Critical approaches to the IPA

The emergence of an IPA is partly a consequence of an historical evolution to combat war and associated forms of political violence in its evolving forms, through which there have been six main stages or layers, often overlapping. Partly it represents a linear process that can be traced in systemic layers that have built up to combat war, and can be seen through standard liberal theories and methods. Partly it represents different global, regional, and state forms of hegemony, and partly it represents the circulation of critical and subaltern agency and the political claims made for emancipation in a rhizomatic framework. The development of each stage is also a response to the failures of the previous stage as well as representing attempts to engage with global structural change and new forms of conflict and violence that are constantly emerging. Most importantly, each stage is a vehicle for the expansion of subaltern and human rights claims across the international system, which has influenced the development of the social contract, the nature of the state, and international order itself.Footnote ¹⁰ Each stage carries its own ontologies, epistemological framing, empirical examples, and methods.

Shedding light on the development of the IPA, using a critical-historical methodologyFootnote ¹¹ aimed at underlining the mutual interweaving and construction of subaltern, state, and international political frameworks (which incorporate emancipatory claims, constitutions, law, and institutions) helps to understand the evolution of an overall historical IPA framework. This is rather than focusing solely on power, sovereignty, territory, and perhaps diplomacy. It also helps situate order-maintenance methods and tools such as peacekeeping, conflict transformation, peacebuilding, or statebuilding. It helps understand the types of peace that have been the goal at each stage, the pressures on them, and how they may advance.

In terms that are relative to the conditions and outcomes of war, the most successful international and state level peace architecture in modernity was the liberal peace framework, albeit only in relative terms to the systems of geopolitics, imperialism, civil and industrial war that it contended with. The systems of power and interest were modified by its ethical systems of rights and duties, but still depended upon on a long-standing geopolitical balance of power or hegemonic support. Yet, soon after its post-Cold War apogee, the liberal peace system was reshaped from above and below by international and local actors engaged in peacebuilding and a range of other peace related activities.Footnote ¹² They incorporated military intervention, liberal democratic and capitalist state reform of conflict-affected states, in many countries as diverse as Cambodia, Timor Leste, Sierra Leone, DRC, Liberia, El Salvador, Bosnia and Kosovo.Footnote ¹³ The liberal peace framework was a substantial stage in the IPA, a flawed one that required propping up. There are several lines of critique that emerged: that liberal peace watered down rights and equality, was not concerned with sustainability or broader forms of justice, marginalised grounded legitimacy, resolved wars in support of Western hegemonic order, and could not hold its position in the IPA.

However, from a more critical perspective, foregrounding ethical questions about political order where power and knowledge determine war and peace, pointed to the validity of alternative forms of organisation. These were inherent in hybrid political orders, resistance, and the hidden workings of power and stratification, as mounting dysfunctionality drove the subsequent ‘local turn’.Footnote ¹⁴ This set of approaches pointed to the salience not just of geopolitics and diplomacy, political-economy, or even liberal internationalism for peacemaking, but also everyday and hybrid forms of peace from a postcolonial perspective.Footnote ¹⁵ This approach was in parallel to the postcolonial interest in alternative types of international order.Footnote ¹⁶ This approach has been divided between descriptive, prescriptive, and emancipatory approaches.Footnote ¹⁷

Much evidence was found for the development of hybrid peace processes driven by local agency,Footnote ¹⁸ determined to reclaim some version of an emancipatory peace in the subsequent marriage of institutional and ethnographic research as an emancipatory response to more dominant problem-solving approaches or more banal descriptive approaches.Footnote ¹⁹ This process in turn has led to a discussion in the academic and policy literatures of postcolonial and intersectional questions of everyday and critical agency, micro-politics, justice, power, and the encounter of everyday peace formation with international peacebuilding actors, along with the mediating role of local and global civil society.Footnote ²⁰ The local turn has once again turned attention to the deficiencies of the international system, power relations, and related injustices, and the need for substantial reform in the light of the recent ‘Sustaining Peace’ agenda of the UN. It is partly because of the plurality of perspectives of peace in IR that now exist that the IPA has become more clearly discernible, as the next section illustrates.

An overview of the IPA: A historical sketch and disaggregation

Though very opaque, it is possible to see in the debates about peace in international relations over the last century, an approximation of a systematic approach, even if it is only the sum of a range of micro-tools such as diplomacy, peacekeeping, mediation, law, peacebuilding, statebuilding, and global governance. During the last one hundred years, the liberal peace model has been by far the most dominant concept of and institutional framework for peace. However, a much broader international architecture has emerged in various stages, of which the liberal peace is just one component.

