The P5 and international intervention: debating Syria, contesting the liberal peace, seeking ontological security

Abstract This article examines the crisis of the liberal peace through the lens of ontological security. While existing scholarship has analysed the erosion of consensus around peacemaking from a geopolitical or a normative point of view, this study extends the debate by exploring how contestation of the liberal peace disrupts the identities of its promoters. Through qualitative discourse analysis of speeches delivered by the Permanent Five (P5) members of the United Nations Security Council at the 152 meetings debating the situation in Syria between 2011 and 2020, the study illustrates the tensions that emerge from competing discursive frameworks that link self-identity framing to a given role, providing grounds for agency and, thus, actions that guarantee continuity. The article argues that not only does the unravelling of the liberal peace challenge the rules that have governed international interventions; it unsettles the identities of the states that have upheld them. The traditional hierarchy in the debate on intervention, historically based on the intervener/intervened upon divide, has shifted toward mutually exclusive ways of framing who the interveners are. By introducing a perspective that sees intervention as a terrain of identity claims, the article contributes to understanding how intervention is contested within shifting global power dynamics.