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https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231168772
European Journal of
International Relations
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661231168772
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The international dynamics
of counter-peace
Oliver P. Richmond
The University of Manchester, UK; Dublin City University, Ireland;
Ewha Womans University, South Korea
Sandra Pogodda
The University of Manchester, UK
Gëzim Visoka
Dublin City University, Ireland
Abstract
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 emerging multipolar order, the international peace architecture (IPA), dominated
by the liberal international order (LIO), is contested through counter-peace processes.
These processes contest the nature of the state, state-society relations and increasingly
international order itself. This paper investigates the tactics and strategies of regional
actors and great powers, where they engage in peace and order related activities or
interventions. Given the weakness and inconsistency of the IPA and the LIO, such
contestation leads to challenges to international order itself, often at the expense of
the claims of social movements and civil society networks.
Keywords
Counter-peace, blockages to peace, failed peacemaking, international peace
architecture, multipolar order
Corresponding author:
Oliver P. Richmond, Department of Politics, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13
9PL, UK.
Email: oliver.richmond@manchester.ac.uk
1168772EJT0010.1177/13540661231168772European Journal of International RelationsRichmond et al.
research-article2023
Original Article
2 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)
Introduction
Localised peacemaking has implications for international order and its legitimacy, as can
be seen over the last 30 years, and in particular since 9/11. The unipolar liberal interna-
tional order after 1989 has been based on sovereignty, reshuffled power hierarchies and
economic inequality, but less so than its historical predecessors (such as imperial, colo-
nial, monarchic, totalitarian and fascist orders). Within the constraints of ideological
hegemony, the post-Soviet unipolar order allowed for a multilateral approach. However,
the liberal peace, liberal international order (LIO) and multilateralism were dominated
by Western states.
While the related and more expansive international peace architecture (IPA) that has
developed, particularly since WW2 (Richmond, 2022), had largely been limited to main-
taining the Westphalian order during the Cold War (e.g. through diplomacy, mediation,
peacekeeping), post–Cold War unipolarity allowed its interventionary toolbox to expand.
New instruments were added, such as liberal peacebuilding, statebuilding and develop-
ment, and traditional interventionary practices were enlarged (Chandler, 2010, 2017;
Paris, 2004). This created an intricate web of mutually reinforcing interventions aimed at
maintaining and expanding the LIO.
However, this architecture represented a hegemonic, Eurocentric, northern-focused,
framework (Doyle, 1983; Paris, 2004). Its inherent hypocrisy, which was rapidly identi-
fied and critiqued ‘from below’ (Pouligny, 2006), has undermined its legitimacy around
the world. It has been of limited effectiveness, and it has lacked political will (Krasner,
1999; Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Chambati, 2013; Pugh, 2004). Paradoxically, it may have
constrained development, justice and sustainability in many conflict-affected regions, as
laid out in critical scholarship and among social movements and networks engaged in
peace and war in International Relations (IR) (Vinthagen, 2015).
International order is increasingly divided between reactionary nationalism and liber-
alism (de Orellana and Michelsen, 2019), and any pretence of a normative order is under
attack via ‘extra-legal’ versions of sovereignty (Paris, 2020) in which war and violence
retain political functions and utility. These attacks represent an old story of ideological
and norm-contestation in IR driven by a rationality of state domination in domestic,
regional and imperial spheres. They ensure that progress towards justice and sustainabil-
ity beyond rationalities of power and territoriality remains obstructed. The implications
for peacemaking are substantial. Indeed, these internal inconsistencies provide a plat-
form for further, morbid dynamics to emerge.
This paper builds on previous research, which elaborated three stable patterns of
internal blockages that have been obstructing peace processes across the globe (Pogodda,
Richmond and Visoka, 2022) and in increasingly systematic ways. Drawing on the coun-
ter-revolutions literature, we have described these as ‘counter-peace’ patterns, defined as
emerging from tactical and ‘proto-systemic processes that connect spoilers across all
scales (local, regional, national, transnational), while also exploiting structural blockages
to peace and unintended consequences of peace interventions’ (Pogodda, Richmond and
Visoka, 2022). Similar to the concept of counter-revolution, ‘counter-peace’ does not
necessarily manifest itself as the opposite of peace (i.e. war), but characterises a range of
strategies that are designed to obstruct, derail and reverse peace and reform processes.
Richmond et al. 3
This range also includes watered-down peace and reform processes, in which the hierar-
chies, inequalities and forms of marginalisation at the heart of the conflict are preserved
and where stability depends on continuous pacification. Counter-peace indicates para-
sitic processes in which spoilers subvert peace interventions that are supported by the
IPA to erode their emancipatory potential.
This paper investigates the international connections between spoilers, their ideolo-
gies, as well as their capacity to combine tactics into strategies and disseminate them
within revanchist or revisionist1 networks. To do so, this research deploys insights and
methods relevant to critical, post-colonial and feminist approaches concerned with the
relationship between order, justice, rights and peace across a range of disciplinary areas
related to peacemaking (Richmond, Pogodda and Ramović, 2016: 1–17). First, the paper
outlines how failures of the IPA have allowed competing approaches to emerge.
Subsequently, our analysis turns to the dynamics of counter-peace in theoretical and
practical terms (as both local tactics and international strategies), drawing on a number
of related cases. It then explains why counter-peace tactics have the tendency to escalate
into systematic strategic and ideological forces. Finally, it draws out some implications
for peacemaking and international order.
The failure of the IPA and emerging alternatives
Underlying multilateralism and globalisation was a hope that unipolarity might be tem-
pered by the principles of the IPA as laid down in the UN Charter (i.e. respect for sover-
eignty, human rights, multilateral consensus-building and the foregrounding of diplomacy
to resolve conflicts). In reality, however, the demise of ideological or geopolitical com-
petition allowed the United States to entrench liberal and later neoliberal ideology in the
IPA. The international framework and its norms shaped domestic frameworks (Finnemore
and Sikkink, 1998), which in turn were supposed to legitimate the LIO and its peacemak-
ing apparatus. The intellectual and practical engagements of peace in IR were understood
to be aligned across levels of analysis and scales, in an elegant, cosmopolitan order, to
resolve what Arnold Toynbee had long ago called the ‘master-problem’ of the era
(Ikenberry, 2020: 154).
Contradictions and hypocrisy set in quickly after 1989, especially in view of the sub-
stantial advances in critical scholarship about peace during this period (Galtung, 1996;
Lederach, 1995, 1998). Early and substantial success for landmark peace agreements
such as the Oslo Accords, the Ta’if Agreement and the Dayton Peace Accords in Bosnia-
Herzegovina might have sent positive signals about the LIO. Their subsequent stalemate
and deterioration, by contrast, indicated a lack of unity and political will on the part of
the West (Belloni, 2020), and exposed the limitations of liberal peacemaking. It became
clear that powerful local actors which stand to lose privileges in a peace process may
shift into a diplomatic counterinsurgency mode against peace and reform – or in Phillipe
Leroux-Martin’s (2014) words,
This is how losses at war are recuperated at the negotiating table and how concessions in peace
treaties are neutralized through resistance in the implementation phase. (p. 208)
4 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)
This illustrates how peace processes can be subverted and ties in with globally and
regionally revisionist frameworks in IR. In contexts such as Afghanistan and Iraq, United
States’ statebuilding and counter-insurgency have undermined the legitimacy of liberal
peacebuilding (Dodge, 2021). In the Sahel region, United Nations (UN) stabilisation
missions have fed into ‘counter-insurgency governance’, geared towards perpetual war
(Charbonneau, 2021). Meanwhile, the BRICS, principally Russia and China, but also by
other countries such as Turkey, have become involved in peace processes or order main-
tenance. They have done so to restrain and counter-balance hegemony, project power and
maintain regional spheres of influence or control, as the West has also tried to do outside
of and through the IPA in recent times.