Overall, it comprises a range of concepts, methods, and theories that are ontologically framed by Western assumptions inherent in thinking about war and peace in several stages. They effectively represent sedimental layers, like a palimpsestFootnote ²¹ (in which a previous text is visible under a newer, overwritten text), built up over time through broadening forms of intervention created to maintain an ever more complex IPA.Footnote ²² Each layer redresses a previous set of conflict igniters and coexist with (or contradict) the new layers that emerge for later forms of conflict, such as feudalism, imperialism and colonialism, capitalism and industrialism, the national state, cold war, ethnic and religious conflict, and ‘new wars’.Footnote ²³ Underlying this essentially unplanned evolution is both a linear process and also fluid and rhizomatic dynamics.Footnote ²⁴

There has always been a long-standing local and international political dream of a positive peace, one that transcends coexistence and builds a new ethical framework for cooperation and equalisation of widely divergent human populations. As Kant wrote, in a universal community wrongs committed in one place are felt everywhere.Footnote ²⁵ Much of the body of thinking and practice has come into view in order to deal with different types of conflict: civil wars; revolutionary wars; colonial and imperial conflicts; wars over territory, power, and resources; industrialised conflicts over ideology as in the twentieth century; wars over ethnic identity and self-determination as seen regularly since the 1960s or after the end of the Cold War. The sheer variety and scale of such violence indicates points to the existence of a much more sophisticated peace architecture than generally thought. A significantly broader and multidisciplinary view illustrates this epistemological and methodological oversight.

Different critical understandings of this architecture emerge from different positionalities: the subaltern points to basic needs, identity, sustainability, and mobility: the state to its interests and communitarian ethics; the international to global norms, duties, and responsibilities in the light of global problems. Norms, institutions, law, across the international, the state, and civil society, reflect both the need to respond to wrongs as well as reflecting power. Inequalities of many (but not all) sorts are increasingly been seen as ‘wrongs’, meaning the nature of political legitimacy at the global level has now irrevocably changed. Similarly, matters of social, environmental, and intergenerational legitimacy have now made their appearance on the international scene. In this sense, legitimacy needs to be understood in broader, social and global, intergenerational terms, not just in terms of law, process, and efficiency. Legitimacy is related to the social provision of consent through consensual systems of political decision-making on a wider scale than ever before.Footnote ²⁶ It connects with the broader questions of sustainability raised by the problem of global justice.

Six stages in the development of the IPA

There are at least six overlapping stages of historical and theoretical development in the IPA. These need to be identified, theorised, and critiqued if a new stage is to either replace or rescue the overall system in the light of newer conflict dynamics in the twenty-first century. They comprise as follows:

1. (i) a geopolitical balance of power designed to deal with the clash of interests between elite-led industrialised states and empires;

2. (ii) a ‘pluralist’ Westphalian system of discrete sovereign states designed to deal with nationalism caused by stage (i) through the liberal democratic peace and a liberal cosmopolitan postwar architecture, designed to deal with the slow decolonisation of the imperial world and its systemic clashes, as well as nationalism and ethno-nationalism;

3. (iii) A Marxist-derived critique of both realist and liberal versions of peace designed to produce international equality and solidarity;

4. (iv) Liberal peacebuilding in its later iterations, informed by a postcolonial and hybrid, multilayered framework of international relations designed to expand rights while maintaining the previous layers of the international architecture;Footnote ²⁷

5. (v) Neoliberal statebuilding, and a reversion to securitisation and a focus on state security, complemented by global capital;

6. (vi) the newer ‘digital’ dynamics of international relations (as opposed to the analogue system of industrial modernity and the states system represented by i–iv), and which offers the potential of extending the agency of global civil society and further expanding rights, or constraining political claims through a form of digital governmentality.

Stages one to four: From the balance of power to agenda for peace

The sensitivity of the IPA to the vagaries of political hegemony and subaltern claims can be seen in its uncertain evolution. Stage one, relating to the balancing system of nineteenth-century geopolitics, allowed limited, Eurocentric progress to be made on the basis of a fragile, imperial balance of power, but one that was devoid of rights-based thinking being focus on the diplomatic balancing of interests:

The Congress and Concert Systems aimed at maintain the European balance of power through elite diplomacy began to betray a concern with the broader stability and sustainability of an international order susceptible to constant wars, following the thought of Kant:

Yet, such thinking, perhaps obvious, now was controversial as Palmerston famously noted in the House of Commons in 1848 (also reflecting contemporary cynicism about international cooperation and multilateralism):

This rather confused understanding of the pros and cons of international cooperation (because it was only worthwhile if there was a confluence of separate national interests) laid the basis for stage two,Footnote ³¹ including the International Court of Justice's initiation at the 1899 Hague Conference and its implications for a wider acceptance of international law and new institutions to support order and progress in ‘international society’. This also drew on the emergence of an interest in humanitarianism, with the foundation of the ICRC in the 1860s, as well as the problem of disarmament. Further steps were taken after the First World War with the liberal internationalist system that was built with the emergence of the League of Nations, following US President Wilson's argument that,

