Oliver P. Richmond

The University of Manchester · Department of Politics

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook; however, the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

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 'artp...

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 a...

What can the academic, diplomat, or peacebuilding official, agency, or NGO employee, do when, on a UN helicopter taking off after a meeting in a rebel-held village in Eastern Congo, a woman tries to put a sick child on board so it can receive desperately needed medical care in a faraway town?

This chapter examines the elite level, outside—in and top-down processes that developed in order to construct the liberal peace in conflict zones via the various internationals that represent states or a multilateral state consensus.

After WWI, during the Cold War and after, the victor’s institutionalised peace and its contestation became the major dynamic of the implicit conceptualisation of peace.

This chapter outlines the evolution of the traditional debates on peace in disciplines commonly drawn upon in this context, until World War II. It indicates what the key competing debates in theory and practice are about peace and how these discourses have developed, both in the discipline of IR and beyond.

This chapter investigates the development of theory about conflict and peacemaking in the discipline of IR, through three generations of debates on approaches to ending conflict.

A number of different strategies for conceptualising peace have emerged in the intellectual and policy discourses examined in the previous chapters of this study. There appears to have been an evolution in approaches to dealing with conflict and constructing peace, which has moved away from the notion that peace was geographically contained, or con...

How has the liberal peace been imagined and created in contemporary policy and academic approaches to the ending of conflict from the perspective of non-state actors and civil society?

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 r...

Con la publicación de Agenda para la Paz en 1992, el sistema de Naciones Unidas abrió sus intervenciones de paz a críticas que finalmente permitieron una tímida incorporación de enfoques etnográficos, feministas y basados en los derechos al Orden Internacional Liberal (OIL). Sin embargo, los esfuerzos posteriores por reformar la Arquitectura Intern...

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...

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...

Peace: A Very Short Introduction explains how the concept of peace has broadened from the absence of overt violence and war. Today, it incorporates concepts and practices such as mediation and negotiation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, development, law, institutionalization, conflict resolution or transformation, and statebuilding. This VSI traces t...

Peace: A Very Short Introduction explains how the concept of peace has broadened from the absence of overt violence and war. Today, it incorporates concepts and practices such as mediation and negotiation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, development, law, institutionalization, conflict resolution or transformation, and statebuilding. This VSI traces t...

Peace: A Very Short Introduction explains how the concept of peace has broadened from the absence of overt violence and war. Today, it incorporates concepts and practices such as mediation and negotiation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, development, law, institutionalization, conflict resolution or transformation, and statebuilding. This VSI traces t...

Peace: A Very Short Introduction explains how the concept of peace has broadened from the absence of overt violence and war. Today, it incorporates concepts and practices such as mediation and negotiation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, development, law, institutionalization, conflict resolution or transformation, and statebuilding. This VSI traces t...

Peace: A Very Short Introduction explains how the concept of peace has broadened from the absence of overt violence and war. Today, it incorporates concepts and practices such as mediation and negotiation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, development, law, institutionalization, conflict resolution or transformation, and statebuilding. This VSI traces t...

Peace: A Very Short Introduction explains how the concept of peace has broadened from the absence of overt violence and war. Today, it incorporates concepts and practices such as mediation and negotiation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, development, law, institutionalization, conflict resolution or transformation, and statebuilding. This VSI traces t...

Peace: A Very Short Introduction explains how the concept of peace has broadened from the absence of overt violence and war. Today, it incorporates concepts and practices such as mediation and negotiation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, development, law, institutionalization, conflict resolution or transformation, and statebuilding. This VSI traces t...

Peace: A Very Short Introduction explains how the concept of peace has broadened from the absence of overt violence and war. Today, it incorporates concepts and practices such as mediation and negotiation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, development, law, institutionalization, conflict resolution or transformation, and statebuilding. This VSI traces t...

Peace: A Very Short Introduction explains how the concept of peace has broadened from the absence of overt violence and war. Today, it incorporates concepts and practices such as mediation and negotiation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, development, law, institutionalization, conflict resolution or transformation, and statebuilding. This VSI traces t...

Peace: A Very Short Introduction explains how the concept of peace has broadened from the absence of overt violence and war. Today, it incorporates concepts and practices such as mediation and negotiation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, development, law, institutionalization, conflict resolution or transformation, and statebuilding. This VSI traces t...

Peace: A Very Short Introduction explains how the concept of peace has broadened from the absence of overt violence and war. Today, it incorporates concepts and practices such as mediation and negotiation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, development, law, institutionalization, conflict resolution or transformation, and statebuilding. This VSI traces t...

Peace: A Very Short Introduction explains how the concept of peace has broadened from the absence of overt violence and war. Today, it incorporates concepts and practices such as mediation and negotiation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, development, law, institutionalization, conflict resolution or transformation, and statebuilding. This VSI traces t...

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 coun...

Peace operations and associated peacekeeping research have changed dramatically over time. This article reviews the extent to which two prominent strands of peacekeeping research – behavioral-quantitative/quantitative and critical – have reflected changes in peacekeeping practice. Following critiques of how these approaches have fallen short, the a...

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. Cr...

This chapter outlines how an alternative historical-materialist critique, drawing on a critique of imperialism and international political economic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and aware of the risks of industrialized modes of nationalism and warfare, challenged the liberal layer via stages three and four. It evoked a new layer of arch...