Authoritarian conflict management (Lewis et al., 2018),‘illiberal peacebuilding’
(Soares de Oliveira, 2011) and, from earlier work, ‘spoilers’ and ‘devious objectives’
(Newman and Richmond, 2006; Stedman, 1997) have been conceptualised in this vein.
Debates on so-called ‘Chinese peacebuilding’ and its salience around the global South
indicate the propensity for counter-networks to intensify (Wong, 2021). Many such anal-
yses have pointed to smaller tactics and patterns (partly because they assume that liberal
hegemony has been fundamental and unchallengeable after 1989), but they also implic-
itly raised the issue of strategy. From an international perspective, strategies may connect
ideological contests with the proliferation of localised tactics that hollow out peace pro-
cesses across different regions and conflicts. Much of the scholarly work done so far
suggests that the former BRICS grouping, some Gulf States, several sub-Saharan African
states and others have encouraged, joined and supported such practices while remaining
closely entangled with the IPA. This has been despite some earlier, post-colonial hope
that a more emancipatory perspective might be forthcoming from such exchanges
(Richmond and Tellidis, 2014).
These dynamics point to a complex constellation of blockages to peace occurring at
the local, national, regional and international level, serving to counter international and
local efforts for peacemaking. At the same time counter-peace is sheltered to some extent
by peace and reform processes. In what follows, we investigate the international driving
forces of counter-peace, especially the strategies, norms and ideologies that underpin it.
Based on fieldwork produced by the authors and a partner network in 11 conflict-affected
countries,2 this illustrates how diverse, tactical challenges to the IPA may constitute
wider, strategic attempts to reshape international order.
The rise of counter-peace on the international stage
With many peace processes having collapsed (e.g. in Afghanistan, Israel /Palestine,
Sudan, Libya, Yemen, Burma and El Salvador), long-standing interventions unable to
resolve conflicts (e.g. in the DRC, CAR, Mali, Bosnia, Kosovo and Cyprus) and access
to ongoing conflicts blocked (e.g. Syria, Ethiopia), the IPA appears weak and ineffective.
Common tactical blockages and their capacity to combine into more effective counter-
peace strategies appear to spur conflict escalation by connecting counter-peace dynamics
and actors.
Previous research has identified three prevalent counter-peace patterns (Pogodda,
Richmond and Visoka, 2022): the stalemate, the limited counter-peace
Richmond et al. 5
and the unmitigated counter-peace. Stalemates patterns of counter-peace occur in frozen
conflicts in which violence has been proscribed but inter-group tensions persist unabated
(Smetana and Ludvik, 2018). The limited counter-peace pattern describes contexts in
which surface stability in some parts of the country coexists with a diversity of geo-
graphically limited conflicts (e.g. the Sahel region, which suffers from secessionist con-
flicts, localised insurgency and small land disputes). Unmitigated counter-peace patterns,
by contrast, prevail in contexts in which human rights are systematically violated across
the country (i.e. in dictatorships, military occupations, civil wars) and violence has
returned as a political tool. While the stalemate pattern may remain stable for decades
(e.g. in the Balkans and Cyprus) in the context of the LIO, frozen conflicts might be more
easily destabilised in a multipolar order. This tendency may be exaggerated further in the
limited and unmitigated counter-peace patterns. They tend to demarcate a fluid spectrum
of violence in which conflicts might shift, often escalating from the former to the latter
(Pogodda, Richmond and Visoka, 2022).
This evolution also indicates the formation of broader, revisionist or revanchist politi-
cal processes, aimed at achieving maximalist pre-negotiation objectives. After regroup-
ing under cover of the peace and reform process, counter-peace actors might deploy the
threat of violence, division and polarisation to this end. While these tactics can be used
in a stalemate, external counter-peace dynamics could escalate them into localised con-
flict or civil war. If fuelled by international ideological struggle, an authoritarian, nation-
alist or imperialist bloc might form, reconstituting regional order based upon the states
that emerge from counter-peace processes (Constantini and Santini, 2022; Kobrin, 2020;
Öniş and Kutlay, 2020; Soares de Oliveira, 2011; Subedi, 2022). This reflects the way
that authoritarian states have also regularly linked up in alliances or formed parallel
institutions that both suppress challenges from within their own societies as well as block
attempts to expand human rights and democracy in the international sphere.
International counter-peace dynamics thus provide a powerful platform through
which to resist the decentralisation of power, block the rise of human rights and democ-
racy, reverse or exploit interdependence, undermine law and justice and block dialogue
and reconciliation. Peace processes, by contrast, require all the above to check and even
reverse established power relations that tend to control the state and regional order, polit-
ical economy and security services (see Richmond and Visoka, 2021). Civil society and
its transnational links may also pose a threat to the nationalist and imperial configura-
tions of power that counter-peace reconstitutes.
In addition, the limitations of liberal international norm diffusion, international law,
multilateralism and order building under recent liberal and neoliberal paradigms (Paris,
2004) have contributed to failed peacemaking. Without a decisive alliance between civil
society and international backers who command significant resources and political will,
local conflict actors are likely to revert to stalemate or limited forms of violence. Yet
while international support for civil society has been waning, domestic counter-peace
forces have been bolstered directly (through external support in the emerging multipolar
order) and indirectly (through unintended consequences of peace interventions) (Day
et al., 2021; Pogodda, 2020). This has allowed quasi-states or revanchist forces to con-
solidate as ‘fierce states’ (e.g. as in Egypt after 2013, Belarus after 2019 and Burma,
Chad, Mali, Sudan and Guinea since 2021) (Heydemann, 2018; Pogodda, Richmond and
6 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)
Visoka, 2022). Blocs within the rising multipolar order have already developed compet-
ing practices (Lewis et al., 2018) to counter the IPA. To expand their power and political
control, geopolitical actors might underpin these practices with revisionist and revan-
chist ideologies, attempting to supplant it. This results in geopolitical competition
focused on competing ideologies, potentially fuelling a renewed ‘cold war’ in a multipo-
lar framework.3 Counter-peace tactics at the domestic level rapidly spill into the interna-
tional scale and become systemic blockages to peacemaking. As a result, broadly
speaking, civil society has been marginalised or shut down completely, and its interna-
tional networks have been blocked.4 Indeed, stalemate and backsliding in peace pro-
cesses around the world over the last 30 years may have been harbingers of these
regressive processes and dynamics (Soares de Oliveira, 2011).
Revisionist and revanchist actors (including recent and current leaders in Cambodia, Sri
Lanka, Russia, Sudan, Chad, Mali, Burma and Colombia) may be determined to use vio-
lence or war as political tools. Their analysis is shaped by ideology, grudges, hierarchy and
the pursuit of power, rather than being guided by science, norms or the critical pursuit of
peace, justice, equity and sustainability. They encounter substantial opposition in multilat-
eral, regional and international organisations, manifested in norms, security guarantees,
alliances or peace-interventions connected to the UN, European Union (EU) or North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), among others. Yet the latter have failed to consoli-
date peace, and domestic leaders tend to deploy counter-peace tactics and strategies.
