The future of UN peace operations:

pragmatism, pluralism or statism?

ROLAND PARIS *

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The number and size of United Nations peace operations have experienced a
‘steep decline’ since the mid-2010s,1 prompting some observers to pronounce ‘the
end of an era for large-scale blue helmet missions in Africa’ and to question the
future of UN peace missions more generally.2 Compounding these doubts, the
world body has also faltered in the face of recent high-profile conflicts outside
Africa, including the wars in Syria, Ukraine and Gaza. Still, previous predictions
of the demise of UN peace operations have proven wrong.3 The history of this
conflict-management tool has been one of constant transformation, marked by
waves of increased and decreased activity. Further, there is strong evidence that
UN missions on balance have reduced violence,4 limited the spread of conflicts5
and improved protection for civilians.6 The pertinent question today is how UN
peace operations might change, not whether they will disappear entirely.
At the heart of this question is a debate about doctrine, broadly defined as the
assumptions and principles that guide such missions. Most peace operations during
* Drafts of this article were presented at the annual convention of the International Studies Association in
March 2022 and at the University of British Columbia in April 2022. I thank the participants in those sessions,
as well as this journal’s editor and four anonymous reviewers, for their thoughtful comments. Research for
this article was funded in part by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada.
1
Eugene Chen and Katharina Coleman, ‘Reinvigorating UN peacekeeping’, in Markus Kornprobst and
Sławomir Redo, eds, Reinvigorating the United Nations (London: Routledge, 2024), p. 131.
2
Richard Gowan and Daniel Forti, ‘What future for UN peacekeeping in Africa after Mali shutters its mission?’,
International Crisis Group, 10 July 2023, https://www.crisisgroup.org/global-mali/what-future-un-peace-
keeping-africa-after-mali-shutters-its-mission. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in
this article were accessible on 25 April 2024.)
3
Including my first published article: Roland Paris, ‘Blue helmet blues: the end of the UN as a security organi-
zation?’, Washington Quarterly 20: 1, 1997, pp. 191–206, https://doi.org/10.1080/01636609709550236.
4
Barbara F. Walter, Lise Morjé Howard and V. Page Fortna, ‘The extraordinary relationship between
peacekeeping and peace’, British Journal of Political Science 51: 4, 2021, pp. 1705–22, https://doi.org/10.1017/
S000712342000023X; Håvard Hegre, Lisa Hultman and Håvard Mokleiv Nygård, ‘Evaluating the conflict-
reducing effect of UN peacekeeping operations’, Journal of Politics 81: 1, 2019, pp. 215–32, https://doi.
org/10.1086/700203.
5
Kyle Beardsley and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, ‘Peacekeeping as conflict containment’, International Studies
Review 17: 1, 2015, pp. 67–89, https://doi.org/10.1111/misr.12205; Kyle Beardsley, ‘Peacekeeping and the
contagion of conflict’, Journal of Politics 73: 4, 2011, pp. 1051–64, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022381611000764.
6
Hanne Fjelde, Lisa Hultman and Desirée Nilsson, ‘Protection through presence: UN peacekeeping and
the costs of targeting civilians’, International Organization 73: 1, 2019, pp. 103–31, https://doi.org/10.1017/
S0020818318000346; Lisa Hultman, Jacob Kathman and Megan Shannon, ‘United Nations peacekeeping
and civilian protection in civil war’, American Journal of Political Science 57: 4, 2013, pp. 875–91, https://doi.
org/10.1111/ajps.12036.

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 Roland Paris
the Cold War—then known as ‘peacekeeping’—undertook relatively straightfor-
ward monitoring tasks, such as observing ceasefire lines.7 This changed at the end
of the Cold War with the rise of more complex, multifunctional ‘peacebuilding’
missions that promoted democratic transitions, civil and political rights and
market-oriented economies as a formula for peace—an approach that came to be
known as ‘liberal peacebuilding’.8 However, the perceived shortcomings of these
missions, including dramatic failures in places such as Rwanda and Afghanistan,
ultimately fuelled a backlash against the liberal peacebuilding model.9 Today’s
doubts about the future of UN peace operations reflect, in part, a deeper uncer-

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tainty about which doctrine (if any) should guide such missions, now that the
liberal approach has lost much of its appeal.
The solution, according to some observers, is ‘pragmatic’ peacebuilding, or
shifting away from ambitious plans to remake war-torn societies into liberal
market democracies and towards ‘more realistic or contextualized approaches
to addressing intrastate conflicts’.10 Pragmatists view the recent proliferation of
competing peacebuilding concepts and approaches as a strength, not a weakness,
and as a basis for more successful UN missions in the future. They have written
about pragmatism both descriptively and prescriptively. As a descriptive label, the
term refers to ‘a multitude of embryonic and experimental approaches’—from
counter-insurgency techniques to local community reconciliation projects—that
depart from the standard model of liberal peacebuilding.11 What makes these
innovations ‘pragmatic’ is their emphasis on finding ‘good enough’ practical
remedies for concrete problems in war-affected states, rather than ‘ideal type’
7
A notable exception was the UN mission in the Congo, 1960-64. See below.
8
Oliver P. Richmond, ‘The problem of peace: understanding the “liberal peace”’, Conflict, Security and Develop-
ment 6: 3, 2006, pp. 291–314, https://doi.org/10.1080/14678800600933480; Roland Paris, At war’s end: building
peace after civil conflict (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
9
For a survey of critiques of liberal peacebuilding, see Oliver P. Richmond, ‘Liberal peace and its critiques’, in
Oliver P. Richmond and Gëzim Visoka, eds, The Palgrave encyclopedia of peace and conflict studies (Cham, Swit-
zerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), pp. 715–33.
10
Louise Riis Andersen, ‘The HIPPO in the room: the pragmatic push-back from the UN peace bureaucracy
against the militarization of UN peacekeeping’, International Affairs 94: 2, 2018, pp. 343–61 at p. 343, https://doi.
org/10.1093/ia/iix239. See also Outi Donovan, ‘Promise or peril? Exploring the gender dimension of pragmatic
peacekeeping’, International Affairs 99: 1, 2023, pp. 279–97, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiac267; Caroline Dunton,
Marion Laurence and Gino Vlavonou, ‘Pragmatic peacekeeping in a multipolar era: liberal norms, practices, and
the future of UN peace operations’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 17: 3, 2023, pp. 215–34, https://doi.
org/10.1080/17502977.2023.2217579; Katelyn Cassin and Benjamin Zyla, ‘UN reforms for an era of pragmatic
peacekeeping’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 17: 3, 2023, pp. 294–312, https://doi.org/10.1080/175029
77.2022.2158427; John Karlsrud, ‘“Pragmatic peacekeeping” in practice: exit liberal peacekeeping, enter UN
support missions?’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 17: 3, 2023, pp. 258–72, https://doi.org/10.1080/1750
2977.2023.2198285; Pol Bargués, ‘Peacebuilding without peace? On how pragmatism complicates the practice
of international intervention’, Review of International Studies 46: 2, 2020, pp. 237–55, https://doi.org/10.1017/
S0260210520000042; Ana E. Juncos and Jonathan Joseph, ‘Resilient peace: exploring the theory and practice of
resilience in peacebuilding interventions’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 14: 3, 2020, pp. 289–302, https://
doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2020.1745445; Ridvan Peshkopia, ‘A bottom-up view at peacebuilding: pragmatism,
public opinion, and the individual as unit of analysis in postconflict societies’, in Henry F. Carey, ed., Peace-
building paradigms: the impact of theoretical diversity on implementing sustainable peace (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2021), pp. 304–23; Mateja Peter, ‘UN peace operations: adapting to a new global order?’, in
Cedric de Coning and Mateja Peter, eds, Peace operations in a changing order (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2019), pp. 1–22; Cedric de Coning, ‘Adaptive peacebuilding’, International Affairs 94: 2, 2018, pp. 301–17,
https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iix251; Louise Wiuff Moe and Finn Stepputat, ‘Introduction: peacebuilding in an
era of pragmatism’, International Affairs 94: 2, 2018, pp. 293–9, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiy035.
11
Andersen, ‘The HIPPO in the room’, p. 360.
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 The future of UN peace operations
solutions.12 The diversity of approaches captured under this label, however, makes
it more of a catch-all than a clearly defined category of activities.
The prescriptive version of pragmatism, by contrast, has been presented as a
conceptual framework and method for future missions. Specifically, its propo-
nents reject preconceived ‘templates, formulas and one-size-fits-all solutions’ and
argue that the goals of each mission should be allowed to emerge from a more
organic process of trial-and-error learning and societal deliberation—or ‘partici-
patory exploration, experimentation, and adaptation’.13 According to this view,
by setting aside their own ‘normative expectations’14 and becoming ‘agnostic

