Counter-Peace

During the 21st century, peace processes have been stagnating, collapsing, or reversed across diverse contexts. At the heart of this unravelling lies a complex and hitherto overlooked phenomenon: the systematic obstruction of peace itself. Counter-Peace: Tactical Blockages to Peace and Strategic Risks for the International System introduces the concept of counter-peace: a set of interconnected, multi-scalar processes that undermine, distort, or reverse peace processes without necessarily reverting to open warfare. Drawing on detailed case studies, this book reveals how counter-peace dynamics have become embedded in peace processes and why the resulting conflict escalation is a symptom of a changing international order. It interrogates the international peace architecture and argues that its failure to adapt to critical insights on justice, legitimacy, and emancipation has rendered it increasingly ine?ective. Rather than viewing peace failures as isolated or technical missteps, the authors examine how blockages to peace are anchored in power structures, neoliberal policies, and geopolitical rivalries. Actors exploit the structural flaws and unintended consequences of peacemaking to pursue revisionist goals with the support of rising actors in the multipolar order. In this sense, peace processes have become an ideological battlefield between the declining liberal and the rising authoritarian international order. Through this lens, peace and counter-peace appear as deeply entangled forces that shape and contest the future of the international order. Rich in empirical evidence and theoretical innovation, this book challenges the traditional explanations that sanitise or depoliticise the idea of peacemaking. It shifts the debate toward systemic analyses of failure, resistance, and legitimacy. Urgent, timely, and critical, Counter-Peace calls for a fundamental rethinking of how peace is conceptualised, built, and maintained. It provides scholars, practitioners, and policymakers with a new framework to understand why peace often fails and how the construction of peaceful social orders needs to be rethought.

Oliver P. Richmond is Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics at the University of Manchester, UK. Sandra Pogodda is Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Department of Politics at the University of Manchester, UK. Gëzim Visoka is Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies in the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University, Ireland.