Ideological struggle and concepts such as counterinsurgency or counter-revolution
once alerted scholars to the dangers and subtleties of power and inequality, intervention
and the contested constitution of legitimate authority (Halliday, 1999). Counter-
revolutionary debates were often designed to explain that progressive politics would be
destabilising, whereas the status quo was natural and stable even if it only provided a
limited, negative form of peace. Thus, radical movements for social change came to be
seen as more of a danger than oppressive forms of power, even if the former drove state
and international reform (Losurdo, 2015) and were responsible for the multi-layered
construction of the IPA (Richmond, 2022).
In sum, the concept of counter-peace sheds light on the formal and informal structures
and processes that resist and reshape the political order sought by peace processes
(through mediation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding or statebuilding). This in turn points to
the contrast between scientific, critical knowledge and ideological assumptions about
peace and order.
Tactics and strategies
For every peace intervention and process, there may be a counter-peace dynamic, as
previous literatures have already highlighted (Stedman, 1997). Recent work on hybrid,
authoritarian and illiberal forms of peace (Soares de Oliveira, 2011), as well as on ‘back-
sliding’ and peace-breaking figurations (Visoka, 2016), confirm this. Minor domestic or
localised counter-peace strategies, which try to moderate the impact of peace interven-
tions, development and state reform on conservative power relations, tend to escalate
slowly. If small pushbacks against peacemaking and reform find more traction, they
become visible at the geopolitical level. This has been clear from the growing leverage
Richmond et al. 7
of the Republika Srpska in Bosnia, Serb pushback against a Kosovan state, the consoli-
dation of the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus and the growing dominance of Prime
Minister Hun Sen in Cambodia. The intensification of their revanchist tactics has
depended on increasingly ambitious regional hegemons (Russian, Turkey and China,
respectively). At first, this process may well look like a pattern of separate stalemates,
weak states and frozen conflicts, which tend to throw a poor light on liberal peacebuild-
ing, statebuilding and development strategies. It makes peace interventions appear to be
weakly backed, ill coordinated and internally incoherent.
Blockages and counter-peace dynamics can be seen on different levels of analysis.
First, localised and tactical blockages may create an enabling international environment
for counter-peace processes: this connection can be observed in the eroding impact of the
US War on Terrorism after 9/11 on peace processes. Duplicitous politics from the perma-
nent members of the UN Security Council may also bring complex and urgently needed
peace processes (as in Libya in 2019) to the point of collapse (Salamé, 2020). China and
Russia’s more recent resistance to the liberal peacebuilding consensus in the UN Security
Council has also contributed. Their shift towards the construction of competing, multipo-
lar zones of interests, their own development banks and forms of military and diplomatic
assistance of intervention further drives the escalation of counter-peace dynamics (Jones
and Marc, 2021; Richmond and Tellidis, 2014). External support by neighbouring dicta-
torships has proven to be crucial for the viability of authoritarian regimes (as in Syria,
Egypt, Ethiopia, Belarus and Bahrain).
A second level of analysis links the operational level of peace interventions to a
national rejection of the IPA. Here, the UN’s tendency to become locked into maintaining
unsuccessful peace processes, peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions over a long
period of time (as in Cyprus) has created space for counter-peace dynamics to expand
from the tactical to the strategic. Where urgently needed UN missions contract (as in
Palestine) or where a drawdown and withdrawal of missions or donors indicates the lack
of interest in sustaining peace process (as in Kosovo) or their inability to do so (as in
Afghanistan), the credibility of the IPA suffers. A further loss of legitimacy occurs
in contexts, in which international donor conditionality fails (as in Cambodia) or results in
local elites developing a ‘partial reform syndrome’ (as in Liberia) (Van de Walle, 2001).
Just as problematic is the inability to overcome blockages in the UN system even in cases
of chemical weapons use (e.g. in the case of Syria and Gaza). Furthermore, the contain-
ment of civil society (as in Cambodia, most Arab countries and Sri Lanka), the establish-
ment of ethnic or religious hierarchies and the targeting of minorities (as in India, Burma
and China) are signs of the state’s involvement in counter-peace dynamics. Corruption
and the rejection of state reform further undermine the possibilities for a meaningful peace
process. Brutal counter-insurgencies (as in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Egypt)
often radicalise conflict-affected populations. The militarisation of the state through coups
(as in the Sahel region and Burma), democratically legitimated rule of the military (as in
Egypt) or military occupations (as in Israel), may turn the state into an epicentre of domes-
tic counter-peace dynamics (Pogodda, Richmond and Visoka, 2022).
A third level identifies additional societal blockages to peace: a disinterest in peace
processes (as in Israel) or the rejection of peace and the liberal model of state (as in
Colombia (Chagas-Bastos, 2018)) by societal groups makes difficult compromises in
8 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)
favour of peace impossible to achieve. (Ethno-) nationalism and the acceptance of iden-
tity-based exclusion and hierarchies (as in Cyprus, India and the Balkans) also work as
effective blockages to peace. The willingness of the majority to trade the human
rights of marginalised groups for stability (as in Egypt, Colombia, Sri Lanka, India and
Cambodia) constitutes another major impediment to peace. The radicalisation of indi-
viduals (e.g. by fundamentalist movements) enables oppression, backsliding and persis-
tent authoritarianism.
A more detailed analysis of cases allows us to recognise how a combination of block-
ages enables small scale counter-peace tactics (calibrated to resist peaceful reforms, but
not to spark violence, operating within peace and reform processes) to extend their reach
into the structures of international politics. For example, in the half-century-long Cyprus
peace process, the forces of ethno-nationalism and geopolitics have been aligned against
UN peacekeeping and mediation since 1964. On the surface, since 1974, both disputants
have been careful to couch their positions diplomatically, to avoid sparking another war,
while maintaining the existing status quo. In the period running up to the UN-sponsored
referendum over the Annan Plan in 2004, a small number of Greek Cypriot nationalists
managed to keep the international liberal peace framework at bay by voting against the
UN’s peace plan. They favoured ethno-nationalist majoritarianism, and the myth of the
territorial nation-state, which disguised their preference for the former (Palley, 2006).
Counter-peace forces tested the stability of the post-1974 order through basic diplomatic
and political tactics which held back the UN mediation process, and could rely on the
presence of UN peacekeepers as well as on the regional balance of power, allowing
the shift to a more systematic counter-peace dynamic. This illustrates the weakness of the
entire IPA, on one hand, and the ease with which nationalism can align itself with geo-
politics, on the other.
Meanwhile, the gulf between critical knowledge about peacemaking and politics has
been widening. In Cyprus, the EU ironically awarded membership to the Republic of
Cyprus as the conflict party which vetoed the Annan Plan, relieving any pressure to make
concessions. This was also mirrored in the failed peace processes in the Middle East, in
Sri Lanka with the re-emergence of authoritarian nationalism after 2002, and during
peace processes in Kosovo, Colombia or Cambodia over the last decade.5 Residual
resistance to peace and reform increasingly enhanced its leverage and found regional and
geopolitical supporters, as well as donors. This brings into view a camouflaged, but well-
connected counter-peace process at the systemic level. As the subsequent analysis shows,
the counter-peace appears increasingly to be a concerted effort to erode, block and
replace the IPA. By building rival institutions to the IPA and connecting those to micro-
level tactics as well as macro-level strategies, the counter-peace is increasingly proto-
systemic. Its different elements aim to retain power, push back against reform, protect
the privileged status of elites and enable the use of war and violence as political tools and
for rent-seeking opportunities.
