Description
This paper revisits the political and normative foundations of peace against the backdrop of the crisis of liberal peacebuilding and polarization within liberal societies. Liberal conflict theory has long assumed that regulated conflict strengthens democracy, yet it has reduced conflict to interest negotiation, thereby stripping it of political substance. The crisis of liberal peace, I argue, stems from this impoverished conception of conflict and liberalism’s failure to prevent factionalism—the fragmentation of the political community into antagonistic groups lacking a shared sense of the common good. The paper reconstructs two waves of republican critique of liberal peace, each arising in periods of political transition - after World War II and following the Cold War - examining how freedom and civic bonds can be maintained amid disagreement. Drawing on this lineage, the paper advances a republican alternative to both liberal and authoritarian approaches. Republican peace, it argues, arises from the tension between hopes for political order and inevitable disappointments. Renewed through Latour’s notion of collective assembly, it envisions peace as a shared search for the common good amid enduring conflict.
