The Fragmentation of War and Peace: Rethinking Peace Processes in a Polycentric World

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This Special Issue argues that fragmentation is a structuring condition of contemporary conflict, operating within domestic conflict systems and across the international order. Domestically, authority is dispersed among elites, armed groups, and civic actors; internationally, peacebuilding frameworks have given way to parallel mediation, regionalised intervention, and competing geopolitical projects. These forms are mutually reinforcing. What appears as disorder is a patterned architecture of authority through which peace processes reconfigure rather than consolidate power. The articles show that contemporary peace architectures manage fragmentation rather than resolve it, producing a post-liberal peace that blurs the boundaries among settlement, stabilisation, and predatory governance.