Over the last few decades, the systems for multilateralism, UN peacekeeping, interna-
tional mediation and international peacebuilding have consequently become tactically
blocked, and many peace processes and conflicts have been systematically frozen. This
is in part because of the stances of disputants but also because international actors have
prioritised their geopolitical interests over multilateralism and peace processes. Elite
Richmond et al. 9
actors are thus able to reshape political processes in their favour, even where this contra-
venes international norms, law and scientific knowledge. Disagreement within the UN
Security Council, geopolitics, populism, nationalism, authoritarianism, weak states, as
well as tensions between self-determination and territorial sovereignty, some of it ampli-
fied via digital technologies, have all hindered peacemaking (Karlsrud, 2014; Richmond,
Visoka and Tellidis, 2023). This has led to a situation where a fragile, insecure and unjust
status quo has become the main outcome of peace interventions, which in turn has
favoured geopolitical and ideological contestation on the international stage. This has
damaged various processes that were supposed to support unified notions of peacemak-
ing and political reform, as it has involved challenges from alternative and competing
notions of peacekeeping, mediation, diplomacy and development associated with geopo-
litical actors.
Isolated tactics, if successful, may link up, be disseminated through international and
domestic networks, and become wider strategies, over time. This has been clear with the
obstruction of revolutionary momentum in the Arab region by authoritarian elites and
fundamentalist movements, and the contagion of military coups across the Sahel region.
Growing and increasingly collaborative Serbian and Russian rejection of the post-war
regional order have spurned different tactics to destabilise the stalemates in Kosovo and
Bosnia (Ingimundarson, 2022).6 Western actors, donors, the UN, EU and other third par-
ties all played their part in turning a blind eye, being under-committed or dominant. They
operated according to strategic interests or shifting ideological preferences (e.g. from
liberal peacebuilding in the 1990s to neoliberal statebuilding in the 2000s).
Another element relates to the formation over time of a political network around dif-
ferent axes of associated revisionist powers, which prefer to push back international law
and human rights and reclaim lost historical territorial possessions, powers or hierar-
chies. At the centre of this network are global players such as Russia and China, who ally
variously with regional powers such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and India, which in
turn support their own regional clients (Doshi, 2021; Lewis, 2022). Within this network,
authoritarian regimes prop up other dictatorships and ethnic or sectarian hierarchies
through military, diplomatic and economic assistance. Internationally, this network
rebuffs demands for human rights, minority protections and democratisation through
insistence on non-intervention, sovereignty and a prioritisation of stability over rights.
Of course, their foreign policies and geo-economics may differ from their internal social
and civil society perspectives, where concepts of human rights, justice and democracy
may be more germane.
Regional and international actors and organisations may thus begin to form a parallel
system of global order, as with China’s ‘Belt and Road’ project, the Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank or Russia’s ‘Eurasian Economic Union’ complete with tools to main-
tain that order, even with tacit approval from within the IPA (Jütersonke et al., 2021).
They also might form systematic frameworks that co-opt and hollow out peace pro-
cesses, tools and institutional and legal frameworks, thus diverting emancipatory theo-
ries aimed at conflict resolution, justice, hybridity and sustainability, towards more
conservative ideologies and theories such as ‘conflict management’. Order versus disor-
der seems to dominate authoritarian conceptions of IR rather than considerations of
peace (Thompson, 2022).
10 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)
At the strategic and system level, counter-hegemonic tools aim to fragment the multi-
lateral consensus on how to build peace, increase its inconsistencies, weaken the pro-
scription of violence when it comes to political interests, and discredit liberal norms and
law. These strategies may work indirectly, and at first be aimed at a stalemated counter-
peace, as perhaps early on in Tunisia after 2014 or Sri Lanka around 2002. By producing
domestic polarisation,7 or enabling an increasingly authoritarian government as in
Cambodia through Chinese sponsorship of the Belt and Road project, the stalemate
might be tipped into a more violent counter-peace pattern.8 Such dynamism in the coun-
ter-peace framework points to the contestation not just of the localised conflict and the
stalemated tools for making peace, but to broader ideological issues.
For these reasons, counter-hegemony – like balance of power praxis – is difficult to
modulate. Violence maintains stability in counter-peace, and scientific evidence about
order is dominated by politics and ideology. Hence, counter-peace strategies, even when
locked into a stalemate are likely to escalate, if they manage to create strong domestic
and international connections with better resourced counter-peace actors.
At the state level differing variants of authoritarianism are its clearest outcome,
facilitated by the deadlock of peace and reform processes. This is in line with elite
interests to capture and securitise peace, as well as with geopolitical foreign policy
goals. At the civil society level, a clear indication of a more active counter-peace
emerging lies in the proscription and marginalisation of non-governmental actors
working on human rights, democratisation and in social areas. The governments of
China, Russia, India, some Gulf States, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Burma, Egypt and
Venezuela, along with other authoritarian-capitalist and military-led countries, increas-
ingly have rejected Western hegemony, liberalism and civil society activism.9 Counter-
peace thus forms the embryonic foundations of new regional orders with their own
‘peace’ and ‘reform’ strategies, centred on alternative ideologies and power centres. A
victor’s peace and the justification of authoritarian rule thus sets into sharp relief the
liberal project (Rosenberg et al., 2022). An international counter-peace implies central-
ised power, aimed at imperial or (ethno-)nationalist domination, centralisation and
bordering, the securitisation of dissent, the support of parallel states and institutions
and a rejection of rights and democracy. Law and norms would be subservient to
power-politics in this framing.
The liberal and neoliberal order would be reversed by peace and reform strategies that
actively pushback via a limited or unmitigated counter-peace (rather than remaining in
stasis as in a stalemate): meaning elite hierarchy and capital accumulation through the
state and global capital; illiberal societies; the state being designed for war and internal
oppression rather than peace; and in an extreme form an imperially based international
order emerging from sovereign competition and ensuing arms races.
Such dynamics illustrate how the proscription of violence may collapse and how
nationalist groups are increasingly defined according to centralised power and perhaps
expanding borders, especially if geopolitical plates shift (Smetana and Ludvik, 2018;
Strasheim and Bogati, 2021: 354). These dynamics appear in much of the existing lit-
erature to be associated with democratic backsliding (Haggard and Kaufman, 2021:
1–4).
Richmond et al. 11
Transitions in international order and the tools
of peacemaking: back to the future?
The vacuum caused by the decline of liberal internationalism and the IPA has created
space for competing approaches to conflict in the emerging multipolar international
order (Hellmüller, 2021). The latter needs to accommodate rule-governed liberal democ-
racies and their regional orders as well as authoritarian-nationalist, unfettered states and
their geopolitical interests. International and Western disunity as well as intransigence
towards the need for reform are complicit in the failure of the UN Security Council,
World Bank, IMF and Development community to win legitimacy for their peace, secu-
rity and development efforts. Their ‘offers’ to conflict-affected societies, already wary of
external actors as much as their own elites, have been perceived as unjust, neo-colonial,
appended to Western hegemony, and too little too late. Since this rejection has not led to
an adjustment of this ‘offer’, the so-called BRICS actors have attempted to revise the
international order, while China10 and Russia, and other states seek to influence, impede,
displace and replace liberal peacebuilding. The subsequent sections investigate what this
indicates for the current impasse of the IPA in the emerging multipolar order.
Contributions to a stalemate model of counter-peace
Effectively when critique crosses over into revisionism, reactionary politics and even
revanchism, this places the IPA in competition with an increasingly explicit ideological
and strategic alternative. Possibilities to build on or improve the LIO are eroded as a
consequence. This produces competing systems of multilateralism, alliances, capital,
technology and information flows (Zuboff, 2019), as well as populist networks, along
with related tools of conflict management. It exploits dissatisfaction with the recent,
regressive drift of liberal peacebuilding into neoliberal statebuilding and counter-insur-
gency in pursuit of Eurocentric and US interests. Yet if deprived of a commitment to
human rights, anti-imperialist critiques of the IPA are at risk of allying with authoritarian
regimes for their revisionist stances, which might indirectly amount to support for sys-
tematic human rights violations, socio-economic injustice and ethno-nationalist or sec-
tarian hierarchies (Lewis, 2022: 654).
