This is the fifth and final paper of the Conscious Cost program, which has traced a single test — can the question whom does this serve? be asked, and answered, without foreclosure — from interpersonal relations through commons, markets, and the polity. This paper carries the test to relations among peoples and defends one proposition: peace is not an outcome that anyone produces; it is the name of the condition in which the foreclosure is lifted — in which the question can be asked among peoples, in both directions. The theory separates the breadth of recognition from the mutual recognition of centers, anatomizes the foreclosure types that operate across borders — including the interrogation type, defined by a moving criterion and a phantom addressee — and operationalizes the test as a grammar of the peoples: five identifiers that read the standing of peoples off actual documents, from banquet toasts to dual referendums, scored as documents-in-use. Three mechanisms are then examined on settled cases: the monetization of the memory of suffering, the black market of questions, and market competition in the currency of legitimacy. The instrument is run on hard cases — one circuit followed through four mechanisms across forty-seven years; one union that passed by ending; and one living alliance, read under paired literatures, that returns a map rather than a grade, including an exit clause whose untried consequence column the instrument must record as illegible, and a falsifiable prediction about the threshold of office. The passes cluster among small and middle powers and post-catastrophe pairs: power can buy exemption from the test. No party is positioned to lift the foreclosure; what remains is the custodian — the form a circuit takes in order to survive foreclosure — and release is identified not as the end of questioning but as the question at normal temperature. The paper is a structural theory applied to the historical record, not an empirical dataset contribution, and the absence of prescription in which it ends is entered as a finding, not an omission. The paper closes with a brief autoethnographic record, kept at the scale where the program's master variable was first observed. Keywords: peace; foreclosure; recognition; askability; security communities; conscious cost; custodianship; peoples; international relations theory AI-Use Disclosure The author conceived and developed the theory and its argument and directed all substantive content. Generative AI tools — Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT, xAI's Grok, and Google's Gemini — were used as aids in drafting, structuring, and editing the text, and in cross-checking and stress-testing arguments; each model's feedback was reviewed and selectively incorporated by the author, who reviewed all AI-assisted text and takes full responsibility for the content, including any errors.
Chikako Goto (Tue,) studied this question.