This chapter, the book’s Conclusion, argues that this evolution means that peace in a digital age, where agency, mobility, networks, trans-scalarity, transversality—a whole new conceptual vocabulary—points to conceptions of peace connected with global justice, as well as underlining the blockages that exist. In order to respond in changing conditio...

This chapter examines the dynamics of the geopolitical order and the first stage or layer of the international peace architecture, aimed at state-centric and imperial balancing behaviour and very negative forms of peace.

Introduces the concept of the IPA

Provides some background concepts, theory and methods for the study.

This chapter outlines how a neoliberal retrenchment entangled with geopolitics and the advent of the War on Terror in the 2000s undermined the international architecture in stage five.

This chapter examines the implications of this argument for the different elements and tools present in the contemporary peace architecture.

This chapter draws the argument out further. From here an interest in everyday and hybrid forms of peace emerged, implying broader hybrid outcomes for political order, pointing towards a post-colonial and post-liberal layer in the international architecture during the 1990s. In turn, however, this evolutionary process also led to the consolidation...

This chapter examines two alternatives for stage six, arising from stage five and its concerns about intervention, which in turn opened up the potential to outline the possible dynamics of a new emerging stage. Firstly, stage six might require a more complex and emancipatory framework for peace suited to advanced conceptions of justice and sustaina...

This book examines the development of the ‘grand design’ and various subsequent attempts to develop a peaceful international order, as well as its implications for the current international peace architecture. The theories and doctrines related to peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and other tools used to end war and conflict, raise a range of long-stand...

This chapter outlines how counter-revolutionary international and domestic forces, both from within the liberal order and connected to the geopolitical layer, attempted a neoliberal retrenchment entangled with geopolitics as liberal internationalism began to lose political legitimacy.

Chapter 4 provides further discussion of the twentieth-century version of the liberal peace, which drew on all of the fruits of the Enlightenment, based upon a combination of social consent, economic legitimacy, and international norms, related largely to the legitimacy of the US model post-war. US hegemony provided this system with its moral and m...

This chapter sketches the overall framework of dominant sediments, layers, or stages in the modern peace architecture in historical, theoretical, and policy terms. It does so partly to show how contingent the latter are on shifting forces in history, in which peace architectures emerge after systemic war, being based upon the last systemic threat,...

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’ ar...

This introductory paper for the special issue on Reconstructing the International Peace Architecture (IPA) in the Asian Century outlines the background to, the objective and the scope of, and the key contributions of the special issue. A fundamental problem that each contributor has underlined is the inability of the existing IPA to effectively cop...

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...

The Oxford Handbook of Peacebuilding, Statebuilding, and Peace Formation offers an authoritative and comprehensive overview of peacebuilding, statebuilding, and peace formation. With contributions from over thirty distinguished and leading scholars, the Handbook provides a timely, engaging, and critical overview of conceptual foundations, political...

The Oxford Handbook of Peacebuilding, Statebuilding, and Peace Formation offers an authoritative and comprehensive overview of peacebuilding, statebuilding, and peace formation. With contributions from over thirty distinguished and leading scholars, the Handbook provides a timely, engaging, and critical overview of conceptual foundations, political...

The Oxford Handbook of Peacebuilding, Statebuilding, and Peace Formation offers an authoritative and comprehensive overview of peacebuilding, statebuilding, and peace formation. With contributions from over thirty distinguished and leading scholars, the Handbook provides a timely, engaging, and critical overview of conceptual foundations, political...

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...

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 t...

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 b...

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 soci...

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 peacebuilding, reduced to a technical exercise with the limited ambition to contain spillover effects of crises. In theoretical terms this is a reversal, which tilts in...

There remain a range of long-standing questions for the following exploration of the evolution and integrity of the international peace architecture. Can human ingenuity shape the evolution of political order, perhaps though new social, economic, and technological advances, which will finally, after millennia of debate and effort, solve the problem...

Peacebuilding Paradigms focuses on how seven paradigms from the Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Policy Analysis subfields - Realism, Liberalism, Constructivism, Cosmopolitanism, Critical Theories, Locality, and Policy - analyze peacebuilding. The contributors explore the arguments of each paradigm, and then compare and contrast t...

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...

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...

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...

Recently there have been calls from policymakers around the world for practically engaged research to produce evidence-based policy for peace, security and development. Policymakers aim to align three types of methodological approaches to knowledge about peace, security and development in international order: methodological liberalism at state and...

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 c...

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...

Contrary to most debates about state formation, this article outlines an alternative perspective on the shaping of political community–and the international peace architecture–based on the agency of actors engaged in peaceful forms of politics after war. Drawing on long-standing critical debates, it investigates the positive potential of ‘peace for...

International Relations (IR) and related social science disciplines focusing on peace and conflict studies have enabled a bureaucratic understanding of peacebuilding and a liberal form of peace. This has extended into a neoliberal type of statebuilding. There is now an impressive international architecture for peace, but its engagement with its sub...

What does it mean to mediate in the contemporary world? During the Cold War, and since, various forms of international intervention have maintained a fragile strategic and territorially sovereign balance between states and their elite leaders, as in Cyprus or the Middle East, or built new states and inculcated new norms. In the post-Cold War era in...