Description
Peacebuilding debates have long critiqued the liberal peace paradigm for its depoliticising effects, treating conflict primarily as a technical problem that can be solved through institution-building and administrative reforms. This critique, indeed, reveals how liberal peace universalises its normative assumptions while marginalising local peace cultures, practices, and agency. In response, the recent turn to ‘illiberal’ or ‘authoritarian peace’ highlights state-centered modes of conflict management grounded in stability, unity, and traditional values that reinforce hierarchy and authority while foreclosing deliberation and democratic pluralism. This paper advances these debates by proposing the concept of a-politicised peace, the form of peace framed as inherently outside of politics and imagined as natural, universal, and uncontested. Specifically, drawing on empirical findings from Kazakhstan and Central Asia, I show how everyday peace is discursively constructed as the opposite of the political realm, rendering societal antagonisms unintelligible and illegitimate, while maintaining the structures of inequality and exclusion. Building on Chantal Mouffe’s distinction between ‘the political’ (constitutive societal antagonism) and ‘politics’ (the ordering of social relations), the paper argues that a-politicised peace (challenging ‘the political’) goes beyond depoliticisation (application of standardised technocratic-administrative solutions). It erases the possibility of democratic struggle altogether and thus sustains an always-already fragile stability reliant on silencing disagreement rather than negotiating it. Accordingly, the paper seeks to extend the debates on authoritarian peace by employing a-politicised peace as a critical lens to offer evidence-based insights from Kazakhstan and Central Asian everyday peace, as well as to normatively
interrogate their underlying assumptions.