Some of these dynamics were visible in Turkish involvement in the Cyprus conflict in
the period between 1963 and 1974. Despite an ongoing UN peacekeeping and mediation
mission, Turkish involvement defied norms of non-intervention, manipulated approaches
to self-determination as a cover for occupation and used war as a political tool (Ker-
Lindsay, 2017). The debacle of ONUC from 1960 to 1963 inside the DRC as well as for
the UN itself, where UN peacekeepers were drawn into a civil war which also destabi-
lised the UN Security Council, also provided room for such manoeuvres (Boulden, 2001;
United Nations Security Council, 1960). Turkish tactics succeeded in consolidating a
subversion of early peacekeeping, mediation and later liberal peacemaking. Meanwhile,
Turkey remained a member of NATO and seemed to display good faith in the UN pro-
cess and potential hybrid outcomes (Adamides and Constantinou, 2012).
Such approaches laid the groundwork for a counter-peace framework of otherwise
disconnected micro-strategies designed to hold back the encroaching liberal peace
12 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)
framework as it emerged over time. Turkish policymakers could claim Turkey to be a
member of NATO, pro-Western, and a good international citizen, while partially under-
mining UN mediation, exploiting the presence of UN peacekeeping, and deviating from
Western norms of human rights and democratic governance, especially in the 1970s.
Similar tactics are present in Western Sahara where Morocco manipulated the UN-led
peace process, expanded the occupation on the ground, and curtailed the human rights of
the Sahrawi people by exploiting geopolitical rivalries and active diplomatic and eco-
nomic campaigns (Zunes and Mundy, 2022).
The Turkish government sought to make its occupation of Northern Cyprus viable by
resettling populations from the mainland to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus
(TRNC). This settler population helped create and consolidate the emerging de facto
state (Jensehaugen, 2017) and provides substantial support for the nationalist UBP
(Hatay, 2005), which seeks to prevent a bi-communal solution to the conflict in Cyprus.
While nationalist parties in the Republic of Cyprus and their Western backers are equally
responsible for creating and maintaining the Cypriot stalemate, the Turkish position war-
rants reflection in the light of Turkey’s role in the breakdown of another stalemate: the
recent war in Nagorno Karabakh.
In the latter case, Turkey had been an important external actor in the conflict between
Armenia and Azerbaijan since the early 20th century, affecting a power shift from
Armenia to Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan in governing the contested region (Cornell, 1998).
Yet during the war of the 1990s, Kemalist doctrine and external pressure from its Western
allies prevented Turkey’s military involvement (Cornell, 1998: 63). By 2020 though,
Turkey’s military and diplomatic support for Azerbaijan had enabled its authoritarian
president, Aliyev, to violently contest the stalemate (Keddie, 2020; Ulgen, 2020). The
militarisation of Turkish foreign policy under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in turn,
has been attributed domestically to Turkey’s descent into authoritarianism and interna-
tionally to the decline of liberal internationalism, generating a power vacuum in Turkey’s
near abroad (Kutlay and Öniş, 2021). Hence, the combination of unresolved conflicts,
domestic backsliding, alliances between authoritarian leaders and shifting geopolitical
spheres of influence render stalemates both escalatory and a powder keg for wider inter-
national conflict. In this respect, the current Ukraine war is a visceral reminder of how
local tensions can be manipulated by an external counter-peace force to escalate conflict
through the three patterns of our typology (Pogodda, Richmond and Visoka, 2022).
Serbia’s stance on Kosovo’s statehood and on its internal and regional conflicts along
with its support for Republika Srpska’s secessionism in Bosnia-Herzegovina are also
indicative of how counter-peace dynamics can escalate.11 The UN Security Council
remains divided on Kosovo’s independence, with United States, France, and the United
Kingdom vouching for Kosovo with many strings attached, while Russia and China
unreservedly back Serbia. While the presence of NATO peacekeepers and EU’s rule of
law mission on the ground is the most important deterrent of inter-ethnic tensions, lega-
cies of the conflict, structural pressure and emergent disputes persist. In the absence of
progress on the EU-led talks for normalisation of relations between Serbia and Kosovo
(Visoka and Doyle, 2016), hardliners on both sides of the conflict have regained momen-
tum. The stalemate can only hold as long as the pro-peace forces manage to contain the
forces that threaten to violently overturn the status quo.
Richmond et al. 13
In Bosnia Herzegovina, various domestic and international counter-peace forces are
currently putting pressure on the stalemate that the Dayton agreement imposed (Bell and
Pospisil, 2017). Its power-sharing provisions have given ethno-nationalist hardliners the
veto power to block, undermine and decimate Bosnia’s weak central institutions (Leroux-
Martin, 2014). Serb nationalist Milorad Dodik, for instance, has spent the past 15 years
building up the Republika Srpska as a para-statelet with the intention to erode the Bosnian
state (Carcic, 2022). With his plan to secede from Bosnia, his politics align with Russian
President Putin’s objective to keep Bosnia divided, dysfunctional and unable to join
Western institutions (Carcic, 2022). Yet, an alliance between counter-peace forces at dif-
ferent levels requires mutual support in addition to an alignment of politics. This can be
seen in Dodik’s and Croat nationalist leader Dragan Covic’s collaboration to stop Bosnia
from joining the UN sanctions regime after the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine (Ruge,
2022). Similarly, Hungary’s President Victor Orban promised to protect Milorad Dodik
from EU sanctions (Ruge, 2022). Concerningly, the Office of the High Representative
(backed by the United States and the United Kingdom) has recently used its Bonn pow-
ers in ways that have reinforced the sectarian dysfunctionality of the Dayton regime
(Mujanovic, 2022).Yet since these actions were part of a wider intervention to tackle
Bosnia’s governmental dysfunctionality and happened alongside sanctions on the hard-
line nationalist saboteurs of the central state (Ruge, 2022), this might count as the unin-
tended consequences of peace interventions.
Against this international backdrop, peacemaking efforts that resulted in stalemates
have tested the credibility of the UN and the EU, as well as notions of rights and justice,
norms of sovereignty and non-intervention. They have perhaps undermined the legiti-
macy of international order itself. Other seeming post-conflict successes, such as in
Northern Ireland, now also appear to be weakened. The examples above also illustrate
how the main nexus of power in the counter-peace framework links (ethno-)nationalism
with authoritarian regimes and geopolitics.
Contributions to the limited counter-peace
Revisionism is present in attempts to develop tools that undermine – rather than help
improve – the IPA. It points to the implausibility of maintaining an IPA with homoge-
nised institutions, units, norms and policies in an ideologically fragmented international
environment. Scholarship has shown that the IPA itself became increasingly entangled
with the counter-peace after the end of the Cold War. When the pressure of having to
compete with the material emancipation the communist bloc proposed fell away, the IPA
contracted to support only basic rights while otherwise tracking power. In the limited
counter-peace pattern, the IPA provides only localised stability through stabilisation mis-
sions. It is unable to transform conflicts. Indeed, the IPA’s stabilisation approach has
contributed to a militarisation of governance structures (Charbonneau, 2021), entangling
internationally supported peace missions with counter-peace dynamics.
