For the Peace Yet to Come: Interventions, Infrastructure and Violence in the Global Borderlands

This article examines contemporary peace interventions through the lens of infrastructural violence. It argues that as liberal peacebuilding has given way to stabilization and containment, interventions increasingly materialize as background noise: they act as invisible infrastructures that shape everyday life while entrenching control ‘from a distance’. Focusing on Lebanon as a global borderland, the article analyses border and surveillance projects in South Lebanon and along the Lebanon–Syria frontier. It shows how peacemaking infrastructures may enact epistemic and slow violence, reconfigure and distort sovereignty, and reproduce the logics of conflict they claim to resolve.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding
Published
2026-06-24
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2025.2599685
Primary Topic
Transboundary Water Resource Management
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

For the Peace Yet to Come: Interventions, Infrastructure and Violence in the Global Borderlands

Simone Tholens
Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding
Transboundary Water Resource Management
article

For the Peace Yet to Come: Interventions, Infrastructure and Violence in the Global Borderlands

Simone Tholens
article en

Abstract

This article examines contemporary peace interventions through the lens of infrastructural violence. It argues that as liberal peacebuilding has given way to stabilization and containment, interventions increasingly materialize as background noise: they act as invisible infrastructures that shape everyday life while entrenching control ‘from a distance’. Focusing on Lebanon as a global borderland, the article analyses border and surveillance projects in South Lebanon and along the Lebanon–Syria frontier. It shows how peacemaking infrastructures may enact epistemic and slow violence, reconfigure and distort sovereignty, and reproduce the logics of conflict they claim to resolve.

Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding
Openalex Percentile: Top 3%
Transboundary Water Resource Management
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