ABSTRACT
Mainstream IR theory has been in crisis, if not anomie, for some time. Looking at the discipline through the lens of a search for peace (one or many) underlines this state. Partly because of this, IR has found it very difficult to attract the attention of those working in other disciplines, though increasingly IR scholars have themselves drawn on other disciplines.3 Even those working in the subdisciplines of peace and conflict studies, for example, an area where there has been a longstanding attempt to develop an understanding of peace, have often turned away from IR theory – or refused to engage with it at all – because it has failed to develop an account of peace, focusing instead on the dynamics of power, war, and assuming the realist inherency of violence in human nature and international relations. Utopian and dystopian views of peace, relating to contemporary and future threats calculated from the point of view of states and officials, often delineate the intellectual extremes of a linear typology of war and peace inherent in mainstream international thought. The peace inferred in this typology is concerned with a balance of power between states rather than the everyday life of people in post-conflict environments. Even the ambitious peacebuilding efforts of the post-Cold War environment in places as diverse as Cambodia, DR Congo, the Balkans, East Timor and Afghanistan among many others testify to this shortcoming. Yet, as Erasmus and Einstein famously pointed out, peace is both separate and preferable to war.
