Chapter 8 draws together the major themes of the analysis and prompts further thinking on decolonial feminist modes of conflict resolution. This chapter concludes that the UN’s attempt to stay relevant through developing mediation expertise is counterproductive, and contends that it should instead adopt a solidaristic approach that foregrounds politics and aims to produce ‘knowledge encounters’ between different worlds. The bulk of the chapter discusses some principles for decolonial feminist approaches to mediation, which include encounters across different ontologies of peace, decolonising expertise, solidarity, and establishing relations of care and accountability.

Chapter 3 explores narrative struggles over defining UN mediation. It examines the discursive production of UN mediation as an institution, from its beginning as a series of ad hoc diplomatic engagements, to its institutionalisation in the 2000s. The chapter shows how we can observe over time the increasingly dominant construction of conflict as a technical rather than political challenge. The chapter traces these struggles by contrasting two key documents on the UN’s role in peace and security that appeared in 1992: UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali’s 'Agenda for Peace' and the UN Office of Legal Affairs' 'Handbook on the Peaceful Settlement of Disputes between States'. The differences between these documents illustrate the development of competing logics of UN mediation: that of mediation as an art, and that which sees it as a science. The chapter compares and contrasts the narrative features of these institutional logics, and discusses how they rely upon gendered-colonial assumptions about the nature of politics, violence, and agency that shape the incorporation of the WPS Agenda.

Chapter 7 explores how the logic of UN mediation as an art produces masculinities, particularly the subjects of ‘the mediator’, ‘conflict parties’, and ‘youths’. The first part examines the narrative representations of ‘the mediator’ as a political man who should show good judgement, have excellent interpersonal skills, and be spatially mobile. ‘The mediator’ has to be empathetic and good at listening – feminised traits that operate as capital for male mediators, but less so for women. In addition, the selection process for mediators draws from the masculinised professions of diplomacy and politics and the informal, male-dominated networks of diplomats at the UN. This chapter presents descriptive findings on the gender and career backgrounds of senior UN mediators. The second part of the chapter examines representations of local men. ‘Local men’ – often equivalent to the ‘conflict parties’ – function as the constitutive outside of ‘the mediator’. ‘Conflict parties’ are represented as emotional, traditional, and irrational, recalling colonial constructions of the ‘other’. Meanwhile, male ‘youths’ appear not as political agents, but as vectors of senseless violence. Thus, a colonial hierarchy of masculinities exists in which local men are subordinate to the mediator.

Despite ubiquitous references to ‘ethnicity’ in both academic and public discourse, the history and politics of this concept remain largely unexplored. By constructing the first transnational and interlingual conceptual history of ethnicity, this book unearths the pivotal role that this concept played in the making of the international order. After critiquing existing accounts of the ‘expansion’ or ‘globalisation’ of international society, the chapter proposes to rethink the birth of the international order through a scrutiny of its major concepts. Fusing Reinhart Koselleck’s method of conceptual history with the philosophical writings of G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Derrida, the chapter theorises the emergence of the international order as a dialectical process that both negated and preserved existing imperial hierarchies. The concept of ethnicity is ejected by this dialectical process as a residual category – an indigestible kernel of difference and particularity – that cannot be internalised by the work of sublation.

Chapter 4 starts with a discussion of imperialism constructed as a fact and as theory. It highlights the major disruptions in East Asian and world history. The prevailing realist, liberal institutionalist, and constructivist theories are not scaled to explain such dramatic transformations of East Asia by Western imperialism. Rather, a historical sociological approach anchored on evolutionary theory is a better fit. Western domination based on the rise of the West in terms of economic, technological, and military power took several centuries to complete. Some East Asian empires were also expanding after 1500. A turning point was Britain’s defeat of China in the Opium War of 1839–1842. After that, East Asian nations engaged earnestly in reform. Some, like Japan, succeeded, while others, like China, failed, resulting in a great divergence among Asian countries. To some extent, much of East Asia still lives in the shadow of that imperialist past.

This chapter examines Kenya's use of debt-based financial statecraft, revealing an uneven track record. It first describes how the Kenyan government diversified its portfolio of external finance with both international bonds and Chinese loans. Drawing on interviews with government and donor officials, the chapter then shows Kenya's mixed success in extracting bargaining leverage from its new sources of finance. While the Kenyan government achieved increased flexibility from donors on governance issues, it encountered greater resistance on financial management practices. The chapter highlights that donors' strategic interests in their relationship with Kenya encouraged them to be more flexible when Kenya diversified its portfolio of external finance, but that their concerns about accountability and use of funds led them to be more stringent on issues of financial management.