This project aims to map existing networks and concepts that shape discussions about peace today and how it should change moving forward. It is the first in WPF’s newest research area on the future of peace.
Overall, this program focuses on re-imagining the ideas, networks and institutions required to create a more peaceful world.
Ideas, policies and practices for world peace function at two levels: there’s a global context and then the particular actions and policies pursued at every other level. For the last forty years, the global view has been an amalgam of the liberal multilateralism of the United Nations fused with American dominance of the world’s security, financial and informational architecture. The dominant model for peace since was to expand the community of democratic countries that are invested in multilateral processes and global markets. For those countries that stood outside this community and experienced conflict or anti-democratic leadership, the presumption was that peacemaking, mediation, the imposition of “sticks” (human rights exposés, military interventions, economic sanctions, etc.) and “carrots” (access to loans and trade, reputational enhancements, etc.), could be applied.
This liberal peacebuilding model has been unravelling from the ground up for some years. Now the global context, the hegemony of liberal peace and Pax Americana, has shattered from the top down. Most efforts to reimagine the larger peace agenda are weighed down by the political, institutional and intellectual legacies of the past era. There are things to be preserved or rescued from the recent past, for sure. But this program aims to be more radical in rethinking world peace—especially in its global paradigm.
