Peacemaking and the Maintenance of International Order: Alignment under Hegemony versus Multipolar Misalignment

Abstract With the publication of Agenda for Peace, the UN system opened its peace interventions up to critiques that allowed a tentative incorporation of critical, ethnographic, feminist, and rights-based approaches. Yet, subsequent efforts to reform the international peace architecture have been more limited, reflecting geopolitical interests rather than critical methodologies. Since the 1990s, two trends have occurred: within the liberal international order legitimate political claims from outside Western understandings of peacemaking have been marginalized, while liberal peacemaking has been undermined by competing actors, institutions, and processes in an emerging multipolar order. But has the latter developed a significant capacity for peacemaking? This article argues that the “liberal alignment” appears to have broken down but a “misaligned multipolar” order offers few if any tools that respond to critical arguments about peacemaking. This article critically evaluates the potential for peacemaking in a liberal aligned order versus that of a multipolar misaligned order.