In this section, China serves as a prime example due its complex relationship with the
IPA, but also because of its increasing role in many limited counter-peace contexts in
sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and in gang-crime affected countries in Latin America (e.g.
Cabestan, 2018; Hein, 2017; Lanteigne, 2019; Roy, 2022; Toogood, 2016). China has
14 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)
gone further than other global powers in establishing new institutions which could either
help fill gaps in the IPA or erode it further. Hence, this section investigates the ramifica-
tions of China’s opaque approach to the IPA, human rights and democracy.
As a member of UN Security Council (and thus being able to veto or shape UN policy
directly), China has been comfortable with the neo-Westphalian system established by
the UN (Kim, 1993). After the end of the Cold War, China started participating in UN
peacekeeping since it served the Communist Party’s security interests and propaganda
purposes (Cabestan, 2018: 730). Restoring stability after conflict helped secure China’s
investments in conflict-affected regions, while participation in UN missions positioned
it as a responsible great power in the international system. MINUSMA, the UN peace-
keeping mission in Mali, with its mandate to expand state authority matched the Chinese
leadership’s understanding of acceptable responses to the conflict in the Sahel.
Considering state instability as the cause of poverty and radicalisation, the Chinese
Communist Party regarded stabilisation through UN peacekeeping as an opportunity to
expand its investment in and trade with Mali (Lanteigne, 2019). Yet differences between
China and other MINUSMA contributors came to the fore after the 2021 military coup in
Mali. Despite China’s previous rhetorical commitment to regional solutions for African
security (Lanteigne, 2019), China and Russia vetoed an extension of ECOWAS sanctions
in the UN Security Council. This assertion of the principle of non-intervention in favour
of Mali’s new dictator Assimi Goïta backfired against MINUSMA. Goïta’s imposition of
restrictions on the UN mission, coupled with his alliance with the Russian Wagner Group
and the resulting withdrawal of France’s security support for MINUSMA, has led to a
mass pull-out of peacekeepers, making the UN mission appear increasingly unviable
(International Crisis Group, 2022). Since MINUSMA has been working towards the
implementation of the 2015 peace agreement, constitutional reform, decentralisation,
security sector reform and women’s participation in the peace process, the current crowd-
ing out of UN peacekeeping by Goïta and the Wagner Group implies a regression in
Mali’s peace process.
Analysts have identified more areas in which China is seemingly on a collision course
with the IPA. China is creating its own financial, political and regional networks and
institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Belt and Road
Initiative, the China-Africa Forum, and other regional networks (Doshi, 2021). These
institutions combine a belief in economic growth as a force of stability and order with the
assumption that markets for future growth will be located in the global South (French,
2022). In recent years, Chinese commentators have argued, according to Doshi (2021),
that its concepts of peace, security, development and government are more viable than
liberalism and able to contend with extremism and terrorism better, partly through the
use of advanced technologies.
Initially – at least until 2019 – such initiatives were seen as complementary, experi-
mental and constructive for the IPA. However, recent events in Hong Kong, China’s
increasing use of its veto on the UN Security Council in favour of non-intervention
(Wenqi and Xinyu, 2016) without much regard for human rights, its continuous support
for Russia in the face of international sanctions, and its steadfast defence of authoritari-
anism, have led observers to assume that China aims to – at least partly – reshape the
international order (Bolt and Cross, 2018). Some have interpreted this as a plausible
Richmond et al. 15
attempt to reject the LIO altogether, and to replace it with alternative hegemonic formu-
lations, maintained by its own peacemaking tools. So-called rising powers, according to
Gilpin (1981, 1988), are prone to efforts to undermine existing hegemonic systems to
establish counter-hegemonies, complete with new tools for the preservation of the rising
order, its norms, security, stability and areas of influence (Doshi, 2021: 298).
For Chinese strategists, this may extend as far as a whole range of strategic goals in
East Asia, related to control over Taiwan, the Koreas, Tibet, removal of US forces from
Japan, and influence in the wider Pacific area. It may also be related to the reform of
world order, the exemplar of the ideal state as authoritarian-capitalist and China’s partial
control of the developing world through the Belt and Road Initiative (Doshi, 2021: 302).
The existing multilateral systems, its laws, norms and institutions would stand as an
obstacle to such extensive goals, as they maintain Western/American, not Chinese,
hegemony. Since the 2000s, China has focused on balancing Western power in the UN
Security Council, while pursuing a stabilisation strategy in limited counter-peace con-
texts in its spheres of influence (where little progress can be made along liberal, civil or
scholarly lines, but where order prevails and violence is limited or hidden). Its contribu-
tion to UN peace interventions aimed to co-opt the IPA towards Chinese interests.
However, there are now suspicions that it may go much further vis-à-vis control of
Taiwan (given its recent success in Hong Kong), dependant perhaps on the outcome of
Russia’s war on Ukraine.
An unmitigated counter-peace
Similar dynamics can be seen in Russia’s engagement with peace and order maintenance
(Lewis, 2022). Russia followed a version of the evolution of UN peacekeeping as with
China through the 2000s, but began to diverge during the War on Terror and after the
Financial Crisis of 2008 (Zheng and Hang, 2020). Sakwa has described this evolution as
‘neo-revisionist’, indicating some intent to work within the existing system as well as to
supplant it with alternative regional models, and to reject US hegemony. This has become
more pronounced recently (Sakwa, 2019). The split widened after the NATO interven-
tion in Libya in 2011. President Putin, ever aware of the potential for revisionism, has
called Russian military intervention in Syria a model for ‘regional crisis management’,
which has spilled over into Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic (Lewis, 2022).
This concept emerged from Russian mimicry of liberal peacebuilding, designed to
undermine the rules-based international system and allow space for its own interests to
re-emerge (Lewis, 2022: 659). In the context of Chechnya, an illiberal and authoritarian
state model began to consolidate based upon Russian coercion. This became attractive to
countries like Sri Lanka and Serbia in their attempts to frame liberal peacebuilding as
weakening their own standing and security (Ratelle and Souleimanov, 2016).
After trying to collaborate with Western peacebuilding briefly in the Balkans (which
highlighted substantial contradictions in Western and Russian approaches), Russian
President Putin’s model now mirrors and extends Western counter-terrorism and stabili-
sation policies, but more explicitly focuses on short-term conflict management con-
nected to its geopolitical advantage. It pioneered a diplomatic and mediation approach of
exclusive and limited conflict management with key power-brokers, including the
16 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)
Taliban in Afghanistan, bringing to bear Russia’s own leverage for its own multipolar
and regional interests (Lewis, 2022: 668). In Syria, it consolidated a model of counter-
insurgency to help allied leaders such as Syrian President Assad to regain state control,
buttressed by aggressive military support even for the use of chemical weapons against
civilian populations. Extreme violence against rebel-held enclaves in Syria facilitated
local ‘peace agreements’, which made no political concessions other than a cessation of
hostilities (Turkmani, 2022). Moreover, Putin has pursued an interest-based approach to
regional diplomacy often through the provision of mercenaries in exchange for primary
resources (Parens, 2022). This approach highlights the utility of war over peace, aligning
pacification and diplomacy with older forms of conflict and crisis management that ena-
bled Putin to reconstruct Soviet spheres of influence from sub-Saharan Africa to the
Middle East (Lewis, 2022: 661).
With the deployment of Russian ‘peacekeeping’ in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020, a model
emerged based upon the use of military force, top-down coercive negotiations following
Russian geopolitical interests, and the exclusion of Western actors, interests and models.
