(Il)Liberal Peace? Western and Non-western Approaches to Interventions

• In Event: Interventions and Conflict Resolution

Abstract

Contemporary scholarship in peace studies is geared towards understanding the prospects and challenges of conflict management and resolution tools, methods, and models in an international system characterised by geopolitical rivalries and normative contestation. This paper contributes to the current macro-turn debate by examining major powers’ conceptions of the scope and justification of interventions along the spectrum between the liberal/illiberal peace. It maps the P5’s conceptions of conflict management and resolution based on the speeches at the UNSC delivered by China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States from 1995 to 2020 (Schönfeld et al. 2019). It employs Latent Semantic Scaling (LSS), a semi-supervised machine learning algorithm, to construct a continuum between liberal and illiberal peace. It derives seed-words from the existing peacekeeping and peacebuilding literature. The paper captures variation in the P5’s conceptions of conflict management and resolution across time and cases of intervention. While the validity of relying on liberal/illiberal peace as ideal types of conflict management is confirmed, the findings of the study reveal the many nuances that this entails when time and space are introduced as variables. Overall, the paper contributes to the contemporary scholarship by arguing that the consistency of the P5’s conceptions of conflict management and resolution is not found when individual cases of intervention are taken into consideration, thus problematising the existence of alternative models of interventions.

Authors

• Francesco Niccolò Moro, University of Bologna

• Matteo Dian, University of Bologna

• Irene Costantini, University of Naples, L'Orientale

• Andrea Knapp