Why are progressives often critical of US foreign policy and the national security state? What would a statecraft that pulls ideas from the American left look like? Grand Strategies of the Left brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice. It argues that American progressives think durable security will only come by prioritizing the interconnected conditions of peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. US statecraft – including defense policy – should be retooled not for primacy, endless power accumulation, or a political status quo that privileges elites, but rather to shape the context that gives rise to perpetual insecurity. Progressive worldmaking has its own risks and dilemmas but expands how we imagine what the world is and could be.

This chapter explores third-party mediation and peacekeeping. Mediation, along with arbitration and adjudication, is a form of peacemaking. Peacekeeping means maintaining durable peace after conflict has ended. The UN is one of several kinds of actors that engage in peacekeeping missions. They leverage the costs belligerents would pay if they return to war, provide information, reduce uncertainty, and provide political cover to facilitate political concessions. Also discussed in the chapter are peacebuilding efforts, including developing the proper political, legal, social and economic infrastructure to stabilize the security environment. Challenges for third parties seeking to engage successfully in peacekeeping and peacemaking include the difficulties they face in providing long-term incentives for peace, the possibility of distorting information flows such that peace is less stable, and being sensitive to local contexts. The chapter applies many of its concepts to a quantitative study of the causes of peacekeeper sexual exploitation and abuse, and a case study of third-party involvement during the conflicts in the Great Lakes region of Africa in the 1990s and 2000s.

The book concludes by analyzing what it means to say that the First World War ended in less than victory for the Allies. The peace process amounted to little more than reimaging an old imperial system that forged a peace that came at a heavy price.

The sudden end of the war in 1918 gave rise to high expectations of the forthcoming peace congress. Yet neither the gathering at Paris nor the settlement to which it gave its name marked a new beginning in international politics. ‘New Diplomacy’ proved to be a short-lived blossoming. Old diplomacy, with its focus on the management of relations between states, persisted, though bearing outwardly the stamp of Geneva. Openness and democratic ideals did not lend themselves to peacemaking but rather complicated international relations. Not only was the Paris settlement not ‘a building finished and complete in all respects’, it also did not rest on stable foundations. In erecting it, the peacemakers had undermined the primacy of order; and into the cracks in the new building seeped malign ideas and narrowly defined interests which, ultimately, brought it down.

How can force be used to pursue human security? Treatments of this issue are surprisingly rare.  This chapter addresses the potentially positive uses of force to address basic human needs under the new doctrine of human security in international law.   International laws, cases, and regimes addressing the constituent elements of human security are addressed in turn: personal and political security, economic, food, health, community and environmental security. The evolving structure and function of UN Peacekeeping Operations is demonstrated through cases of specific missions. Finally, the possibilities of 2001’s "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine are debated.

Chapter 14 presents a new interpretation of the peacemaking and reordering process that unfolded at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. It argues that it was not only the most complex process of its kind in history but also, at the core, a process that was dominated by the struggle to negotiate the underpinnings and ground-rules of a new Atlantic order – which in turn had far-reaching global repercussions. Taking into account the unprecedented multiplicity of governmental and non-governmental actors who tried to influence this process in and beyond Paris it sheds new light on how the peace negotiations ultimately came to be shaped by the interests, concepts and strategies of those who led and represented the most powerful states after the war: Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau – and their main advisers. And it opens up new perspectives on why the first truly modern peacemaking process remained in crucial respects incomplete. It shows that while the principal “peacemakers” began to learn how to forge complex compromises under the challenging conditions of 1919 what they ultimately managed to negotiate could not lay firm and legitimate foundations for a sustainable Atlantic, and global, peace order.

Explores the emerging subdiscipline of Peace Communication (PeaceComm), beginning with a discussion about the history of the practice, and the author’s ongoing quest to introduce a subdiscipline, dedicated to assessing and evaluating the critical efficacy of the practice. A methodological template for comparative global assessment and evaluation is offered, stressing the need to prioritize political conflict data and conflict zones-based context analyses, given that political conflict is caused by collective grievances related to “group”-level disadvantages and perceived disadvantages, not individual prejudice. The template is operationalized through the assessment of Sesame Street interventions into the Israeli Palestinian ethnopolitical nationalist conflict, drawn from field work in 2001, 2004-2006, and 2011. Best practices and other interdisciplinary contributions for practitioners are recommended, to understand conflict intractability where socialization, culture, and inter-“group” (mediated and interpersonal) communication intersect in glocalized conflict zone contexts, and in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically. The interventions targeted children, who comprise the majority within conflict zones. The model used, mediated contact effects, is one of seven models and six subtypes of PeaceComm practiced historically worldwide the author has previously categorized, and is one of those most in need of PeaceComm scholarship, with potential to succeed but scarce evidence collected about its efficacy.