Indicative of the difficulties in consolidating the second stage or layer of the IPA, the League of Nations was more or less immediately curtailed in 1919 given that the US did not join. Yet, the Locarno Agreements of 1925 appeared to confirm the progress that was being made, normalising relations in Europe (including the United Kingdom) with the Weimar Republic, and also reviving elements of the Concert system according to Georges-Henri Soutou:Footnote ³³

The Permanent Court of International Justice in 1920, the Kellog-Briand Pact to abolish war in 1928, as well as the attempt to codify international law at the Hague Codification Conference in 1930, were important steps but they all faced significant opposition.Footnote ³⁵

Yet, never before in history had there had never been so much progress in building an IPA than during the 1920s (this being perhaps faint and damning praise), culminating in slightly futile attempts to outlaw war:

The growth of international law, the emergence of new forms of diplomacy, and growing multilateralism, were seen as markers consolidating peace architecture in the early twentieth century.Footnote ³⁷ They were to be brought together under an expanding institutional framework throughout the twentieth century. They were brought together according to an American-driven conglomeration of the development of liberal global order, vision for the state and the international system, to cement the peace especially after decolonisation and again after the end of the Cold War. This ‘liberal hegemony’ was based to a large degree on popular acceptance of American exceptionalism after 1945, implying a mixture of realist and liberal approaches. It provided the basis for more significant activity after the end of the Second World War when the UN system, the Bretton Woods Institutions, the International Court of Justice, and much later, the International Criminal Court emerged.Footnote ³⁸ The UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 also gave rise to an expansionary dynamic, leading the Helsinki Accords in 1975 as a challenge to existing power relations.Footnote ³⁹ Of course, the 1945 postwar settlement represented perhaps one quarter of the world's population, depending on how one counts the proportion of signatory states (numbering 51) versus the world's population. It represented an elite and victor-based, fairly centralised consensus, such as was epistemologically and politically possible in its era, perhaps opening the way for a globally collaborative, social and relational, consensus.Footnote ⁴⁰ Thus, the international architecture as well as the state, by stage two of the IPA had been formed through war, the exercise of hegemony (including capital), particularly American, as well as social forces looking for recognition, emancipation, and rights over the longue durée.Footnote ⁴¹

Part of this phase of the international architecture was based upon the moral purpose of the state being focused on augmenting individual potential, organised around liberal versions of sovereignty, legislative justice, and contractual international law, all within a multilateral umbrella supposed to support property rights within and of states.Footnote ⁴²

Stage three in the development of the modern IPA challenged liberal internationalism by underlining the very limited rights it propagated after 1919 and 1945. Stage three spanned the Marxist challenge to imperialism, capitalism, and liberalism, drawing on the revolutionary philosophies of the French and American Revolutions, the Soviet Union's vision of international peace, as well as the growing demands made by substantial numbers of newly decolonised states by the 1960s (including the Non-Aligned Movement this spurred). As Marx and Engels wrote:

The very tense dialogue between stage two and stage three during the Cold War was also connected to decolonisation:

In 1964 the first UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was supposed to provide a response, repeated over the coming decade.Footnote ⁴⁵ The New International Economic Order proposals of 1973 were the heavily contested result.Footnote ⁴⁶ It,

US hegemony after 1945 helped make global relations and networks even denser than multilateralism suggested might be possible, expanding into civil society, science and technology, trade, law, conventions, and treaties. This was partly as a consequence of a transfer of American ‘New Deal’ thinking into the international sphere to create a stable institution national and international symmetry during the postwar era, according to Anne Marie Burley,Footnote ⁴⁸ plus the emergence of global civil society, much of it drawing on the stage three critique of stage two liberal internationalism. This dialogue provoked a substantial response that forced liberal internationalism to expand the peace framework that it offered for a transition towards a stage four framework, to redress the challenges raised by stage three, particularly relating to the continuation of colonialism, the circumscription of rights, and inequality. The beginnings of this process could be seen in the Helsinki Accords of 1975, which connected foreign policy, human rights, and the re-emergence of a European and potentially global order. This order capitalised on the evolving IPA.Footnote ⁴⁹

The Helsinki Accords, signed by the US, the Soviet Union, and most European states, linked state sovereignty, international and regional organisation, law, economic and social development with human rights to Western foreign policy.Footnote ⁵⁰ In this way, it provided a platform to bring the previous stages of the international architecture together, and to resolve some of its inconsistencies in the emerging stage four:

Thus, stage four in the evolution of the IPA, drawing on a long tradition of the expansion of rights in the West, stabilised the existing layers of the architecture while enormously expanding its overall scope. It required a much higher set of standards than there might have been post-Second World War or in the early Cold War period.Footnote ⁵² ‘Agenda for Peace’, published by the UN Secretary General in 1992 later captured some of these developments, in that it linked ‘social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom’ with prevention, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding was well as disarmament, drawing stages one to four together:

