Description
Peace processes are increasingly instrumentalized to serve interveners’ geopolitical agendas, underscoring the need to reassess peace practices in an era of heightened global competition and globalisation. This paper introduces the concept of peacemongering—the use of peacemaking and peacebuilding by third parties as tools of hybrid and grey-zone warfare to control (post-)conflict political economies and gain a strategic advantage over rivals. Drawing on four years of multilingual discourse and content analysis of government documents and news media, it employs process-tracing of Russia’s intervention in Syria. By tracing Russian actors' motives for intervention, strategies and behaviours, and their impact on the trajectory of the Syrian conflict, this case reveals how coercive mediation, manipulation of multilateral mechanisms, and economic capture were used to advance Moscow’s global ambitions. This resulted in the weaponization of peace, and challenged prevailing norms associated with peacemaking and peacebuilding, such as conditional sovereignty and multilateralism.