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about the end goals’ of each peace process,15 international peacebuilders can serve
effectively as ‘process facilitators’16 rather than purveyors of particular ideologies
of governance.17
Does pragmatism offer a workable framework for the next phase of UN
peacebuilding, as some of its proponents claim? At first glance, it has consider-
able appeal. The task of promoting peace in war-affected societies is enormously
complex and varied, so why not renounce ‘ideologically driven’ formulas and
embrace a doctrine of practical problem-solving?18 Doing so might not only
produce approaches that are better tailored to each society and thus more likely
to work; it might also help to insulate UN peacebuilding from rising ideological
disputes in international politics over what constitutes ‘good’ governance.
The problem, I shall argue, is that prescriptive pragmatism rests on a faulty
premise—the unrealistic assumption that international peacebuilders can become
‘agnostic’ about the end-goals of peace processes. As we shall see, peace operations
have always rested on assumptions about what peace means and about the kinds
of governance arrangements that are most conducive to peace. Indeed, without
such assumptions peace operations would not be possible. A close examination of
prescriptive pragmatism reveals that it, too, relies on implicit assumptions about
how war-affected states should be organized: namely, the idea that sustainable
peace requires a pluralist polity and state.19
This observation is important for three reasons. First, peacebuilding doctrines
based on flawed premises are doomed to disappoint. Pragmatism appears to be
either a descriptive label that encompasses so much as to be virtually meaning-
less, or a prescriptive concept that promotes pluralist polities and states while
claiming to be agnostic about governance. Either way, it offers limited utility as
12
Tobias Debiel and Stephan Dombrowski, ‘Hybrid political orders in fragile contexts,’ in David Carment and
Yiagadeesen Samy, eds, Handbook of fragile states (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023), pp. 137–51.
13
de Coning, ‘Adaptive peacebuilding’, pp. 304 and 310.
14
Bargués, ‘Peacebuilding without peace?’, p. 254.
15
Juncos and Joseph, ‘Resilient peace’, p. 299.
16
Cedric de Coning, ‘Implications of complexity for peacebuilding policies and practices’, in Emery Brusset,
Cedric de Coning and Bryn Hughes, eds, Complexity thinking for peacebuilding practice and evaluation (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 19–48 at p. 44.
17
I define an ‘ideology of governance’ as a set of ideas, beliefs and values that justifies and explains the political
arrangements and processes of a community. This definition is adapted from Michael Freeden, ‘Ideology:
political aspects’, in Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, eds, International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral
sciences (Oxford: Pergamon, 2001), p. 7174.
18
Peshkopia, ‘A bottom-up view at peacebuilding’, p. 317.
19
On the meaning of pluralism in this context, see below.
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 Roland Paris
a guiding framework for future missions. Second, this critique of pragmatism
nevertheless points to a more promising approach: one that explicitly champions
and elaborates the concept of pluralist peacebuilding rather than hiding it behind
a pretence of normative neutrality. Notably, pluralist peacebuilding might offer
a compelling alternative to authoritarian conflict-management models that
have been in the ascendancy in recent years and that seek to impose peace by
empowering repressive regimes.20 Third, at a more theoretical level, this article
uses peacebuilding as a window into the relationship between ideas and power
in international affairs. It shows how different understandings of peace inevi-

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tably favour different forms of governance, and how normative tensions between
pluralist and statist–authoritarian conceptions of peace mirror power shifts in
global politics. Changing configurations of power and ideas in international
affairs, including about the concept of peace itself, have always shaped conflict-
management practices, but the rapidity of today’s change places particular
pressure on UN peacebuilding.21
The rest of the article proceeds as follows. In the first and second sections, I shall
examine recent pragmatist writings and show how pluralist assumptions about
peace, politics and the state are embedded in them. Then, to demonstrate that the
pragmatist assumption of ideological agnosticism is unrealistic, I will show how
peace missions have always relied on contingent understandings of what ‘peace’
means and how peaceful societies should be organized. Finally, I shall argue that
pragmatists would be better off embracing and developing an explicitly pluralist
framework, or else risk surrendering the idea of peacebuilding to those who seek
to equate peace with repressive authoritarianism.

What is pragmatic peacebuilding?

The terminology of peace operations is notoriously confusing. According to
the UN, peacekeeping missions are those ‘mandated by the Security Council to
provide security and political and peacebuilding support to countries in conflict
or post-conflict situations’—a very broad definition.22 Others have used the term
more narrowly to refer to multinational military operations with more limited
monitoring tasks, such as overseeing ceasefires—sometimes called ‘traditional’
peacekeeping. Peacebuilding, by contrast, is a broad category that encompasses
both military and civilian efforts to create the conditions for lasting peace in
conflict-affected states. Virtually all UN operations launched since the end of the
Cold War have had peacebuilding mandates, as we shall see.
What, then, is pragmatic peacebuilding?23 As noted, the term has both descrip-
tive and prescriptive uses. Descriptively, it refers to ‘looking for and embracing
20
John Heathershaw and Catherine Owen, ‘Authoritarian conflict management in post-colonial Eurasia’,
Conflict, Security & Development 19: 3, 2019, pp. 269–73, https://doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2019.1608022.
21
Roland Paris, ‘The past, present, and uncertain future of collective conflict management: peacekeeping and beyond’,
Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 17: 3, 2023, pp. 235–57, https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2023.2170546.
22
United Nations Security Council, ‘Glossary’, n.d., https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/content/glossary.
23
While some scholars refer to ‘pragmatic peacekeeping’ (using ‘peacekeeping’ in its broadest sense—see above),
others employ the term ‘pragmatic peacebuilding’. To avoid confusion, I use the latter phrase in this article.
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 The future of UN peace operations
solutions that work best’,24 often contrasted with the more idealistic ‘liberal peace’
model that dominated post-Cold War peacebuilding and promoted democratiza-
tion and economic liberalization as a formula for peace. ‘The era of liberal idealism
and interventionism is closing’, write Louise Wiuff Moe and Finn Stepputat, for
example, ‘and while the contours of the emerging global order remain uncertain,
a more pragmatic approach to the means and ends of peace appears to be on the
rise.’25 This new approach encompasses diverse developments in both the prac-
tice and theory of peace operations in recent years, including ‘the “local turn” in
peacebuilding, the related rise of complexity, hybridity and resilience thinking, as

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well as … the (re)turn of prevention, stabilization and pacification approaches’.26
Indeed, as a descriptive label, pragmatism seems to encompass virtually anything
that departs from—or is perceived to depart from—the more ‘ideologically driven’
liberal paradigm.27
The second, prescriptive version of pragmatism refers to a broader concep-
tual framework for peacebuilding. Its central claim is that any approach—not just
the liberal model—will be flawed if it expects peacebuilding to follow a ‘linear
and calculated process’.28 This methodological critique, derived from complexity
theory,29 builds upon a more common observation that ‘liberal peacebuilding has
been more difficult than anticipated, fraught with challenges and confronted with
a continuing difficulty of understanding local politics and dynamics’.30 As Cedric
de Coning argues, the sheer complexity of working in war-affected societies
belies any prospect that ‘external peacebuilding intervention can set in motion
and control a causal sequence of events that will result in a sustainable peace
outcome’.31 Peacebuilding must therefore be based on a different approach—one
that values continuous experimentation and learns inductively from successes
and failures in the field, and one that allows the goals of each mission to emerge
from an ongoing process of dialogue among local actors and stakeholders. In de
Coning’s version of pragmatism, which he calls ‘adaptive’ peacebuilding, interna-
tional actors set aside their own prejudices about how war-affected states should
organize themselves, recognizing that ‘there is no external privileged knowledge
nor predetermined model’ of peace and that ‘the design of solutions for peace
should emerge from the process itself ’32—namely, through ‘experimentation,