This represents the rejection of multilateralism in favour of regional dominance and
multipolarity. Even humanitarian issues were controlled under this model, along with
information, and longer-term reconstruction (Lewis, 2022: 665). It offered a competing
model of order maintenance and crisis management, in other words, one which replaced
rights, democracy and inclusion with Russian pacification, authoritarianism and exclusion.
It points to crisis management and balance of power tools in a broader, multipolar order,
perhaps resonant of the failed 19th-century attempts to curtail war through balance of
power mechanisms in an imperial order. The use of private military companies also joined
the panoply of measures to replace norms with interests, as in CAR, Mali and Libya with
Russian mercenaries (Euronews, 2022; United Nations Security Council, 2022).
Taken all together, this suggests that Russian approaches have pushed into an unmiti-
gated counter-peace terrain. Here, violence coexists with a coercive peacemaking frame-
work, geared towards rent extraction, pacification and victor’s peace. By combining
Russia’s veto in the UN Security Council with its military intervention in support of
authoritarian regimes, this unmitigated counter-peace aims to replace the IPA, impacting
international order itself. This indicates ambitions for a restructured multipolar interna-
tional order, complete with tools for its own maintenance, based upon power-relations
rather than cosmopolitan norms, legitimate institutions, democracy and rights. It also
indicates a rejection of liberal approaches (e.g. decentralisation of power, democracy,
active civil society, proscription of violence, rights and human rights-based interven-
tions), which Russia sees as destabilising historical patterns of order (Lewis, 2022: 668).
Even in the current economic and political crisis in Sri Lanka, Russia has sought
opportunities to indicate the viability of its support, seeking political credibility during
the military invasion of Ukraine (Al Jazeera, 2022a). All these strategies have achieved
success according to Putin’s revisionist and possibly revanchist policy goals, including
the attempt to reduce the already limited emancipatory capacity of the UN, multilateral
organisations and related peacemaking tools. Russian attempts (together with China) to
build a regional, revisionist network of states, playing on anger at Western hypocrisy
particularly in Iraq after 2004 (Dodge, 2013) and the West’s weakness since the 2008
financial crisis, have met substantial acceptance (Al Jazeera, 2022b). Like China’s
Richmond et al. 17
evolutionary approach of pushing back at Western hegemony within the IPA, blocking it
by becoming integral to its systems, and then perhaps competing with its institutions,
Russia’s approach has substantial implications for the tools, norms and functional capac-
ity of the IPA. China has also apparently noticed the utility of the Russian conflict man-
agement approach in its goal of reclaiming Taiwan (Lewis, 2022: 670). Other actors have
also noticed the revisionist potential in their own locales and regions of such an approach,
especially in terms of counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, power-based mediation,
peacekeeping, arms acquisitions and hybrid military interventions.
On entanglement and the impact on the multipolar order
The limited and long-term capacity of civil agency in the IPA is easily countermanded
through different counter-peace strategies. The latter may nest within the IPA and peace
tools in parasitic form, leading to morbidities in the overall framework. Counter-peace
tactics deploy direct, structural or governmental power, to undermine law, order and
social agency within the IPA. We have already noted the entanglement of Western and
US foreign policy and interventionism with counter-peace dynamics. They are not
merely the preserve of non-liberal or non-Western actors. They aim to reduce rights and
justice by foregrounding power and interests, exploiting the available political space:
they use propaganda, often in the form of disinformation campaigns; they exploit the
global economy to maintain inequality; they block or pushback international and regional
organisations; and they contain or ban civil society actors and networks. Personalised
power, exclusionary access to the assets of statehood, control of information and society,
as well as grey operations that manipulate legal norms are often connected (see Visoka
and Lemay-Hénert 2022: 119–150). The counter-peace concept provides a framework to
understand the escalation of tactics into strategy. Furthermore, it indicates some sense of
mission or an ideological framing, which is camouflaged at first. Thus, from challenging
critical and post-colonial civil norms and discourses in international order, authoritarian
domestic governance then relates to the structural contestation of international norms.
The next step in the escalatory framework entails ideological struggle. Here, counter-
peace actors will seek to justify the reversal of progress in peace and reform processes.
This targets rights, norms, the rule of law, effective and accountable governance, security
sector reform, the redistribution of resources, the establishment of checks and balances,
as well as global social networks and multilateral tools. At the moment, establishing
‘order’ and preventing ‘disorder’ is used as an argument to justify a reversion to top-
down, centralised and territorialised autocracy, the return of escalating regional geopoli-
tics, and effectively, renewed regional tensions (perhaps reframed for a digital era).
Should the IPA survive, the pressure of rising authoritarian forces might transform the
IPA and its interventionary practices fundamentally: the role of elite power in the IPA
could be heightened, while the role of civil society and social movements along with
their political and justice claims might be further reduced. Stabilisation operations might
continue to replace attempts at conflict transformation. At the very least, this interna-
tional contestation requires a complete rethinking of the IPA. The rise of a multipolar
order risks international instability, the return of revolutionary politics at the domestic
level and the escalation of many more direct and proxy conflicts.
18 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)
Conversely, the pressures of a newly forming world order could aid the urgent recon-
struction of the IPA, align it more closely with scientific, critical and post-colonial
knowledge about peace, justice and sustainability, and connect the IPA more substan-
tially to the claims of global civil society. Yet, an enormous investment in new interna-
tional mechanisms designed to support the IPA would be needed in this scenario. This
requires close attention to current critical debates about the ‘decolonisation’ of the inter-
national system, justice and sustainability therein. To some degree, these issues have
been connected in the UN’s sustaining peace agenda (which emerged from global civil
society engagement with expert knowledge in multilateral venues across the UN system
(United Nations Secretary-General, 2018)).
The international counter-peace dynamics discussed in this paper make clear that
peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding have arisen within a system of hegemony
since the end of the Cold War. In parallel, illiberal actors discussed in this paper have
gone from being potentially part of the liberal international system in the 1990s and
2000s, to revisionist actors in the 2010s, and are now on the cusp of authorising alterna-
tives to the tools and thinking that emerged within the post-war liberal and US-dominated
epistemological framework. This loose counter-peace alternative at the international
level exploits but also drives local dissatisfaction with the liberal international order. It
also indicates that there is a bifurcation between the scholarly understanding of the roots
and drivers of conflict and what needs to be done about them, and the multipolar direc-
tion of travel in global politics. Effectively, this indicates that the liberal peace, top-down
alignment has collapsed into a multipolar order of different spheres, which have their
own internal and limited peacemaking approaches. Between these different spheres,
there is little left in the way of an IPA, other than the balance of power, traditional diplo-
macy and minor tools like early generation peacekeeping and mediation as remnants
from the Cold War and previous imperial order. Although local-level agency seems to
determine social legitimacy for peace settlements to a large degree in critical scholarship
and across disciplines (Richmond, Pogodda and Ramović, 2016: 1–17), it appears to be
international politics that determine whether a counter-peace escalates from small tactics
to the strategic level, and even gains a wider ideological platform. As the counter-peace
phenomenon is inherently escalatory, the IPA needs wide-ranging rethinking to contain
it.
Conclusion
Given the trend of stagnating, reversing and collapsed peace processes, this paper has
investigated the ways in which the IPA is blocked, leading to counter-peace processes. In
particular, it has explored the international dimensions of such processes: how blocking
tactics merge into larger strategies; the links between counter-peace actors at different
levels and the preliminary contours of an emerging counter-peace architecture.
