Peace in an Authoritarian International Order Versus Peace in the Liberal International Order

FEATURED RESEARCH PAPER, 16 Jun 2025

Oliver P. Richmond | The Royal Institute of International Affairs – TRANSCEND Media Service

2025 – There may well be a correlation between the recent increase in war and displacement and the retreat of peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding as effective tools since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. There certainly is a strong correlation between the weakening of the liberal international order (LIO) and the retreat of peacemaking and peacekeeping since the Syrian civil war began in 2011. The retreat of the West and the rise of competing bloc interests are connected to the rapid increase in violence around the world. Peacemaking, peacekeeping and peace-building tools had already seen a weakening of their success rate by the end of the 1990s. Indeed, the LIO and related liberal/democratic peace theories have long been separated from their supposed Kantian and internationalist underpinnings.

At best, the victor’s peace of the postwar and post-Cold War international order has underpinned the LIO and the subsequent liberal peace framework, leading to a pattern of stalemated peace impasses. Throughout history, the victor’s peace model has hinged upon top-down political reconstruction through diplomatic, political, economic, legal and social means after a war had been won. In short, this has meant that postwar legitimacy would depend on victory being accepted by the vanquished and that any subsequent reshaping of order would remain legitimate among subject elites and societies in the long term. The question of legitimacy for any victor’s peace order has always been its historical ‘Achilles heel’ both in terms of its top-down nature and its mismatch with conflict-affected societies. It has produced a gap between power and legitimate authority which ultimately distances peace from justice. These problems have driven resurgent geopolitics at the structural level of international order as well as undermining many regional and local peace processes around the world. Peacemaking has gone into reverse where pronounced linkages have re-emerged between nationalist, sectarian, neo-liberal, authoritarian and geopolitical rationalities.

These morbidities in international order are widespread, as with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent retrenchment in Kashmir,4 the civil war in Syria, the war in Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s revisionist geopolitical philosophy.5 President Xi Jinping of China recently outlined new rules of ‘neutrality’ for a post-western order in relation to the Russian war on Ukraine.

They imply conservative perspectives of peace that rest on internal or hegemonic victory, the containment of war and international neutrality: ‘We must adhere to the three principles of no spillover from the battlefield, no escalation of fighting and no adding oil to the fire by relevant parties.’6 The implications of these rules are on display across the Middle East in the tensions and contradictions between different multipolar factions over the war in Gaza. More broadly, they are present to an extent not seen since the height of the Cold War or even, in some respects, since the 1930s. Underlying many of these recent developments are the failures of the liberal peace, of the foreign policy of the United States since 9/11 and of the latter’s subsequent conduct in the Iraq War.

The victor’s peace reproduces the balance-of-power models of earlier eras. Its epistemologies and methodologies of peace follow a realist ontology of fundamental and eternal enmity and shifting power relations. Local and regional forms of victor’s peace thus tend to be ordered according to a number of key elements:

firstly, the interests and capacity of regional and domestic military forces; secondly, the exercise of the means of violence by geopolitical and authoritarian actors; and, overall, by complex power relations. Such dynamics tend in practice to lead to the rejection of human rights, democracy, the rule of law and pluralism.

The main issues in this context are how to preserve global trade and mitigate or evade sanctions, while war and violence are normalized. In Syria, for example, Russia backed the authoritarian rule of President Bashar al-Assad according to Putin’s geopolitical preferences and his reading of prevailing Syrian domestic power relations.

This article illustrates how such dynamics have supported the expansion and validation of authoritarian interests and regional geopolitics, forming a wider international pattern.

TO READ FULL PAPER, Download PDF:

Peace in an Authoritarian International Order Versus Peace in the Liberal International Order

______________________________________

© The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

FEATURED RESEARCH PAPER STAYS POSTED FOR 2 WEEKS BEFORE BEING ARCHIVED

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 16 Jun 2025.

Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: Peace in an Authoritarian International Order Versus Peace in the Liberal International Order, is included. Thank you.

If you enjoyed this article, please donate to TMS to join the growing list of TMS Supporters.

Share this article: email mastodon facebook 🔗 copy link

This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.

There are no comments so far.