24
Peshkopia, ‘A bottom-up view at peacebuilding’, p. 315.
25
Moe and Stepputat, ‘Introduction’, p. 293.
26
Moe and Stepputat, ‘Introduction’, p. 293.
27
Peshkopia, ‘A bottom-up view at peacebuilding’, p. 317.
28
Bargués, ‘Peacebuilding without peace?’, p. 244.
29
On complexity theory and peace operations, see Adam Day, States of disorder, ecosystems of governance: complexity
theory applied to UN statebuilding in the DRC and South Sudan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
30
John Karlsrud, ‘From liberal peacebuilding to stabilization and counterterrorism’, International Peacekeeping
26: 1, 2019, pp. 1–21 at p. 2, https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2018.1502040.
31
de Coning, ‘Adaptive peacebuilding’, p. 304.
32
Cedric de Coning, ‘Fitting the pieces together: implications for resilience, adaptive peacebuilding and tran-
sitional justice’, in Janine Natalya Clark and Michael Ungar, eds, Resilience, adaptive peacebuilding and transi-
tional justice: how societies recover after collective violence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021),
p. 261.
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 Roland Paris
feedback and collective learning’.33 In this sense, pragmatism is said to be a ‘goal-
free’ approach to peacebuilding.34
Pol Bargués describes pragmatism in similar terms. International missions, he
argues, should be ‘radically open to discoveries in the field of action and revise the
principles and values as they go along’.35 He roots this prescription in the episte-
mological writings of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century pragmatist
philosophers, such as Charles Peirce and John Dewey. As Monica Prasad writes,
these philosophers maintained that ‘knowledge develops through attempts to
solve problems with practical consequences’—a criticism of abstract theorizing—

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and that ‘it is in the attempt to solve these problems and in the encounter with
the empirical world that we can best determine if our fallible beliefs are in fact
mistaken and through which the community of enquiry corrects mistaken
beliefs’.36 Bargués echoes these themes: ‘The lack of certainty in post-conflict
contexts obliges practitioners to guess and experiment to generate provisional
insights that are worth considering, despite oversights and errors’.37 Endorsing
this method of continuous trial-and-error learning leads to the idea of ‘literally
practicing peacebuilding without principles and end points’—in other words,
without imposing predetermined ‘normative expectations’ on the outcomes.38
Like de Coning, therefore, Bargués presents pragmatic peacebuilding as a prescrip-
tive philosophy that abandons preconceived ‘solutions’ of any kind and that
instead allows the goals of each mission to emerge through experimental learning
and societal discussion.
Ana Juncos and Jonathan Joseph explain ‘resilient’ peacekeeping—yet another
version of pragmatism—in similar ways: ‘For resilience to be properly imple-
mented by international actors’, peacebuilding agendas must ‘become, in line
with complexity thinking, agnostic about the end goals’.39 The very ‘complexity
and non-linearity’ of peacebuilding, they add, ‘mean that multiple equilibria are
possible and that there is no end goal, unlike in the liberal peace model’, and that
peacebuilders should therefore be ‘agnostic regarding the normative values under-
pinning the system’—although these authors doubt whether the UN would accept
this advice.40 Katelyn Cassin and Benjamin Zyla likewise call for UN peacekeepers
to ‘“unlearn” their own assumptions’ through new kinds of training.41 De Coning,
too, foresees a ‘goal-free approach towards peacebuilding, where the focus is on
the means or process, and the end-state is open to context-specific interpretations
of peace’,42 arguing that UN field personnel should serve as ‘process facilitators’
by helping local actors define their own political arrangements.43
33
de Coning, ‘Fitting the pieces together’, p. 264.
34
de Coning, ‘Adaptive peacebuilding’, p. 301.
35
Bargués, ‘Peacebuilding without peace’, p. 240.
36
Monica Prasad, ‘Pragmatism as problem solving’, Socius, vol. 7, 2021, p. 5, https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023121993991.
37
Bargués, ‘Peacebuilding without peace’, p. 247.
38
Bargués, ‘Peacebuilding without peace’, p. 254.
39
Juncos and Joseph, ‘Resilient peace’, p. 299.
40
Juncos and Joseph, ‘Resilient peace’, pp. 294 and 299.
41
Cassin and Zyla, ‘UN reforms for an era of pragmatic peacekeeping’, p. 301.
42
de Coning, ‘Adaptive peacebuilding’, p. 301.
43
de Coning, ‘Implications of complexity for peacebuilding policies and practices’, p. 44.
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 The future of UN peace operations
The purported benefits of prescriptive pragmatism are twofold. First, its
proponents argue that it should do a better job of fostering peace than the liberal
approach and other ‘preconceived’ models of peace and governance have done.
Second, some maintain that this approach could also help UN missions ‘circumvent
ideological disagreements’ over the purposes of peacebuilding, a growing problem
in a world ‘marked by increasing geopolitical and ideological competition’.44 Put
another way, if the goals of each mission were ‘normatively flexible’ and permitted
to emerge organically through a process of inductive learning and societal delib-
eration, these operations should be better insulated from international disagree-

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ments about what counts as a legitimate form of governance.45

Pragmatism as pluralism
A closer examination of pragmatic peacebuilding reveals something interesting.
Rather than abandoning predetermined models of political organization, propo-
nents of pragmatism tend to make their own assumptions about what kind of
governance is needed in war-affected states: namely, a pluralist polity and society.
Pluralism—a body of political thought with liberal, communitarian and critical
variants—portrays politics as a process of interaction among societal actors, such
as interest groups, communities and individuals.46 For pluralists, the common
good cannot be defined in the abstract; rather, it emerges from the expression
and reconciliation of competing societal interests. Some versions of pluralism—
including those which advocate ideas of ‘deliberative democracy’—place partic-
ular emphasis on ‘continuing dialogue’ among groups and individuals as a means
of arriving at collective decisions.47 All pluralists hold that the state’s role should
be limited: it may serve as an arena or the object of politics, but the state should
neither dictate the outcome of the political process nor impede the expression of
societal interests.
These ideas are clearly visible in the literature on pragmatism. Consider de
Coning’s concept of adaptive peacebuilding, which, as we have seen, rejects any
preconceived ‘model’ and advocates a ‘more open-ended or goal-free approach
towards peacebuilding, where the focus is on the means or process, and the end-state
is open to context-specific interpretations of peace’.48 Adaptive peacebuilding is
purportedly ‘agnostic about content’ and instead seeks to secure peace through a
‘participatory process’ that produces ‘self-organized social institutions’49—echoes
44
Dunton, Laurence and Vlavonou, ‘Pragmatic peacekeeping in a multipolar era’, p. 221; John Karlsrud, ‘UN
peacekeeping operations in a multipolar era’, Global Governance 29: 2, 2023, pp. 219–29 at p. 226, https://doi.
org/10.1163/19426720-02902001.
45
Cassin and Zyla, ‘UN reforms for an era of pragmatic peacekeeping’, pp. 300 and 302.
46
John S. Dryzek and Simon Niemeyer, ‘Reconciling pluralism and consensus as political ideals’, American
Journal of Political Science 50: 3, 2006, pp. 634–49, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2006.00206.x.
47
Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why deliberative democracy? [2004] (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2016), p. 6.
48
de Coning, ‘Adaptive peacebuilding’, pp. 312 and 301.
49
Cedric de Coning, Rui Saraiva and Ako Muto, ‘Introduction. Exploring alternative approaches to peacebuild-
ing’, in Cedric de Coning, Rui Saraiva and Ako Muto, eds, Adaptive peacebuilding: a new approach to sustaining
peace in the 21st century (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), p. 10.
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of deliberative democracy. De Coning adds, however, that implementing this
approach would require international personnel:
to influence the knowledge, attitudes and behaviour of a [host] society away from violent
conflict and towards self-sustaining peace … by trying to disrupt those that seek to use
violence to pursue their interest and by supporting those that wish to strengthen institu-
tions that deter violence.50

