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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 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"--

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

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.

This study explores three generations of approaches to ending conflict and examines how, in the context of the failings of the Westphalian international system, their peacekeeping, mediation and negotiation, conflict resolution and peacebuilding approaches as well as UN peace operations, and asks via an empirical and theoretical analysis, what role such approaches have played and are playing in replicating an international system prone to intractable forms of conflict

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

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.