A Genealogy of Peacemaking: The Creation and Re-Creation of Order

Making peace in intractable conflict is a fundamental challenge in the restructuring of the international system toward a postWestphalian international society in which diverse political communities coexist while also preserving their distinctiveness.1 Yet an examination of the development of many approaches to ending conflict indicates that their application may create and recreate a particular international order. Often this is a negative peace that imposes an order based on hegemony, exclusivity, and the erection of political binaries at the local, regional, and global level. In other words, the question of what constitutes peace is never seriously engaged. This article examines how this may occur through existing approaches to ending conflict and what might be done about it. It does so by first reviewing the development of theorizing about approaches to ending conflict through a radical lens in which all approaches to ending conflict might be seen as impositional at various levels, and then reverting to a critical approach in which might be found a universal basis for agreement about how such orderproducing activities can achieve sensitive and mutually inclusive outcomes.