The political system, he adds, is thereby kept within ‘desired parameters’ to

produce a ‘self-sustainable’ peace.51 There is a clear tension between these two
imperatives: on the one hand, peacebuilders must create space for societal processes

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to determine the meaning of peace and objectives of the peace mission without
prejudging its substantive outcomes. On the other hand, international personnel
must also keep politics within ‘desired parameters’ by influencing local ‘knowl-
edge, attitudes and behaviour’. De Coning seems aware of this tension, noting that
‘too much external interference will undermine self-organization’.52
But exactly what ‘knowledge, attitudes and behaviour’ should peacebuilders
promote? De Coning’s emphasis on ‘sustainable’ peace offers a clue.53 He notes that
the ‘sustaining peace’ concept emerged from the Advisory Group of Experts on
the Review of the Peacebuilding Architecture in 2015,54 whose recommendations
were later endorsed by both the General Assembly and the Security Council.55
According to these UN bodies:
‘sustaining peace’ … should be broadly understood as a goal and a process to build a
common vision of a society, ensuring that the needs of all segments of the population are
taken into account, which encompasses activities aimed at preventing the outbreak, escala-
tion, continuation and recurrence of conflict, addressing root causes, assisting parties to
conflict to end hostilities, ensuring national reconciliation, and moving towards recovery,
reconstruction and development, and emphasizing that sustaining peace is a shared task
and responsibility that needs to be fulfilled by the Government and all other national
stakeholders … including through inclusive dialogue and mediation, access to justice and
transitional justice, accountability, good governance, democracy, accountable institu-
tions, gender equality and respect for, and protection of, human rights and fundamental
freedoms … 56
This statement is worth examining closely because it contains both causal and
normative elements. Its main causal implication is that achieving sustainable peace
requires taking the actions listed in the statement—ensuring national reconcilia-
tion, addressing the needs of all sectors in the society, and so on. The main norma-
tive content is its description of peace. ‘Sustaining peace’, the statement asserts,
is both a process and a ‘goal’. Therefore, the listed actions are not only require-
50
de Coning, ‘Adaptive peace operations’, p. 845.
51
de Coning, ‘Adaptive peace operations’, p. 845.
52
de Coning, ‘Adaptive peace operations’, p. 845.
53
Donovan (in ‘Promise or peril?’) also draws parallels between ‘sustainable peace’ and pragmatism.
54
United Nations, The challenge of sustaining peace: report of the Advisory Group of Experts on the Review of the Peace-
building Architecture, A/69/968 S/2015/490 (New York: United Nations, 2015).
55
General Assembly resolution A/RES/70/262 and Security Council resolution S/RES/2282, 12 May 2016.
56
General Assembly resolution A/RES/70/262 and Security Council resolution S/RES/2282, 12 May 2016.
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 The future of UN peace operations
ments for peace but also characteristics of peace, or both means and ends. Yet it is
not self-evident that peace necessarily implies ‘accountable institutions’, ‘inclu-
sive dialogue’ or reconciliation involving ‘the government and all other national
stakeholders’—all pluralist ideas. By contrast, some actors have sought to establish
peace through the ‘hegemonic control of public discourse, space and economic
resources rather than by the liberal model of compromise, negotiation and power-
sharing’—an ‘illiberal’ conception of peace.57 Others define peace simply as the
absence of violence, or ‘negative’ peace.58 What makes the UN’s version of
sustaining peace normative is its incorporation of pluralist values directly into the

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meaning of peace.
The idea of ‘resilient’ peace—another version of pragmatism—rests on similar
pluralist assumptions.59 Juncos and Joseph present resilience as ‘a useful conceptual
tool to reframe interventions as well as to understand locally-driven peace process-
es’.60 Their analysis builds on earlier work by David Chandler, who argued for
a resilience-based approach that involves a ‘shift to society and societal processes’
and rejects the ‘discourse of sovereign power—a rationalist, top-down, state-
based, view of political dominion of humanity over nature’.61 This vision evokes
pluralist anxieties about the power of the state being used to stifle society-centred
politics. It also portrays ‘participatory methods’62—or what other pragmatists have
called ‘inclusive and organic’ deliberation at the ‘grassroots level’63—as essential to
peace. Indeed, like the UN statement, the idea of resilience elides the requirements
and characteristics of peace: Chandler asserts that ‘local capacities, practices, and
understandings’ are ‘the means and the ends’ of peacebuilding.64
Thania Paffenholz also recommends a peacebuilding approach rooted in pluralist
understandings of politics and peace.65 Rejecting the ‘linearity of the liberal peace-
building model’, she envisions ‘continuous negotiations, and re-negotiations, of the
social and political contract of a society and polity, with pathways to peace marked

57
David Lewis, John Heathershaw and Nick Megoran, ‘Illiberal peace? Authoritarian modes of conflict manage-
ment’, Cooperation and Conflict 53: 4, 2018, pp. 486–506 at p. 499, https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836718765902.
58
On the distinction between negative and positive peace, see Johan Galtung, ‘An editorial’, Journal of Peace
Research 1: 1, 1964, pp. 1–4, https://doi.org/10.1177/002234336400100101.
59
Moe and Stepputat, ‘Introduction’; Rui Saraiva and Alastair Erfe, ‘Preventing violent extremism with resil-
ience, adaptive peacebuilding, and community-embedded approaches’, Current Opinion in Environmental
Sustainability vol. 61, 2023, 101271, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2023.101271; Giulio Levorato, ‘Adapta-
tion or paradigm shift? An interpretation of resilience through the lens of policy change’, Current Opinion in
Environmental Sustainability vol. 64, 2023, 101325, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2023.101325; Ana E. Juncos,
‘Resilience as the new EU foreign policy paradigm: a pragmatist turn?’, European Security 26: 1, 2017, pp. 1–18,
https://doi.org/10.1080/09662839.2016.1247809.
60
Juncos and Joseph, ‘Resilient peace’, p. 293.
61
David Chandler, Resilience: the governance of complexity (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 78
and 51.
62
Saraiva and Erfe, ‘Preventing violent extremism’, p. 5.
63
Bargués, ‘Peacebuilding without peace’, p. 254; Katelyn Cassin and Benjamin Zyla, ‘The end of the liberal
world order and the future of UN peace operations: lessons learned’, Global Policy 12: 4, 2021, pp. 455–67 at
p. 462, https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12993.
64
David Chandler, ‘Resilience and the “everyday”: beyond the paradox of “liberal peace”’, Review of International
Studies 41: 1, 2015, pp. 27–48 at p. 48, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210513000533 (emphasis added).
65
Thania Paffenholz, ‘Perpetual peacebuilding: a new paradigm to move beyond the linearity of liberal peace-
building’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 15: 3, 2021, pp. 367–85, https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.202
1.1925423.
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 Roland Paris
by opportunities, setbacks, catalysts, friction and resistance’.66 International actors
should therefore focus on ‘facilitating the envisaging of the society which people
want to build’67— not unlike de Coning’s conception of peacebuilders as ‘process
facilitators’. The pluralist elements of Paffenholz’s formula are clear, including
the need for ‘inclusive’ negotiation of a ‘social contract’ among a ‘diversity of
actors’ in war-affected states.68 In fact, this is one of the oldest ideas in the study of
peacebuilding. John Paul Lederach, one of the earliest contributors to this schol-
arship and whose work Paffenholz cites, has defined the ‘goal’ of peacebuilding
as ‘the generation of continuous, dynamic, self-regenerating processes’ composed

