Conceptualising Peace

A number of different strategies for conceptualising peace have emerged in the intellectual and policy discourses examined in the previous chapters of this study. There appears to have been an evolution in approaches to dealing with conflict and constructing peace, which has moved away from the notion that peace was geographically contained, or contained and constructed by race, identity, or power, and also away from the notion that universal peace was an unlikely achievement. What seems to have developed is an understanding of a certain version of peace — the liberal peace — as being universal and also as being attainable, if the correct methods are concertedly and consistently applied by a plethora of different actors working on the basis of an agreed peacebuilding consensus, and focusing on the regimes, structures, and institutions required at multiple levels of analysis and in multiple issue areas by liberal governance. This development is a hybrid form related to the main strands of thinking about peace outlined earlier in this study, including the victor’s peace, constitutional, institutional, and civil approaches, and there exist both ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ versions.