Oliver P. Richmond’s The Grand Design: The Evolution of the International Peace Architecture is a timely and sophisticated examination of the historical and theoretical processes for the establishment of a peaceful international order. The study of modern international relations has long addressed questions pertaining to the breakdown of international order, hegemonic conflicts, and the attempt to reestablish a more resilient political order that can, more or less, adjudicate interstate disputes without resorting to cataclysmic violence. The book is certainly timely because of a sense that hegemonic conflicts have returned to contemporary international politics and that, in the twenty-first century, the proliferation of digital technologies, climate change, and reactionary politics entail a constellation of events that radically call into question the durability of a liberal international order.
Richmond approaches the questions of peacemaking or peace building in a remarkably compelling way. First, he lays out for his readers a conceptual vocabulary for drawing attention to historical continuities across centuries. In fact, Richmond does not frame the question of peace within a preconceived notion of political order; rather, he deploys the concept of an international peace architecture (IPA) as a “partially planned, partially fortuitous, partially resisted or blocked, intergenerational set of practices (e.g., military intervention, humanitarianism, peacekeeping, mediation, social movements, etc.) aimed at ending war” (p. 9). The IPA need not be internally coherent nor free of contradiction; it may—in fact, often—reflect forms of political hierarchies that are predicated on ubiquitous forms of violence and determinative of who counts and who is recognized as a political agent. Richmond also uses terms such as layers, stages, and sediments to render intelligible the imbrications of the IPA with the “historical dynamics of war, and to their geopolitical, institutional, constitutional and civil peace responses” (p. 11). Second, Richmond recognizes the historical and conceptual Eurocentrism that has been at work for centuries in defining the very meaning of what counts as a peaceful order. And yet, political contestation by the “subaltern”—whether civil society activists or claims from the peripheries of the global system—must figure in a larger story about the evolution of the IPA and its potential future.
The historical story Richmond tells is rich in nuance and detail. It is organized according to five stages or layers, with speculation about a future sixth. The story begins with the period roughly between Westphalia (1648) and the emergence of the modern state-system to the Concert System in 1815 (Stage/Layer 1). As is well known, the language of the balance of power, European diplomacy, and the emergence of an imperial system of hierarchies figure as references for international peace. The decline and collapse of this order beginning in the late nineteenth century reframed what was necessary for international peace: international institutions such as the League of Nations and the United Nations, designed to limit sovereign prerogative (Stage/Layer 2). In contrast, Stage/Layer 3 emerges with a broadly Marxist critique of capitalism and liberalism to advance a framework of political and economic rights that became the catalyst for decolonization, nonaligned movements, and struggles for forms of global social democracy. Stage/Layer 4 continues this pluralization of international peace with a focus on a cosmopolitan project of human rights, social development, and security. By the 2000s, Stage/Layer 5 represents a reactionary project focused on neoliberal state-building and American neo-imperial missions across the world. As Richmond writes, “Stage five rested on a rejection of the connection between peace, justice, and social legitimacy, instead foregrounding the geopolitical needs of hegemonic states in the global North and their interests in capital” (p. 147).
Of key interest then is what comprises Stage/Layer 6 (our current moment), which is still in its infancy. Given the failure of the muscular American-centric attempt to redefine peace through forceful democratization and neoliberal state-building, Richmond argues that there are contradictory forces at work here. On the one hand, there are significant initiatives to return to a Stage/Layer 4 program of expansion of rights and civil society in the wake of a legitimacy crisis associated with the previous stage, including issues pertaining to sustainable development and the UN’s Sustaining Peace Agenda. On the other, as Richmond correctly points out, an evolving nexus of “state, capital, and technology” creates the conditions of a ubiquitous surveillance society that challenges traditional conceptions of rights and autonomy. Digital governmentality is an emergent mode of governing that increasingly asserts forms of extractive capital with disciplinary techniques. What this implies for the IPA in the future is a crucial problem because it renders the meaning and nature of global peace increasingly ambiguous.
The Grand Design is an ambitious book. It covers a span of five centuries of political thought and action in a coherent narrative. And yet, despite Richmond’s attempt to call into question the enduring Eurocentrism of what constitutes IR’s historical conceptualization of peace and the place of subaltern forms of contestation, there is little in terms of more contemporary non-Western contributions to the theorization of a future peaceful global order. With the potential emergence of a multipolar political order, for example, what are the voices in the BRICS that redefine the parameters of peaceful coexistence beyond liberal ideas? In what ways, do multilateral institutions reflect a different form of political praxis (i.e., the peacemaking by China in the Middle East, for example) that genuinely points to an emergent non-Western architecture?
Theoretically, IR scholars—particularly social constructivists—would also wonder whether the deployment of such a vocabulary of architecture, layers, sediments, and stages gives additional theoretical salience than the more traditional focus on the historical evolution of political order. Can we not account for the processes of contestation, crises, collapse, and reconstitution as a larger struggle of the constitutive and regulative rules of what constituted the legitimate global political order? Here the inchoate deployment of a Deleuzian ontology that appears in Richmond’s book—the term “rhizome” appears multiple times—may have been an interesting way to reframe notions of sustainable peace by taking account of the role of nonhuman agents and the role of climate change. Indeed, this may lead to a view of the book’s title as being unfortunate in its assumptions that the evolution of the IPA is, strictly speaking, a design of the mind and human agency.
Notwithstanding these minor issues, Richmond’s book is a compelling examination of the larger questions of global order and the historical, political, and intellectual evolution of peace thinking since early modernity. His work will certainly frame the conversation in the field for many years to come.