R2P in 2005 was to become a logical outcome of this path,Footnote ⁵⁴ but it was not until 2018 that the UN issued a document that captured the full implications of these debates, including prevention, roots causes, expanded rights and a reconceptualised understanding of the state, inclusion and gender issues, and questions of social, economic, and global justice. There was a dawning realisation of the fuller dimensions of the IPA (UN documents were also now beginning to use the term ‘peacebuilding architecture’) required to deal with such a broad form of peace:

The consequence was the creation of a relatively fairer, more stable, and prosperous state and international environment than so far ever seen in history, even when seen from the perspective of the subaltern. Indeed, the latter ‘subaltern perspective’ was to become even more significant as a result. Many of the ideas now widely accepted in stages two to four about the qualities of contemporary peace and order had first emerged in long series of anti-war and humanitarian, developmental, or standard-setting conferences, workshops, and conventions, often driven by civil society actors spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Debate and pressure coalesced in the fourth layer of the IPA, including institutions such as the UN and its Agencies, NATO, the EU, AU, and other regional organisations, and the IFIs, the various international Courts and law, the donor systems, and an enormous range of NGOs. Even so, with the emergence of this layer progress was slow, heavily biased towards the Global North and to the remnants of imperial, sovereign, and authoritarian power.Footnote ⁵⁶

One can see, nonetheless, in this historical evolution the social construction of the international and the states system, partially aligned with social claims for security, rights, welfare, and justice. This process positioned a layer of liberal internationalism, democratisation and human rights, upon the nineteenth-century Balance of Power system, smoothing the way for the mitigation of imperial and state-centric war, as well as civil war. Though this process subaltern claims were represented in several wavesFootnote ⁵⁷ through stages three and four to the degree allowed by by existing knowledge-power structures. Public goods developed to maintain peace and order through institutions, law, development, and legitimacy across local to global scales. Overall, stage four hybridised liberal and social welfarist versions of peace (such as the New Deal and Marshall Plan), as well as everyday and postcolonial versionsFootnote ⁵⁸ (such as from the Non-Aligned Movement of the 1960s). Practical association was to follow function and form, eventually giving rise to a hybrid international society, much of which can now be historically observed.Footnote ⁵⁹

The alignment of social claims, the nature of the liberal state nested within liberal-internationalism and responsive to new rights claims (whether from labour, everyday, or postcolonial subjects) connected Thomas Hobbes's version of powerFootnote ⁶⁰ with Max Weber's stateFootnote ⁶¹ and Hannah Arendt's notion of power in concert.Footnote ⁶² It provided the framework for a substantial, postwar IPA, realised in a mix of geopolitics and liberal architecture, captured in the alignment and density of the IPA by stage four. It was more resilient in terms of its institutional and legal architecture and perhaps more responsive to subaltern claims.

Thus, the UN and Bretton Woods system, postwar, has overseen enormous, though unequal gains in security and human welfare, supported by NATO, regional organisations such as the EU, and an expanding list of donors, IFIs, INGOs, and NGOs, as well as many other related organisations. Yet this architecture is paradoxical and unstable, as any system of checks and balances tends to be (as it is under constant assault by powerful actors and interests). The state was seen as both the nexus for peace at the elite, diplomatic, and international level, as well as a key blockage for the kind of transformation necessary from the subject, individual, or subaltern perspective.Footnote ⁶³ There was a similar pattern in relation to security and capital. Hence, the emergence of global institutions and international law, as well as democracy and human rights, as practical and normative elements of stage four. Transnational and local civil society saw itself as separate to the state and the international, and vital to the co-dependent development of both.Footnote ⁶⁴ The system is deeply rooted in the evolution of Western hegemony, just as in general institutions and power relations are deeply rooted in any society's past.Footnote ⁶⁵ Yet, it is also supposed to offer a Parsonian natural equilibriumFootnote ⁶⁶ under global governance and Western hegemony. Often a ‘far from equilibria’ situation was therefore put down to localised cultural, social, and historical deficiencies, meriting interventionary practices and systems for peace and development.Footnote ⁶⁷

Internal contradictions, blockages, and counter-peace

The internal tensions in the different elements of the IPA, its state-centric nature (drawing on nineteenth-century geopolitics) and elite political, economic, and social power, also means that the architecture has become more entrenched and difficult to reform as it expands. This is partly because it simultaneously provokes revanchist and counter-revolutionary forces associated with systems of geopolitics, nationalism, race, class, gender, and capital. Indeed, at every step along the way the development of peace and its related architecture has involved confronting and challenging existing vested power structures, residing in society, in empires and the state, the economy, the military, oligarchy, and ideology, among other locations of power.

