Book Description

The guiding principle of peacebuilding over the past quarter century has been "liberal peace": the promotion of democracy, capitalism, and respect for human rights in an effort to prevent a reoccurrence of the nationalism, fascism, and economic collapse that led to World War II. This tactichas been relatively successful in reducing war between countries, but it has failed to produce lasting peace at the local level. The goals of peacebuilding have changed over time and place, but have always been built around intervention, with the goal of creating "progress" in post-conflictcountries.As Oliver P. Richmond argues in this book, the concept of peace connects the imperial era with the liberal era, and now, neoliberal eras of states and markets, and perhaps with the developing era of technology and mobility. But recent studies have shown that only a minority of modern peaceagreements survive for more than a few years. All of this begs the question of the legitimacy and effectiveness of the liberal peace agenda, particularly for scholars looking at the historical development, justifications, and tools for intervention.This book examines the development of the "grand design" and various subsequent attempts to develop a peaceful international order, and its implications for the current international peace architecture. Richmond examines six main theoretical-historical stages in this process, which have produced asubstantial, though fragile, international peace architecture, always entangled with, and hindered by, what might be described as a counter-peace framework. He contends that post-WWII liberal peace, which has aimed to balance liberty with regulation through law, democracy, human rights, and freetrade, has recently given way to a retrogressive, technologically driven neoliberal peace, which is more oriented towards free trade, counter-terrorism and insurgency, surveillance, and state security. The Grand Design provides a sweeping look at the troubled history of peacebuilding in order toconsider what the next-stage, "post-liberal peace," might look like.