ABSTRACT
Though peace has often not been explicitly theorised in orthodox IR theory, as previous chapters have discussed, this conceptual area was of more significance for the sub-disciplines of peace and conflict studies. While peace studies focused more on structural issues, and upon understanding the roots of conflict and responding with a democratic peace project, conflict studies has focused more on the implications of conflict resolution theory. In combination, it might be said that peace and conflict studies continued to work on the Enlightenment premise that peace might exist and could be created, and therefore that a notion of peace was indeed necessary for the broader discipline of IR, as was also implied in the UN Charter. Effectively, it might be said that peace and conflict studies was most succinct in offering a concept of peace that was widely adopted. This was partly because they concurred with the liberal peace framework that had implicitly emerged in mainstream IR theory, but were also important in providing an impetus for an ambitious version of peace that many peace and conflict scholars thought had been ignored in the mainstream discipline.