The architecture's capacity is very much reactive – peace is formed after the event of war and conflict due to a mix of social and elite forces, and it is not able to anticipate the nature of future wars because of its limited capacities and the fact that new wars tend to shift character much more quickly (driven by elite power and resources). This is made worse by the opposition between social and elite approaches to peace, security, and order. The early ‘hybrid peace’ of empire and sovereignty has given way to other forms of hybrid peace, increasingly associated with a state-mediated version of local and international politics (mediated by custom, identity, liberalism, neoliberalism, and the influences of global networks). However, this path has not been smooth, because of Western suspicion about the counter-discourses of the development world, especially after the Bandung Conference after 1955.Footnote ⁶⁸ The West saw claims for decolonial demands for liberty and global justice as producing revolutionary resistance to its dominance at a risky moment in the Cold War, rather than developing a more appropriate response to ever-expanding rights claims as everyday subaltern political claims became clearer in international politics. Elite power and social actors have both been instrumental in such mediation over history, indicating how the evolution of the IPA has been inevitably entangled with its nemesis: a counter-peace architecture.

The IPA has thus suffered something of a ‘death of a thousand cuts’, on critical and conservative, ‘counter revolutionary’ fronts.Footnote ⁶⁹ This has partly been because of the challenge of inconsistency in maintaining a common, normative order (see the cases of Syria since 2011 and Rwanda in 1994 versus say Kosovo and Bosnia in the late 1990s), and partly because of what Michael Mann called the challenge of the autonomous power of the state: the way in which it uses infrastructural power to divide and penetrate civil society, supporting the territorial centralisation of state power rather than the expansion of human rights.Footnote ⁷⁰ This has in turn been altered by neoliberalism and the current digital shift and their influence on the overall architecture. The relationship between postcolonial sovereignty and human rights, as well as the requirement of a state to enforce human rights, has been uneasy, to say the least. Indeed, as Samuel Huntington argued in the 1960s, political systems decay and break down when they are no longer able to meet evolving or emerging challenges.Footnote ⁷¹ The authoritarian impulse is never far away under such circumstances, especially in view of the fact that emancipation, justice, and rights claims are an inevitable challenge to entrenched and failing power structures, which will resist concessions.Footnote ⁷² Even now the numbers of democratic states appear to be declining or shifting towards authoritarian capitalism during and after war. Thus, the IPA is evolving precisely because it is entangled with the very forces of war and violence it was supposed to tame, partly because it is loaded towards hegemony rather than expanding rights frameworks. A counter-peace framework is also emerging which opposes its influence in international relations but also requires a limited IPA at strategic points in time (to reassess, recuperate, and reorganise).

The example of peacebuilding in Bosnia-Herzegovina is illustrative of stage four and its limitations. The dominant process over the period since the 1995 Dayton Peace accords has not merely been UN, OSCE, and EU supported peacebuilding and the peace process,Footnote ⁷³ although some progress has been made.Footnote ⁷⁴ Dominant power structures have revived. These have blocked reforms, stopped the expansion of civil society, and pushed back the rule of law. They have also limited the scope for action of the Office of the High Representative, making it very difficult to move beyond the fragile Dayton Agreement.Footnote ⁷⁵ Neither the EU or the US have been able build their version of peace, and the UN has been similarly ineffective in the face of local and regional politics.Footnote ⁷⁶ Bosnia's progress towards EU accession has stalled, as has civil society's localisation and global outreach.Footnote ⁷⁷ The offending power structures are based upon the rents political elites receive from ethnic conflict and tension, ethno-nationalism, territorialism and boundaries, secessionism, militarism, as well as the gains made from unregulated capital.Footnote ⁷⁸ The peacebuilding elements of the Dayton Peace Agreement were merely contained in an Annex, after all.Footnote ⁷⁹

The UN, EU, and other organisations appeared to be trying to build a more sophisticated, liberal peace, but in the end have supported stabilisation type policies given the strength of localised power relations, and the limited capacity of liberal peacebuilding to represent social and cultural practices in the Balkans, or repair the war economy.Footnote ⁸⁰ The peacebuilding process enabled continuity in public office, institutions, clientelistic elites, who subverted democracy, rights, development, and civil society in their interests in a complex double movement.Footnote ⁸¹ This made international actors think they had control while devolving power on a growing basis to local actors and civil society. This produced dependence and a negative peace based upon ethnonationalism, power sharing, and neoliberalism.Footnote ⁸² It allowed powerful elites to step into the vast areas of the political economy where civil society and international actors had limited traction. By 2017, senior international actors thought ‘local ownership’ strategies had failed.Footnote ⁸³ Civil society began to develop a familiar critique based about class, human rights, and social democracy, one which was not audible to the international community, thus replaying important elements of Yugoslavian history but without the resolution Tito once achieved or the more recent focus on democracy or human rights. These dynamics offer an insight into the counter-peace framework:

In addition, the state's resources were being plundered within the same framework, as well as its labour being appropriated by multinational interests, leading to social unrest and the formation of attempts to govern from below with limited results.Footnote ⁸⁵ Yet, it is still common to hear from international actors that more privatisation is required, even though this has tended to hand power to various oligarchs.Footnote ⁸⁶ These counter-peace dynamics challenged and neutralised the already weak liberal peacebuilding framework of the 1990s. Ever since they have undermined its social, political, economic, and legal frameworks, as well as attempts at regional and international governance through the EU, OSCE, UN, and donor system.