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of ‘a web of people, their relationships and activities, and the social mechanisms
necessary to sustain the change sought’.69 A similar idea informs contemporary
discussions of ‘hybrid’ peacebuilding that emphasize ‘complex processes of social
negotiation’,70 just as Christine Bell and Jan Pospisil’s concept of ‘formalized politi-
cal unsettlement’ similarly presupposes continuous societal dialogue.71
All these concepts—including ‘pragmatic’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘resilient’ peace-
building—effectively treat political pluralism as both a prerequisite for and
a characteristic of peace. That they additionally require a restrained state is no
surprise; as Robert Dahl pointed out, pluralist politics are only possible when
‘the barriers to organized oppositions are lowered’ and governing authorities are
willing to accept, if not encourage, the political activity of organized societal
interests and citizens.72 Peacebuilders who apply these pragmatic models must
consequently also take steps to safeguard the ‘civic space’ required for societal
deliberation—and ensure that state authorities respect this space, too. Such delib-
erations are fundamental for yet another reason: they define the very purposes of
each peacebuilding mission, according to the proponents of pragmatism.
In short, pragmatism is hardly agnostic about the governance arrangements of
war-affected states. While its proponents maintain that such arrangements should
emerge through societal deliberation and inductive learning in the field, their own
assumptions result in a ‘field’ that is not level, but tilted toward the production of
a pluralist society, polity and state.

An inherently ideological enterprise

There are two possible responses to this critique of pragmatic peacebuilding. The
first would be to acknowledge these pluralist assumptions and build upon them—
an approach that I recommend later in this article. The second would be the oppo-
66
Paffenholz, ‘Perpetual peacebuilding’, pp. 368 and 380.
67
Paffenholz, ‘Perpetual peacebuilding’, p. 379.
68
Paffenholz, ‘Perpetual peacebuilding’, pp. 369, 372 and 378.
69
John Paul Lederach, Building peace: sustainable reconciliation in divided societies (Washington DC: United States
Institute of Peace Press, 1997), p. 84, cited in Paffenholz, ‘Perpetual peacebuilding’, p. 369.
70
Roger Mac Ginty and Gurchathen Sanghera, ‘Hybridity in peacebuilding and development: an introduction’,
Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 7: 2, 2012, pp. 3–8 at p. 3, https://doi.org/10.1080/15423166.2012.742800.
71
Christine Bell and Jan Pospisil, ‘Navigating inclusion in transitions from conflict: the formalized political
unsettlement’, Journal of International Development 29: 5, 2017, pp. 576–93, https://doi.org/10.1002/jid.3283.
72
Robert A. Dahl, ‘Pluralism revisited’, Comparative Politics 10: 2, 1978, pp. 191–203 at p. 191, https://doi.
org/10.2307/421645.
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 The future of UN peace operations
site: to expunge the pluralist content of pragmatic peacebuilding and make it truly
agnostic about the governance arrangements of war-affected states. However, the
latter option is impossible—and it is important to understand why: peace opera-
tions presuppose certain understandings of peace and governance. This becomes
clear when modern peacebuilding missions are viewed in a wider historical
context.73 As we shall see, peace missions have always depended on—and repro-
duced—contingent assumptions about how political space and societies should be
organized. It is neither reasonable nor plausible to expect UN peacebuilders to be
agnostic about the social and political arrangements of states that host these

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missions. Peace missions are inherently and inescapably ‘ideological’ in this sense.

Proto-peacekeeping after the First World War

The League of Nations, created in the aftermath of the First World War, is perhaps
best remembered for its failure to prevent the disastrous slide into the Second
World War. Despite this failure, the League undertook several smaller-scale
conflict-resolution activities rooted in their own ideology of peace and politics—
a precursor of modern peace missions.
The wartime president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, and other
leading figures believed that the unrequited national aspirations of groups living
under ‘foreign’ rule had been one of the causes of the war. His plans for postwar
peace therefore emphasized the ‘self-determination’ of national groups. As he told
a joint session of the US Congress in 1918:
National aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed
only by their own consent. ‘Self-determination’ is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative
principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril. We cannot have
general peace for the asking … 74

Although Britain and France were initially sceptical of Wilson’s ideas, by the end
of the war both had come to accept them.75 The victorious powers subsequently
carved up the Austro-Hungarian and German empires into smaller states and
redrew several European borders to better reflect the distribution of nationalities,
all with the aim of reducing the risk of future conflict. The principle of ‘national
self-determination’ thus became a centrepiece of the postwar settlement.76
These ideas also informed a flurry of collective conflict-management activities
after the war, including plebiscites that asked people living in border areas where
they wanted the new frontiers to be drawn. Inter-allied commissions oversaw five
73
This section is based on Paris, ‘The past, present, and uncertain future of collective conflict management’.
74
Woodrow Wilson, Address of the President of the United States, delivered at a joint session of the two houses of Congress,
February 11, 1918 (Washington DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1918), p. 5.
75
J. Samuel Barkin and Bruce Cronin, ‘The state and the nation: changing norms and the rules of sover-
eignty in international relations’, International Organization 48: 1, 1994, pp. 107–30, https://doi.org/10.1017/
S0020818300000837. Importantly, though, self-determination principles at the time were applied principally
to European societies. Only later would these principles fuel the decolonization movement in other parts of
the world.
76
Anthony Whelan, ‘Wilsonian self-determination and the Versailles settlement’, International and Comparative
Law Quarterly 43: 1, 1994, pp. 99–115, https://doi.org/10.1093/iclqaj/43.1.99.
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 Roland Paris
such referendums in 1920 and 1921—in Schleswig, Allenstein and Marienwerder,
Klagenfurt, Upper Silesia and Sopron.77 In Schleswig, for example, the Treaty
of Versailles had provided for the evacuation of all German troops and officials
and for a plebiscite commission to take control of the area pending a referendum
asking the population whether they wanted to be part of Denmark or Germany.78
As Lawrence Farley recounts, the Schleswig Commission—‘the first international
commission in history to conduct a plebiscite’—created a locally recruited police
force and reorganized schools and the civil service ‘to eliminate discrimination
against either Danes or Germans, and suspended or amended existing laws or

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statutes that were seen as prejudicial to the rights of either community’.79 After
studying the results of the vote, the commission drew a new boundary between
Denmark and Germany that reflected what it interpreted to be the preferences of
the populace—a border that has remained unchanged ever since.80 The Schleswig
plebiscite thus provides ‘an excellent place-based study of how Wilsonian princi-
ples were put into action’.81 In other cases, too, the League established expert
commissions to adjust boundaries to national populations and in some cases
assumed temporary administrative authority over the territories.82
Although the League’s interventions may have appeared to be normatively
neutral at the time because they applied seemingly technical criteria and methods
to redraw national borders and temporarily administer territories, these precursors
of UN peace operations in fact reflected a particular set of ideas about what ‘peace’
was and what kinds of political arrangements it required, all rooted in assumptions
about the relationship between nationalism and peace.

