[PRI open lecture] Peacebuilding in a Changing International Order: Is an International Architecture for Peace Feasible?

Peacebuilding in a Changing International Order: Is an International Architecture for Peace Feasible?

Date: Thursday, September 7, 2023
Time: 13:50-15:10
Vene: ICU H-115
Language: English
Pre-registration is not required. Please come directly to the venue.

Presenter: Prof. Edward Newman
Professor of International Security, School of Politics and International Studies, and Head of Graduate School of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Leeds, UK.  

Outline
In this seminar we will explore the emergence of the ‘international peacebuilding architecture’ in the context of a transitional international order which is challenging and reshaping the norms and practices of peace management. Efforts to design a coherent and integrated architecture of peace and peacebuilding have achieved a number of milestones in recent years. The New Agenda for Peace presents an ambitious and comprehensive vision, building upon the Peacebuilding Architecture Review, the ‘Our Common Agenda’ initiative, the World Bank’s Fragility, Conflict and Violence agenda, and the Sustainable Peace Agenda. These all reinforce the idea of “coherence, synergies and complementarities” in conflict prevention and holistic approaches to peace, and they now collectively form a guide for the peacebuilding architecture.

However, the sustainable peace agenda is confronted not only by the perennial problems of conflict prevention and peacebuilding, but a ‘polycrisis’ of multiple challenges. Five key overlapping themes will be explored. 1) A renewal of geopolitical and military conflict in a changing international order and a broader challenge to multilateralism has created acute political obstacles to the consolidation of the peacebuilding architecture. 2) Internal contradictions within the liberal peacebuilding agenda challenge its coherence and viability. 3) Local resistance to international peacebuilding norms and practices challenge the legitimacy of the post-Cold War peacebuilding consensus. 4) A decline in the willingness and capacity of some traditional sponsors of peace operations to underwrite international peacebuilding challenges some of the norms of peacebuilding. 5) And peacebuilding is being reshaped by changes in international order in which non-liberal state involvement in peacebuilding is increasing. On this basis the discussion will explore how the rise of non-western involvement in peacebuilding, and particular that of China, is underscoring a shift away from the promotion of liberalism as a part of these activities, and the implications of this.

Key discussion questions:

• What are the prospects for the New Agenda for Peace?
• Is a coherent international peacebuilding architecture possible?
• How is the evolving international order reshaping the norms and practices of peacebuilding?
• Is the ‘liberal peacebuilding’ era over?

Please feel free to contact us at icupri@icu.ac.jp if you have any questions.
We look forward to seeing you there!