International actors themselves were also very divided, both within and outside the Western alliance framework, by interests, normative and practical approaches to maintain a coherent position.Footnote ⁸⁷ Counter-peace and blockages are also useful to them for strategic reasons. The UN created a framework for statebuilding and peacebuilding that had little localised, social, or elite legitimacy. The EU has been suffering from ‘accession fatigue’ in the region, and Republika Srpska would prefer a regional alliance with Serbia and Russia. Thus, geopolitics is rearing its head along with ethno-nationalism once again.Footnote ⁸⁸ Space has been created for both by the deadlock within political community over state reform and international support. Thus, taking a counter-peace perspective underlines how stage one of the IPA has not solved geopolitics in the region: and stage two is deadlocked because democracy is in stalemate, partly because of geopolitics but also because of the failure of development policies. The expansion of rights has been uncertain (as the civil protests in BiH of 2014 illustrated) and cannot work without the other layers operating too, especially through external support. This has meant that reconciliation has been undermined and replaced by entrenchment on a mass scale.

The emergence of stage five

The more the complexity of the IPA, the more it risked failure as it challenged the geopolitical power structures of stages one in the IPA, and raised expectations of expanded rights and intervention to promote political order in stages two to four. The commensurate and receding gradations of sovereignty and agency from north to south have long been noted.Footnote ⁸⁹ This undermined the complex processes of security, institutionalisation, rights, and development, effectively undermining common projects and misallocating ‘surpluses’ in the evolving architecture.Footnote ⁹⁰ This meant that by stage four the IPA ran on a very low margin of reserve capacity under the conditions of global capitalism and the neoliberal state model. Its surpluses were run down, blocking reform (as discussions of UN reform have long illustrated).Footnote ⁹¹ Intervention (broadly defined in the form of peacekeeping, mediation, peacebuilding, and development), the reform of the state, and civil peace formation processes were reactive rather than proactive processes. They operated within the framework of preserving states and only the most basic of rights, underpinned by the avoidance of historical and distributive questions of justice.Footnote ⁹²

Since the neoliberal shifts from the 1970s, the Global North's hegemonic states along with authoritarian states in the south slowly retreated from the expansion of rights and equality as a political solution for war and violence. To some degree progress already made has helped mitigate the historical cycle of war, occupation, colonisation, tribute, and trusteeship. Yet, systems of war and violence became increasingly complex and opaque (even despite their growing academic exploration). They were no longer analytically legible through the state or a liberal international states system. In parallel, the growth of complex systems of governance designed to prevent local, state, and international conflict by redressing social, economic, and territorial grievances, was now consuming vast amounts of energy, resources, and political will. Much of the peace work of the last two decades has been status-quo oriented, as ‘stabilisation’ approaches appeared to replace peacekeeping and peacebuilding (as in Syria since 2011).Footnote ⁹³ A loss of energy and political will due to a decline in marginal returns for the liberal peace and neoliberal statebuilding pointed to a loss of legitimacy and a concurrent growth of complexity (with little in the way of new technologies and new sources of energy for peacemaking emerging to save the overall IPA).Footnote ⁹⁴

The 2000s saw the rise of an authoritarian and neoliberal peace in stage five of the IPA. It was focused on statebuilding, regional security, supported by global capital, in the hope that ‘stabilisation' would buttress the development of legitimate authority in conflict-affected environments like Afghanistan and Iraq:

It was often supported implicitly by the West for reasons of security and a lack of political will, or by the newer powers such as China, for reasons of trade and regional influence. This process has been careless with both the local and global legitimacy of the existing IPA:

What emerged with stage five was an unstable version of the victor's peace, mirrored by the case in Sri Lanka after the collapse of the Norwegian backed peace process in 2002 and the rise of President Rajapaksa's nationalist and militarist regime as well as his ongoing incursions into the state while in political opposition.Footnote ⁹⁷ At the far end of the scale it gave rise to the tragic case of the Syrian war since 2011.

Growing instabilities in the overall IPA

The contradictions of the Global North's stage four and stage five frameworks in the IPA soon emerged between territoriality, borders, rights, and capitalism, as well as its paternalistic and ideological overtones, which have undermined its global legitimacy and progressive goals. Its capacity to build legitimacy and oversee the handover of power peacefully through elections was not in doubt but the political agenda that dominated reform templates in conflict affected societies have been powerfully challenged. To quote Jurgen Habermas, ‘One size fits all fits no one.’Footnote ⁹⁸ Rather than an alignment of power, the state, and civil society through multilateralism in stage four, global governance in stage five turned to neoliberal, technological, and military hegemony rather than human rights or social justiceFootnote ⁹⁹ (not to mention global justice). This has undermined the entire architecture as well as the micro-processes within it (for example, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and mediation). Indeed, global governance diffuses and fragments the power needed to achieve rights and social justice from a subaltern perspective.

