ABSTRACT
GRAHAME F. THOMPSON Introduction In this chapter I ask the question ‘How is it possible to live together in what looks to be an increasingly fragmenting international system?’ It is concerned to uncover what might establish and maintain a regime of ‘relative social peace’ at the level of the international system. I would suggest that the effectiveness of any serious politics of place and space is dependent upon the existence of a ‘relative social peace’ – which constitutes a kind of habitus for the operation of ‘ordinary’ calculative politics. In this regard I try to bring the notion of toleration more squarely back into the international sphere than has been done up to now.