Traditional peacekeeping during the Cold War

The creation of the United Nations in the aftermath of the Second World War
represented yet another effort to establish international peace. The UN Charter
empowered the organization’s new Security Council to ‘determine the existence
of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression’ and to ‘decide
what measures shall be taken … to maintain or restore international peace and
security’.83 Although Cold War tensions quickly paralysed the Security Council
due to the veto power of its permanent members, notably the United States and
the Soviet Union (USSR), the UN nevertheless developed a modest conflict-
management function that was not envisaged in the Charter: peacekeeping.
77
Alan James, ‘The peacekeeping role of the League of Nations’, International Peacekeeping 6: 1, 1999, pp. 154–60,
https://doi.org/10.1080/13533319908413762.
78
Lawrence T. Farley, Plebiscites and sovereignty: the crisis of political legitimacy (New York: Routledge, 2019).
79
Farley, Plebiscites and sovereignty, p. 36.
80
Farley, Plebiscites and sovereignty, p. 36.
81
Ryan J. Gesme, ‘Solving the Schleswig question’, in Albert Wu and Stephen W. Sawyer, eds, The making of a
world order: global historical perspectives on the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles (Abingdon and New
York: Routledge, 2024), p. 70.
82
Norrie MacQueen, Peacekeeping and the international system (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006),
pp. 28–42.
83
United Nations, ‘United Nations Charter, Chapter VII: action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches
of the peace, and acts of aggression’, art. 39, https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/chapter-7.
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 The future of UN peace operations
The first large-scale peacekeeping operation (after the UN’s first small experi-
ments with observer missions in 1948–9) was launched in 1956 in the wake of the
invasion of Egypt by Britain, France and Israel. The USSR warned that it was
prepared to use nuclear weapons if the intervening countries did not withdraw
their forces, prompting a flurry of diplomacy that ultimately led to the creation of
a lightly armed United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) of about 3,000 troops,
deployed to oversee the withdrawal of foreign forces from Egypt and then to take
up observation positions along the Egypt–Israel border. UNEF’s mandate prohib-
ited UN personnel from using force (except in self-defence) or from interfering in

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Egypt’s internal politics—principles that became touchstones for peacekeeping in
subsequent years, including in Cyprus and Lebanon. As UN Secretary-General Dag
Hammarskjöld wrote at the time, peacekeeping operations must limit themselves
to dealing with the ‘external [that is, international] aspects of the political situa-
tion’; otherwise, ‘United Nations units might run the risk of getting involved
in differences with local authorities or [the] public or in internal conflicts which
would be highly detrimental to the effectiveness of the operation’.84 With the
notable exception of the operation in the Congo (now the Democratic Republic
of the Congo) that became embroiled in that newly independent country’s civil
war,85 UN missions during the Cold War era generally conformed to these ‘tradi-
tional’ peacekeeping principles.
Nevertheless, UN peacekeeping operations rested on important, if implicit,
normative assumptions about peace and politics. Whereas the League had sought to
promote peace by enabling nationalism, the victors of the Second World War came
to regard virulent nationalism (especially fascism) as a serious threat to postwar
international security.86 Specifically, instead of associating nationalism primarily
with ‘the desire of people to be free’ and seeking to redraw international frontiers
according to the distribution of nationalities, nationalism was now seen more as
‘the desire of some people to dominate or dislocate others’, which constituted
an ‘unacceptable threat to international peace’.87 Although the UN Charter cited
‘self-determination of peoples’ as a core principle of the organization—a principle
that after 1945 became synonymous with the decolonization movement that was
supported by the UN—self-determination was no longer considered a basis for
dissatisfied minorities within existing states to obtain their own separate sover-
eignty.88
In line with these understandings, peacekeeping missions tended to treat inter-
national borders as sacrosanct instead of redrawing them along the lines of ethnic
nationalism. As Michael Barnett puts it, UN missions thus prioritized ‘juridi-
cal’ sovereignty, or the legal attributes of statehood, rather than the quality of
84
Quoted in Paris, At war’s end, p. 14.
85
David N. Gibbs, ‘The United Nations, international peacekeeping and the question of “impartiality”: revis-
iting the Congo operation of 1960’, Journal of Modern African Studies 38: 3, 2000, pp. 359–82, https://doi.
org/10.1017/S0022278X00003384.
86
Barkin and Cronin, ‘The state and the nation’.
87
Barkin and Cronin, ‘The state and the nation’, pp. 122–3.
88
James Mayall, ‘Nationalism and international security after the Cold War’, Survival 34: 1, 1992, pp. 19–35,
https://doi.org/10.1080/00396339208442628.
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 Roland Paris
governance within the state’s borders, or ‘empirical’ sovereignty.89 This strategy
was not simply a response to the legacy of virulent nationalism. The decoloniza-
tion movement, which accelerated after the Second World War, also reinforced
fears that:
… because many of the newly independent territories that were decolonizing in the name
of self-determination contained, in essence, ‘multiple selves’, their governments might
attempt to create a ‘whole personality’ through territorial adjustment. UN officials, who
were intent on ensuring that independence should not lead to challenges to juridical sover-
eignty and border conflicts, were joined by many Third World leaders who embraced

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juridical sovereignty as a means for preserving their security.90

These beliefs underpinning traditional peacekeeping lent international borders

and state leaders ‘a legitimacy apart from national groups’ and privileged sover-
eign national authorities over their societies91—a raison d’état logic.92 The principle
of non-intervention, while putatively agnostic about the internal politics of states,
in fact served to reinforce a particular conception of sovereignty that constituted
war-affected territories and former colonies according to the ‘monist’ notion that
whatever ‘the State wills has … moral preeminence’.93 This understanding of
sovereignty arguably contributed to a ‘conspiracy of silence’ about the rights of
people living within states and about the inherent pluralism of all societies—yet
another expression of the raison d’état.94
Contemporary proponents of ‘human security’ are among those who have
challenged this statist logic, arguing that ‘the Westphalian order of imperme-
able sovereign states, protected by the rule of non-intervention and territorial
integrity, and unanswerable with respect to domestic policy, no longer describes
the contemporary world, if it ever did’.95 Their protests, however, have served
to highlight the wider point that while traditional peacekeeping was nominally
agnostic about domestic governance arrangements, these missions relied on contin-
gent beliefs about how polities should be organized and who should hold power
within them. They enacted—and reproduced—an unmistakably statist model of
governance, politics and peace.

89
Michael Barnett, ‘The new United Nations politics of peace: from juridical sovereignty to empirical sover-
eignty’, Global Governance 1: 1, 1995, pp. 79–97, https://doi.org/10.1163/19426720-001-01-90000007.
90
Michael Barnett, ‘Partners in peace? The UN, regional organizations, and peace-keeping’, Review of Interna-
tional Studies 21: 4, 1995, pp. 411–33 at p. 414, https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021050011798X.
91
Barkin and Cronin, ‘The state and the nation’, p. 124.
92
Claus Dieter Wolf, ‘The new raison d’état as a problem for democracy in world society’, European Journal of
International Relations 5: 3, 1999, pp. 333–63, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066199005003003.
93
Harold J. Laski, ‘The sovereignty of the state’, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 13: 4, 1916,
pp. 85–97 at p. 88, https://doi.org/10.2307/2012783.
94
Hedley Bull, The anarchical society: a study of order in world politics, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 80.
95
Edward Newman and Oliver P. Richmond, ‘Introduction: beyond peacekeeping?’, in Edward Newman and
Oliver P. Richmond, eds, The United Nations and human security (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 3–14
at p. 7.
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 The future of UN peace operations

Post-Cold War peace operations

The end of the Cold War saw a remarkable proliferation of UN peace operations
and their functions.96 As noted, the liberal model of peacebuilding predominated
during this period, reflecting the global dominance of the US and the idea that
political and economic liberalization offered the surest formula for peace both
within and between states. In the words of then-UN Secretary-General Kofi
Annan: ‘There are many good reasons for promoting democracy. Not the least—
in the eyes of the United Nations—is that, when sustained over the long term, it is
a highly effective means of preventing conflict, both within and between States.’97