Immanuel Wallerstein, via his core-periphery perspective, argued that the world faced a structural crisis as a consequence of such tensions.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ War is now experienced as a piecemeal, disaggregated, multiple phenomena: from the complex, regional, and civil war in Syria, guerilla warfare as recently ended in Colombia, to urban violence as in Latin America in particular, and the environmental and structural violence that global capital enables in its ‘misallocation of resources’ towards multinational, oligarchical, and authoritarian actors as in the MENA region or sub-Saharan Africa (say in the DRC) or Southeast Asia (as perhaps in Cambodia). This echoes the old problem that transformative movements and processes often end up close to the stance they were trying to redress (often because power is persuasive and seductive, with an obvious advantage), as well as the old issue of whether transformation, reform, and emancipation are possible from within the status quo, or only from the outside (that is, a revolutionary or radical social movement aimed at broader forms of global justice). Empirically, as Wallerstein pointed out, there were periods in the twentieth century when radical movements were in the ascendancy, but they did not manage to directly transform the world.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Furthermore, more recent discursive theories discourage deep analysis of contemporary structural problems, focusing attention on more indirect social and communicative dynamics instead, which identify but do not redress injustice in the short to medium term at least. Structural analyses, on the other hand, have since Marx suggested that power and networked solidarity across the global scale was needed to mitigate threats to social peace and order.

For example, mediation, peacekeeping, and peace processes were reserved from the 1950s for the most egregious threats to the Cold War balance, but with the arrival of peacebuilding doctrine in the 1990s broader strategies were expected deal with deeper instabilities and injustices by expanding the liberal international order. However, the IPA by the 1990s was under great pressure to expand further to accommodate not just postcolonial conflicts, but also post-Soviet, and developmental conflicts. This meant that substantial elements of the IPA (for example, stage one to five preserved the northern dominated hierarchy) were increasingly opposed to the structural changed required to stabilise the international order and in tension with other elements such as the expansion of rights and concerns with justice (in stages three and four). This shift towards more decentred forms of globalism, pluralism, and localism, has had the unintended consequence of fragmenting the power, consensus, and agency needed to make peace. It is dependent upon ever broader tools and programmes of intervention.Footnote ¹⁰² Many of these interventions govern consequences rather than causes,Footnote ¹⁰³ disguising the relationship between peace, power, and knowledge, and narrowing emancipatory practices to a minimalist level. As David Chandler has argued, the focus of intervention has moved from the causes of conflict (if it ever was focused on causes) to managing its effects.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Potential for the architecture: Stage six

Kalevi Holsti offered an early impression of the need for multiple elements necessary for a viable peace system, including legitimate authority and governance, the capacity for peaceful change and conflict resolution.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This has been increasingly reflected over time by the development of the UN, donor, regional, and INGO system, international law, and expanded notions of rights. These have been crucial in the reconstitution of sustainable political order as it developed across layers of the IPA.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Stage six of the architecture inevitably requires constant intellectual innovation, and material and geopolitical investment, as well as support for its rights expansion and transversal dynamics. As a global framework its global legitimacy is paramount: yet the ‘undermining of the landmarks of modernization’ is well underway.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ As Ulrich Beck argued so cogently, the international peace ‘project’ (or in his case the European peace project) needs to address the problem of how the architecture might be improved, drawing on what has been learned about the previous layers of the IPA.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Perfecting the state now means expanding rights into temporal, environmental, and thus material areas to reflect subaltern claims. Democratising the international adds a concern with global inequalities and long-term sustainability, as raised by global civil society networks, as well as emancipatory global governance linked to global justice. Such a trajectory challenges geopolitics and geo-economics, excavates socio and anthropocentric versions of politics, and points to deep relationality across societies and the deep structures of the environment or commons.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The social content of security, peace, rights, development, and order is foregrounded under these new structural conditions, rather than the empirical nature of the state, security, or economy, these now being components of a twenty-first century peace rather than its main priority as in the twentieth century. This reaffirms the local, social, and micro ‘turns’ that have recently gained ground,Footnote ¹¹¹ and are actually extensions of a long process of ‘rights-seeking’ across cultural, political, social, and economic terrains by populations around the world since the nineteenth century. This process, associated with the emergence and expansion of human rights, has led to historical structural change which in the recent ‘decolonial epoch’ means pushing beyond a core-periphery neocolonial or economic system,Footnote ¹¹² which were the dominant systems of the twentieth century.

