ABSTRACT

Can diplomacy help remake the world for the better? Arguably, the answer to the question much depends on the meaning we attach to the terms ‘remake’ and ‘better’. In Chapter 9, we offered an interpretation for the first term. The diplomatic (re)making of the world involves two layers, ‘order as value’ and ‘order as fact’. What is less clear, however, is what kind of diplomatic processes and instruments can help remake the world for the ‘better’? For some, peaceful international orders cannot emerge without diplomats systematically addressing the deep causes of international conflict such as endemic poverty, global health disparities, undemocratic governance or lack of opportunities for human development. For others, these represent legitimate and ambitious goals but hardly feasible given the sheer complexity of the issues and the practical difficulties of mobilising broad coalitions of actors and institutions in support of long-term projects. There is no easy formula to reconcile these two views. Short-and long-term priorities obviously need to be set, but the nature of these priorities remains a subject of intense debate. In this chapter, we tackle this dilemma in two complementary ways. On the one hand, we adopt a narrow understanding of the normative dimension of the evolution of the world order, which we define in terms of the reduction of international and domestic violence. On the other hand, we discuss a two-pronged approach for reaching this objective. In the short term, diplomats ought to work to negatively alter the actors’ structure of incentives for resorting to violence. In the long term, diplomats ought to engage in actions that address structural causes of conflict (poverty, ethnic tensions, institutional deficiencies, environmental degradation,

etc.), while also undermining the legitimacy of the idea of using force for settling disputes. To this end, we focus on two important mechanisms by which diplomats can help reduce the use of violence both internationally and domestically: preventive diplomacy and international criminal justice. The former is supposed to assist the peaceful evolution of the international order by anticipating threats to international peace and security and eliminating them before they take place, both in the short and the long term. International criminal justice is supposed to facilitate peaceful change by acting much deeper. By imposing criminal responsibility directly upon individuals, regardless of the national law, international criminal justice does not merely aim to deter actors from resorting to violence in the short term, but it also aspires them to undermine the legal and moral legitimacy of the method of using force for settling disputes in the long term.