This chapter goes back in history to explore the roots of Norway and Sweden’s postulated peace traditions and some key features of the two states’ mediation efforts during and after the Cold War. With particular attention paid to Norway’s attempt to take national ownership of the peace nation narrative in the 1990s and the 2000s, the chapter discusses why Sweden and Norway both found peacemaking an attractive tool for national image building, and demonstrates how the quest for a peace nation identity sparked competition and friction between the two states. The chapter uses examples from Guatemala, the Middle East and Sri Lanka to illustrate the possibilities and limitations of Nordic mediation, and argues that although the mediation successes have been relatively few, the peace nation narrative is hard to challenge since its overarching telos is to be the good, spread the good, and fulfill the good.

This chapter focuses on the psychological analysis of peace in the outer world and examines how peace is psychologically viewed in terms of its components in interpersonal and international relationships.

This chapter focuses on the psychological analysis of peace in the outer world and examines how peace is psychologically viewed in terms of its components in interpersonal and international relationships.

This chapter about the failed peace negotiations between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Government of Uganda, the Juba Peace Talks, highlights the main gaps in scholarship on peacemaking, introduces the main arguments of the book, sets the scene on access to the LRA and reflects on methodological challenges. The book argues that contemporary peacemaking suffers from a theory/practice gap, with the way conflicts are supposed to be resolved not mirroring the complexity of the conflict. Current scholarship on peace negotiations emphasises game theory, failing to take context and developing dynamics into account. Yet how actors experience peace talks and their dynamics determines negotiation conduct and the extent to which they can change their own behaviour. For the Lord’s Resistance Army/Movement (LRA/M), the process was a contradictory experience with shifting loyalties and interests. Internal dynamics within the LRA/M were profoundly influenced by their perception that they were trapped in an established hostile system with an uneven playing field. Yet the LRA/M also struggled to transform their internal dynamics of distrust. The chapter further outlines the methodological challenges of access to armed groups and using likely manipulated information for research.

This chapter focuses on the 2007 events in the Juba Peace Talks between the Lord’s Resistance Army/Movement (LRA/M) and the Government of Uganda. Entering the year with a frayed relationship between the LRA/M and the mediator due to the lack of activity to deal decisively with Ugandan army attacks on the LRA as it was trying to assemble as part of negotiations, 2007 brought to the fore the challenging internal dynamics of the LRA/M. These included internal distrust and sabotage but also increased engagement with an ever-growing collection of outside actors which pulled the LRA/M in different directions. One way of maintaining coherence was to exert control at the very heart of the LRA, which led to the killing by Joseph Kony of his deputy, Vincent Otti. The year 2007 also showed increased international engagement, including from the USA, which further confused possibilities for the peace talks: The international community signalled simultaneously its willingness to find a solution to the arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court as well as its support for a military strike against the LRA. In the broader dynamics of the talks, these contradictions further strengthened the impasse.

The Juba Peace Talks between the Lord’s Resistance Army/Movement (LRA/M) and the Government of Uganda were the most promising attempt to end one of Africa’s longest running wars, yet they ended without a peace agreement and are thus largely considered a failure. This chapter unpacks the lessons that the Juba Talks offer for contemporary peacemaking: The need to understand the importance of the developing dynamics and how individuals experienced the peace talks; the phenomenon that peace talks can entrench, rather than transform, violent conflicts; and the challenges in researching and documenting these dynamics and entrenchments. The chapter concludes that the LRA/M to a great extent maintained its reputation as an unreliable and violent negotiation partner torn apart by infighting. The Government of Uganda made few political concessions and instead relief on military intervention; international actors failed to establish themselves as principled with clear guidelines. These dynamics had been present in the conflict and continued during the Juba Talks and beyond, confirming the LRA/M’s perception of being trapped in a hostile and unchangeable system. Only with a holistic approach to managing the ebbs and flows of political conflict can interaction and systems in entrenched situations be changed over the long term.