Thus, drawing on the lessons of the evolution of the IPA so far, a science-led version of peacebuilding in a new stage six framework would deal with underlying power structures, represent social practices and build transversal, trans-scalar, and transnational political, institutional, legal, and bureaucratic frameworks. This would advance the previous state-centric, multilateral, international law and trade networks, as well as deepening global civil society, which emerged from the debates between science and politics/IR in the previous stages.

Firstly, it requires a viable international political architecture with the capacity to manage and resolve the conflicts of the day. It would be made up over the long term of multiple, sedimental layers of actors, dynamics, laws, institutions, and networks, which firstly, neutralise each era's war and conflict dynamics. Secondly, these layers should maintain themselves in relation to the other layers of the architecture, providing stability in the long term. Thirdly, taken all together they must be sufficiently stable to offer a platform for the expansion of future layers of the architecture as new conflict types emerge.

This social construction rests from local to global scale to some degree on an Aristotelian realisation that political community from the local to the global is an associationFootnote ¹¹³ or many relational entanglements. It is made up of cooperative relationships aimed at justice, security, and rights, as well as emancipation and equality. It does not merely represent a Hobbesian contracting out of self-preservation through a social contract to a Leviathan state (and international hegemon), or a Lockean conversion of natural rights into civil rights under the paternalistic state (or international hegemony). This perspective brings together realist, liberal, constructivist, and critical views of the history of IR, connecting governance and hegemony, order formation, and the foundations of international order.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In indicates that the international architecture has been formed through two processes, one a linear process of liberal institution and constitution building, perhaps leading to some sort of global federation, and secondly this has been brought partly by the micro-powers that actualise subaltern political claims, which is a far more networked, transversal process, leading to more decentralised systems of governance.

If such a path were to come to fruition, this would point to a very complex forms of peace praxis. Peacekeeping, mediation, peacebuilding, development and statebuilding, as well as global civil society and multilateral actors would connect peace praxis with reconciliation, equality, justice and sustainability, across issue areas, networks, and scales. This new layer has so far mainly been prepared in critical work on peace and conflict in theory but is also reflected in the UN's Sustaining Peace Agenda.Footnote ¹¹⁵ It is also shaped by practices, emotions, and everyday spatial, historical, understandings of complex agency, which is mobile and networked.Footnote ¹¹⁶ It is transversal, trans-scalar, post-nationalist, and concerned with long-term sustainability, foreshadowing complex frameworks of global justice. This means the further expansion and enhancement of rights in the light of new structural global conditions, subjectivity, and political claims, and a new and broader understanding of legitimacy that has emerged especially at the social level, if not at the international or state levels.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Mobility, relationality, and networks (assemblages which cannot be defined solely as local or global)Footnote ¹¹⁸ underpin this shift through which critical agency at the social level engages with power structures at the state or global levels while doing their utmost to avoid domination.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The former aims to provide a relational and pluralist ontology for IR that is far more stable and sustainable than the older notions of the territorial sovereignty or cosmopolitan/Eurocentric norms, state encompassment, and vertical hierarchy.Footnote ¹²⁰

An alternative path: Stage six as digital governmentality

More negative alternatives are also on the horizon (though it is too early to make a decisive characterisation), given the fragility and underlying contradictions of the previous layers of the IPA. The mounting contradictions of the previous layers, its blockages, and failures have meant that stage six does not merely represent a new layer of the IPA that builds on the previous layers heralding a peace with global justice. Instead, it is contested and thus has come into being as the first layer that is clearly bifurcated, limiting its capacity to stabilise the existing layers of the IPA or deal with the newer dynamics driving war and conflict.

This strand of layer six include the possibilities of a ‘pax technica’:Footnote ¹²¹ a hybrid of neoliberalism, new technologies of power, extending many of the older, predatory patterns of elite political power, which might be termed ‘digital governmentality’. A turn to digital and AI technologies to overcome the complexity of the IPA's implications for peace, actually anchors this version of stage six in refreshed variants of stages one and five (geopolitics and statebuilding/stabilisation). It highlights recent tendencies for deliberalisation following authoritarian instincts, reinforcing the hierarchical international architecture of relatively exclusive territorial states.Footnote ¹²² This rejects Karl Polyani's argument that redistribution (and so justice) is the basic function of political orderFootnote ¹²³ and instead deploys new tools to maintain political and economic inequality and injustice to buttress public reason and existing power relations through the search for:

There is a reactionary, ‘counter-revolutionary’ tendency inherent in this new layer, through which traditional power relations attempt to reassert themselves, rejecting or diluting expanded rights and scientific claims about sustainability and global justice. Older concerns with land and territory, as well as material resources, still represent the base of modern direct, structural and governmental power. This means that the development of stage six towards justice and sustainability would be almost immediately blocked by digital governmentality, which deflects stage six and allows stage one to re-emerge, drawing on the blockages and the counter-peace frameworks that began to re-emerge in stages four and five.