars as well as many later conflicts. Ultimately, this strategy has been somewhat successful in reducing war between countries, but it has failed to produce legitimate and sustainable forms of peace at the domestic level. The goals of peacebuilding have changed over time and place, but they have always been built around compromise via processes of intervention aimed at supporting "progress" in conflict-affected countries. They have simultaneously promoted changes in the regional and global order. As Oliver P. Richmond argues in this book, the concept of peace has evolved continuously through several eras: from the imperial era, through the states-system, liberal, and current neoliberal eras of states and markets. It holds the prospect of developing further through the emerging "digital" era of transnational networks, new technologies, and heightened mobility. Yet, as recent studies have shown, only a minority of modern peace agreements survive for more than a few years and many peace agreements and peacebuilding missions have become intractable, blocked, or frozen. This casts a shadow on the legitimacy, stability, and effectiveness of the overall international peace architecture, reflecting significant problems in the evolution of an often violently contested international and domestic order. This book examines the development of the international peace architecture, a "grand design" comprising various subsequent attempts to develop a peaceful international order. Richmond examines six main theoretical-historical stages in this process often addressed through peacekeeping and international mediation, including the balance of power mechanism of the 19th Century, liberal internationalism after World War I, and the expansion of rights and decolonization after World War II. It also includes liberal peacebuilding after the end of the Cold War, neoliberal statebuilding during the 2000s, and an as yet unresolved current "digital" stage. They have produced a substantial, though fragile, international peace architecture. However, it is always entangled with, and hindered by, blockages and a more substantial counter-peace framework. The Grand Design provides a sweeping look at the troubled history of peace processes, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding, and their effects on the evolution of international order. It also considers what the next stage may bring.

This work examines the development of the 'grand design' and various subsequent attempts to develop a peaceful international order, and its implications for the current international peace architecture. Oliver P. Richmond argues that post-WWII liberal peace, which has aimed to balance liberty with regulation through law, democracy, human rights, and free trade, has recently given way to a retrogressive, technologically driven neoliberal peace, which is more oriented towards free trade, counter-terrorism and insurgency, surveillance, and state security. 'The Grand Design' looks at the troubled history of peacebuilding in order to consider what the next-stage, 'post-liberal peace', might look like.

Peace and the idealist tradition : towards a liberal peace -- A realist agenda for peace : survival and a victor's peace -- Marxist agendas for peace : towards peace as social justice and emancipation -- Beyond a idealist, realist, or Marxist version of peace -- The contribution of peace and conflict studies -- Critical contributions to peace -- Post-structuralist contributions to peace -- Post-colonial contributions to peace -- New theories : the environment, actors, networks, mobility, and technology.

"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 international relations, 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 in IR 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 international relations. This study aims to redress this negative balance by arguing that IR 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 in IR, with new chapters discussing post-colonial and digital developments in the discipline. This book will be of great interest to students of peace and conflict studies, politics and International Relations"--

Cover -- Peace Formation and Political Order in Conflict Affected Societies -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I Theorizing the Social Formation of Peace -- 1. Peace Formation, Local Dynamics, and Transversal Networks -- 2. Four Paths for Peace Formation -- Part II Reconstructing the Empirical Evidence -- 3. Peace Formation in Practice -- 4. Cases Studies in Peace Formation I: Potential and Limitations -- 5. Case Studies in Peace Formation II: Transforming the State and Addressing the Causal Factors of the Conflict

International actors, including key states like the US and organizations such as the UN, EU, African Union, and World Bank, and a range of NGOs, have long been confronted with the question of how to achieve an emancipatory form of peace. This book argues that the localized 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 efforts

"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"--Publisher's website

"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"--Publisher's website

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.

"The quality of the peace arrived at via liberal peacebuilding approaches has been poor. The related statebuilding praxis has generally been unable to respond to its critics. What is at stake is a recognition of peacebuildings everyday political, social, economic, and cultural dynamics. This indicates the emergence of a post-liberal form of peace"--Provided by publisher

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