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Ensuring security now involved ‘looking at the relationship between leaders and
their societies’.98
Critiques of liberal peacebuilding soon focused on its ‘top-down’ approach and
purported lack of attention to local conditions, among other things.99 Although
some of these criticisms were exaggerated,100 many observers effectively declared
liberal peacebuilding dead101—not least because rising powers, including China,
have challenged the liberal aspects of these missions, including by seeking to
weaken the human rights components of UN operations.102 At the same time,
peace operations were undergoing other transformations in the early decades
of the twenty-first century: the adoption of ‘stabilization’ methods, sometimes
involving ‘the use of military force, bordering on counterinsurgency, and
predominantly aimed against non-state actors who challenge the state’s monopoly
on violence’;103 a proliferation of regional and ad hoc coalitions working within,
or alongside, UN operations;104 and, starting in the mid-2010s, the closing down
of several large operations.105 These developments fuelled uncertainty about the
future of UN peacebuilding and its guiding principles.
This was the context in which pragmatism was presented as an alternative
framework for peacebuilding. Yet this brief history suggests that the pragmatic
model was implausible from the start because peace operations have always made
assumptions about what peace is, and about the political and social arrangements
associated with peace. Nor is this pattern limited to peace missions. As Christian

96
Paris, At war’s end.
97
United Nations, ‘One of greatest challenges to humankind in new century will be struggle to make practice of
democracy equally universal, Secretary-General says’, Statement by Kofi Annan at the Towards a Community
of Democracies conference, Warsaw, 27 June 2000, https://press.un.org/en/2000/sgsm7467.htm.
98
Eileen F. Babbitt, ‘The evolution of international conflict resolution: from Cold War to peacebuilding’, Nego-
tiation Journal 25: 4, 2009, pp. 539–49 at p. 546, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1571-9979.2009.00244.x.
99
Richmond, ‘Liberal peace and its critiques’.
100
Roland Paris, ‘Saving liberal peacebuilding’, Review of International Studies 36: 2, 2010, pp. 337–65, https://doi.
org/10.1017/S0260210510000057.
101
See for example Karlsrud, ‘“Pragmatic peacekeeping” in practice’.
102
Christoph Zürcher, ‘China as a peacekeeper—past, present, and future’, International Journal 75: 2, 2020,
pp. 123–43, https://doi.org/10.1177/0020702020933647. On China’s resistance to the liberal aspects of peace-
building, see Rosemary Foot, ‘Reining in a liberal UN: China, power shifts, and the UN’s peace and security
pillar’, Global Policy 15: suppl. 2, 2024, pp. 24–5, https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.13327.
103
David Curran and Paul Holtom, ‘Resonating, rejecting, reinterpreting: mapping the stabilization discourse
in the United Nations Security Council, 2000–14’, Stability 4: 1, 2015, p. 6, https://doi.org/10.5334/sta.gm.
104
Karlsrud, ‘From liberal peacebuilding to stabilization and counterterrorism’.
105
Paris, ‘The past, present, and uncertain future of collective conflict management’, p. 237.
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 Roland Paris
Reus-Smit argues, all forms of intervention are ‘structured by politico-spatial
assumptions, by understandings of how political authority is distributed and
differentiated within a given order’.106 Martha Finnemore makes a similar point:
Different notions about the nature of threat, about sovereign rights and obligations, about
legitimate and effective uses of force, and about appropriate or desirable political ends all
color the way political decision makers perceive the material world and act in it.107

These assumptions may not be explicit, but they appear to be inescapable. After
all, the decision to authorize, or to participate in, a peace operation presupposes

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that there is a problem to be addressed and a ‘peace’ to be built.

The real choice: pluralism versus statism

The question, then, is not whether peacebuilding should promote a particular
model of governance, but which one to promote. Although the question may be
anathema to proponents of pragmatism, a fault-line is nevertheless emerging in
international politics—and over the future of peacebuilding—between pluralist
and statist–authoritarian conceptions of peace. The latter embrace an anti-pluralist
strategy of empowering strong states to impose peace, including through repres-
sion. Insisting that the pragmatic approach is agnostic about the end-goals of
peacebuilding is therefore not only implausible; it also fails to advance the pluralist
principles that actually underpin prescriptive pragmatism. Nor does it provide a
compelling alternative to statist–authoritarian models of peacebuilding.
Oliver Jütersonke and his colleagues have written about the distinction between
pluralism and statism in the context of peacebuilding. A ‘pluralist peacebuilding
order’, they argue, ‘prioritizes horizontal and decentralized governance with
diffused authority and participatory mechanisms, while a statist peacebuilding
order prioritizes … a strong state with hierarchical/centralized governance’,
although the authors recognize that these categories are ideal types and that
any conceivable peacebuilding strategy will include a mix of pluralist and statist
elements.108 The distinction, in other words, is one of relative emphasis rather
than a binary choice. For example, while my own calls for ‘institutionalization
before liberalization’ in peace operations emphasized the importance of estab-
lishing a functioning state in post-conflict transitions, the goal of this institution-
building was peaceful liberalization, not strong states per se.109
Imprecise language can obscure these distinctions. How, for example, should
we interpret the following passage in China’s 2020 policy statement on UN peace
operations: ‘China advocates ... the rights of host-nation governments to indepen-
106
Christian Reus-Smit, ‘The concept of intervention’, Review of International Studies 39: 5, 2013, pp. 1057–76 at
p. 1059, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210513000296.
107
Martha Finnemore, The purpose of intervention: changing beliefs about the use of force (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2003), p. 93.
108
Oliver Jütersonke, Kazushige Kobayashi, Keith Krause and Xinyu Yuan, ‘Norm contestation and normative
transformation in global peacebuilding order(s): the cases of China, Japan, and Russia’, International Studies
Quarterly 65: 4, 2021, pp. 947–8, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqab060.
109
Paris, At war’s end.
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 The future of UN peace operations
dently choose social systems and development paths based on their national condi-
tions … ’?110 At first glance, this phrase appears to echo the pragmatist injunction
that peacebuilding should focus on ‘the means or process’, leaving the end-state
‘open to context-specific interpretations of peace’.111 On closer inspection,
however, the Chinese statement gives the responsibility for choosing political
arrangements to ‘host-nation governments’, not necessarily to their people.112 This
is consistent with China’s conception of ‘developmental peace’, which priori-
tizes economic growth led by a powerful central state.113 Similarly, while China’s
statement mentions the ‘subsistence and development’ rights of people residing in

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peacebuilding host states, it says nothing about their civil and political rights.114
Just as the pragmatic approach presupposes political pluralism, the Chinese model
seems to preclude it.
The constituency in favour of statist peacebuilding appears to be growing.
As Katharina Coleman and Brian Job point out, many African countries share
China’s penchant for ‘robust operations that reinforce host-state stability’.115
While acknowledging that this generalization does not apply to every African
country, they conclude that ‘common trends are observable in the stances adopted
by many African states’, including a widespread distaste for the ‘liberal aspects’ of
UN peacekeeping from democratic governance to civil and political rights (despite
these states’ rhetorical support for liberal democratic values).116 Nor is this trend
confined to China and some African states. As noted, the UN has aligned some
of its missions with ‘stabilization’ and ‘counterterrorism’ efforts, which in some
cases has ‘enabled’ autocracy,117 all with the support of the United States and other
democratic countries.
These developments reflect larger transformations in international affairs.118
Authoritarian major powers, notably China and Russia—along with an array of
authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian middle powers, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran,
Turkey and India—have their own ideas about what ‘peace’ is and how to achieve
it.119 China and Russia, in particular, have promulgated ‘authoritarian mechanisms
110
People’s Republic of China, ‘China’s armed forces: 30 years of UN peacekeeping operations’, 18 Sept. 2020,
http://english.www.gov.cn/archive/whitepaper/202009/18/content_WS5f6449a8c6d0f7257693c323.html.
111
de Coning, ‘Adaptive peacebuilding’, p. 301.
112
People’s Republic of China, ‘China’s armed forces’ (emphasis added).
113
Kwok Chung Wong, ‘The rise of China’s developmental peace: can an economic approach to peacebuilding
create sustainable peace?’, Global Society 35: 4, 2021, pp. 522–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/13600826.2021.19428
02.
114
People’s Republic of China, ‘China’s armed forces’.
115
Katharina P. Coleman and Brian L. Job, ‘How Africa and China may shape UN peacekeeping beyond the
liberal international order’, International Affairs 97: 5, 2021, pp. 1451–68 at p. 1463, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/
iiab113.
116
Coleman and Job, ‘How Africa and China may shape UN peacekeeping beyond the liberal international
order’, pp. 1455–6. See also Ndubuisi Christian Ani, ‘Coup or not coup: the African Union and the dilemma
of “popular uprisings” in Africa’, Democracy and Security 17: 3, 2021, pp. 257–77, https://doi.org/10.1080/1741
9166.2021.1899915.
117
Sarah von Billerbeck and Oisín Tansey, ‘Enabling autocracy? Peacebuilding and post-conflict authoritarian-
ism in the Democratic Republic of Congo’, European Journal of International Relations 25: 3, 2019, pp. 698–722,
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066118819724.
118
Roland Paris, ‘The geopolitics of peace operations: a research agenda’, International Peacekeeping 21: 4, pp. 501–8,
https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2014.946743.
119
Senem Aydın-Düzgit, ‘Authoritarian middle powers and the liberal order: Turkey’s contestation of the EU’,
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 Roland Paris
of conflict management’ that ‘eschew genuine negotiations among parties to the
conflict, reject international mediation and constraints on the use of force, disre-
gard calls to address underlying structural causes of conflict, and instead rely on
instruments of state coercion and hierarchical structures of power’ to achieve or
maintain peace.120 Russia’s military intervention in the Syrian civil war to crush the
opponents of that country’s regime was one example of this authoritarian peace
model in practice. (Russian President Vladimir Putin even described the ‘Syrian
settlement’ as ‘a model for resolving regional crises’ elsewhere in the world.121) In
other places, such as Mali and the Central African Republic, it was not Russian