Initially, international counter-peace dynamics maintain peace processes to a limited
degree to harvest indirect resources from them. The internationally mediated power-
sharing agreements of the 1990s tended to produce such stalemates, which have been
fairly durable as long as a balance of forces in the underlying frozen conflict was main-
tained. However, stalemated patterns of counter-peace – as in Cyprus, Kashmir, Bosnia,
Richmond et al. 19
Nagorno Karabakh, Lebanon, Kosovo – are vulnerable to shifting alliances and the mili-
tarisation of external backers’ foreign policy. The limited counter-peace pattern (in which
geographically constrained violence coexists with surface stability) constitutes a more
fragile state, which easily escalates into unmitigated forms of counter-peace (as heralded
the current Ukraine war and in the Sahel region).
Small-scale tactics have blocked power-sharing from overcoming war-time identities
and have prevented contested borders from being transcended by inter-communal federa-
tions in the last three decades. Counter-peace tactics maintain securitisation and thus facili-
tate the return of identity-based hierarchies, authoritarian rule and socio-economic exclusion.
Such tactics might converge at different levels: resistance within society to peace processes
may connect with the rejection of the IPA at the national level and an inhospitable interna-
tional environment for peace operations. If such convergence happens, small-scale tactics
combine into larger strategies, implying the potential for ideological opposition.
This pits evolving liberal internationalism (as a platform for more advanced postcolo-
nial, pluriversal and intersectional approaches to peace) against regional geopolitics,
authoritarianism, nationalism and possibly imperialism, with all of their social stratifica-
tions related to race, identity, gender and class. This ideological competition might be
contested by the allegiance of a third camp with a yet indistinct ideology: the global
South (Schuman, 2022). Given that so many peace processes have led to illiberal and
authoritarian outcomes recently (Day et al., 2021; Lewis et al., 2018), ideological rivalry
might effectively gloss over the fact that all political blocs have tended to ignore or pay
only lip service to civil, scholarly and scientific developments vis-à-vis the IPA.
The emerging multipolar order may generate alternative approaches limited to pursu-
ing authoritarian forms of pacification with an even weaker role of civil society and a
strong defence of non-intervention for oppressive governments. Negating international
peacebuilding thus revolves around interfering with UN and development support, accen-
tuating regional geopolitics, co-opting elites at the state level and countering civil society
with ‘uncivil’ majorities. It requires the construction of different and competing interna-
tional narratives about ideology, authoritarian nationalism and its efficiency in develop-
ment, its capacity to maintain order and to reconstitute former territorial possessions. This
appears to be the main ideological tendency of the counter-peace framework, which draws
on reserves of power that far outweigh those of international and grassroots peace tools.
International counter-peace dynamics are deeper rooted and better networked than
often assumed. Related strategies span interference with balance of power mechanisms,
ideological contests, the provision of a peace dividend though global capitalism, authori-
tarian conflict management, support for populist (ethno-)nationalist networks and prior-
itisation of geopolitics over norms, law and rights. Yet, rather than a coherent project
with a consistent theory of change, the contours of counter-peace appear most clearly in
juxtaposition to what it tries to undermine: the liberal peace. To this end, counter-peace
tactics block civil society and multilateral networks. They reject rights as well as designs
for the peaceful state and multilateralism, which check power and interests. They chip
away at international support for the implementation of a peace settlement or process,
local reconciliation and state reform. They also reject the emancipatory, epistemic prem-
ises of scholarship on peaceful social orders, the state and international security. In sum,
counter-peace forces at the international level form an ideological axis of geopolitical
20 European Journal of International Relations 00(0)
power with alternative visions for the nature of political order. This indicates some pref-
erence for the avoidance of direct war, but given its oppressive nature counter-peace
remains war by other means to a large extent.
In terms of China and Russia’s engagement with the IPA, it is clear that they have an
interest in keeping the UN system alive as a platform to coordinate pacification strategies
and conflict management, while effecting the disconnection of the UN system from
human rights and the liberal order. This may also be true of Turkey’s engagement with
the IPA in normative terms. Ultimately, however, this approach is too limited to have any
chance of achieving peace and may cause even more internal contradictions bound to
erode the remaining peace tools within the system (e.g. such as with peacekeeping in the
Mali case). It hints at new and competing, but still unclear, international orders, as well
as the risks inherent in any international transition.
By contrast, the liberal peace model includes some space for rights to expand, for
subaltern voices and hybrid approaches to emerge, and for democracy to consolidate
even within a generally stalemated outcome. Despite its many flaws and much-needed
course corrections, the liberal peace has proven less prone to conflict escalation, but it
has also lost legitimacy in conflict-affected societies. However, none of the international
counter-peace dynamics further the IPA or its alignment with emancipatory scholarship
on peacemaking, and merely entangles them within the stranglehold of ideological and
structural forces, particularly related to territorialism, nationalism, geopolitics, lack of
political will, poor legal capacity and enforcement and unsustainable and inequitable
economic models. In a multipolar framework, peacemaking outside the LIO may thus
tend to be very weak and be replaced by internal authoritarian and securitised interests,
limited development and fluid geopolitical alliances, which might ultimately presage
war. Worse, it may not engage with growing critical knowledge about the IPA.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: This research was funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)
under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee (grant number 10040966) as part
of the Horizon Europe (HORIZON-CL2-2021-DEMOCRACY-0) under grant agreement number
101060809. We also thank the UK government Global Challenges Research Fund (project
‘Innovations in Peacemaking as a Response to Blockages to Counter-Peace’) and The University
of Manchester for their generous funding. DCU’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences pro-
vided additional funding for this study through its Journal Publication Scheme.
ORCID iD
Oliver P. Richmond https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8938-2209
Notes
1. Revanchist actors aim to restore pre-war power structures and hierarchies, and are potentially
motivated by grudges, while revisionist actors contest power structures and hierarchies within
the international system.
2. This paper draws on a number of reports on blockages to peace in different contexts. Over
a 3-year period (2019–2021), these included reports on Bosnia-Herzogivina, Cambodia,
Richmond et al. 21
Colombia, Ethiopia, Kosovo, Burma, Sierra Leone, Southern Thailand, Sri Lanka, Timor
Leste and Tunisia. They were generously supported by the ECPR, the Global Challenges
Research Fund and a grant from the University of Manchester.
3. In the Middle East, a new Cold War has already broken out between regional players such as
Iran and Saudi Arabia (Gause, 2014).
4. See numerous confidential sources from a global network of scholars and civil society actors
in conflict-affected societies for the ‘Blockages in Peacebuilding’ project (with Sandra
Pogodda, Gëzim Visoka and Jasmin Ramovic, University of Manchester) 2019–2022.
5. See our various Project Reports.
6. See the various reports on counter-peace in our range of cases, 2019–2021 as well as Allan
(2020).
7. Tunisia Report, 2019: Sri Lanka Report, 2021: 12.
8. Cambodia Report, 2020: 1.
9. Sri Lanka Report, 2021: 7.
10. See, for example, Doshi’s argument that China joined regional organisations to stall and con-
strain them and limit Western influence (Doshi, 2021: 66).
11. See Blockages Project Reports, 2019–2022.
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Author biographies
Oliver P. Richmond is Research Professor of IR, Peace and Conflict Studies in the Department of
Politics, University of Manchester, UK. He is also International Professor at Dublin City University,
Ireland, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea.
Sandra Pogodda is Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies in the Department of Politics at the
University of Manchester, UK. She has been involved in several EU-funded multilateral research
consortiums, as well as in UK- and university-funded research projects.
Gëzim Visoka is Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Dublin City University,
Ireland. His research focuses on postconflict peacebuilding and state recognition. He is author and
editor of numerous books, peer-reviewed journal articles, and book chapters with leading aca-
demic publishers.
