Description
Contemporary efforts to diversify and broaden conceptions of peace and peacebuilding have struggled to gain significant traction in the face of dominant Eurocentric frameworks that shape academic, policy, and practitioner understandings. Our limited vocabularies of peace are often criticised for favoring existing and familiar frameworks over alternative narratives, given the negative connotations and stigmatised language associated with them. As a result, illiberal, Eastphalian, posthuman, and other emerging peace types that resist the orthodox liberal peace find themselves confined to post-conflict spaces, restricting their transformative potential towards systemic elements of the international order.
This paper employs a historicising approach to explore resistance to hegemonic understandings of peace and governance through a large-scale linguistic analysis of political contestation within UN bodies related to international operations across Southeast Asia from the 1950s to the 2010s. By scrutinising local, national, and regional resistance to external norms, frameworks, and processes within these spaces, it establishes connections between alternative and often unrealised perspectives of peace and governance and contemporary critical peace endeavours. This approach aims to better account for the ways in which contextually bounded aspirations were silenced in the past and how they might be scaled up to more effectively resist systemic consequences of the liberal peace in the future.