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troops, but the Wagner Group, a private military contractor with close ties to the
Kremlin, which sent its mercenaries to achieve similar ends.122
At the core of the authoritarian peacebuilding model is a conception of the
state as controlling if not predatory, and ‘so opposed to [its own] society that it
can only deal with it via coercion and raw force’123—the antithesis of a pluralist
peace. The tension between these two approaches reflects an emerging ideological
fault-line in international affairs, replacing the Cold War-era struggle between
‘democratic’ and ‘communist’ societies. On one side is the vision of a pluralist
polity that manages its internal differences through open discussion and institu-
tionalized processes of compromise; on the other is the idea of a domineering
state that controls its society, suppresses dissent, and imposes its will. The idea of
sovereignty, itself, has been recast by some leaders as a licence to dominate not
only their own people, but other societies as well.124
These developments offer a new perspective on longstanding debates about
liberal peacebuilding. For many years, critics of the liberal approach proposed ‘post-
liberal’ approaches aimed at ‘emancipating’ the populations of war-affected states
from externally imposed models of peace through liberalization.125 Meanwhile,
statist–authoritarian concepts of peace and peacebuilding were quietly gathering
support—in opposition not only to the old liberal model, but also to ‘post-liberal’
calls for ‘local ownership, human rights, culture, social and grass roots resources
for self-government’ in peacebuilding.126 At least one prominent critic of liberal
peacebuilding, Oliver Richmond, has since adjusted his position. In a recent

International Affairs 99: 6, 2023, pp. 2319–37, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiad225.

120
Lewis, Heathershaw and Megoran, ‘Illiberal peace?’, pp. 487 and 491.
121
Quoted in David Lewis, ‘Contesting liberal peace: Russia’s emerging model of conflict management’, Inter-
national Affairs 98: 2, 2022, pp. 653–73 at p. 670, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab221.
122
Marco Mussa and Matvej Dubianskij, ‘“Black cat in a dark room”: examining the impact of Russia’s Wagner
Group in the Central African Republic and Mali’, Journal of International Affairs 75: 2, 2023, pp. 209–32. On
Russia’s conception of peace operations, see Flemming Splidsboel Hansen, ‘The Russian approach to peace-
keeping’, International Affairs 100: 3, 2024, pp. 1023–42, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiae072.
123
Sandra Pogodda, Oliver P. Richmond and Gëzim Visoka, ‘Counter-peace: from isolated blockages in peace
processes to systemic patterns’, Review of International Studies 49: 3, 2023, pp. 491–512 at p. 506, https://doi.
org/10.1017/S0260210522000377.
124
Roland Paris, ‘The right to dominate: how old ideas about sovereignty pose new challenges for world order’,
International Organization 74: 3, 2020, pp. 453–89, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818320000077.
125
For a survey of this literature see: Clare Bath and Philip Gamaghelyan, ‘Benefits and challenges of institu-
tionalizing peacebuilding and activism in a post-liberal world’, International Negotiation 21: 9, 2024, pp. 164–91,
https://doi.org/10.1163/15718069-bja10089.
126
Oliver P. Richmond, ‘A post-liberal peace: eirenism and the everyday’, Review of International Studies 35: 3,
2009, pp. 557–80 at p. 565, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210509008651.
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 The future of UN peace operations
article, co-authored with Sandra Pogodda and Gëzim Visoka, he argues that the
rise of statist–authoritarian models of peacebuilding represents a dangerous form
of ‘counter-peace’ that casts liberal peacebuilding in a more favourable light. In
contrast to this statist–authoritarian counter-peace:
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.127

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This passage highlights a genuine dilemma for long-time critics of liberal peace-
building and for contemporary proponents of pragmatism. If the liberal model has
lost its ‘legitimacy’ and if statist–authoritarian approaches are abhorrent, what is
the alternative? Is there a viable peacebuilding framework that would reject both
the overreaching ambitions of the liberal model and the repressiveness of authori-
tarian statism?
Pluralist peacebuilding seems a promising answer. It does not call for the restruc-
turing of war-torn societies as liberal democracies, but nor does it accept strategies
that suppress civil society—or worse—in the name of promoting peace. It rejects
the notion that peace requires an overbearing state, but does not preclude the
strengthening of state institutions in post-conflict countries. It rests on a simple
premise: that a just peace is one that permits societal actors to express and pursue
their individual and collective interests, in both their private and public lives. The
challenge now is to elaborate this model of pluralist peacebuilding—before it is
too late.

Conclusion
In the decades following the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR, when
the United States and its liberal democratic allies dominated world politics, UN
peace missions took on a distinctly liberal hue, promoting democracy and market-
oriented economics as a recipe for peace. The shortcomings of these operations,
combined with the rising power of illiberal states, eventually produced a backlash
against the liberal model and gave rise to alternative conceptions of peace and
peacebuilding that privilege strong, if not repressive, states.
Proponents of pragmatic peacebuilding have sought to sidestep such debates
by proposing an approach that rejects preconceived models of governance and
embraces trial-and-error experimentation and societal deliberation. The idea of
discarding all paradigms and simply focusing on practical solutions to concrete
problems may be an appealing vision in some respects, but it is also based on a
faulty premise. All peace operations are guided by assumptions about what ‘peace’
is, and what kinds of governance arrangements are most conducive to this under-

127
Oliver P. Richmond, Sandra Pogodda and Gëzim Visoka, ‘The international dynamics of counter-peace’, Euro-
pean Journal of International Relations 30: 1, 2024, pp. 126–50 at p. 145, https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231168772.
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standing of peace. Such assumptions may be explicit or implicit, but they cannot
be wished away. The question is not whether these missions should advance a
particular governance model, but rather, which one?
As it happens, the prescriptive version of pragmatic peacebuilding rests on
its own set of unspoken assumptions: that peace requires a pluralist polity and
state. Making these assumptions explicit could be the first step in developing a
more complete and compelling framework for pluralist peacebuilding. The alter-
native—continuing to pretend that peacebuilders can be agnostic about such
matters—is not only misleading. Failing to mount a positive case for pluralism

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and risks surrendering the idea of peacebuilding to those who seek to equate peace
with authoritarianism.

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