The politics of civilian suicidality in liberal peacebuilding: Theorising the death drive in International Relations

What makes a peace process a ‘success story’? In Northern Ireland, suicidality rose sharply after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, even as the peace process became internationally celebrated as a model of conflict settlement. International Relations and peacebuilding scholarship have largely recognised suicide only when it emerges as political self-sacrifice – terrorism, hunger strike and self-immolation – while ‘ordinary’ or everyday suicides are politically and institutionally routed to public health, psychology and sociology and thereby risk being depoliticised. Against this division of labour, the article theorises post-conflict civilian suicidality as a peace governance outcome; namely, an immanent, structural effect of liberal peacebuilding’s logic of containment, stabilisation and political trade-offs. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, I argue that peace processes can be analysed as death-driven structures. They reproduce themselves by repeating practices that secure negative peace while undercutting positive peace, including healing, reconciliation, integration and care. This self-undermining repetition casts off what I call surplus violence: the remainder generated by the subtraction of negative peace gains from positive peace aspirations. I conceptualise the governance of this remainder as autoktonopolitics, that is, the circulation and distribution through which self-killing is made intelligible, normalised and absorbed as collateral, private or non-political. Empirically, the article draws on interviews in Northern Ireland from 2024 to 2026 to trace technologies of autoktonopower across peace funding, consociational governance, post-paramilitary appeasement and territorialised coercive community control. The article redescribes peace as a question of post-conflict order reproduction, opening a research agenda for Lacanian peacebuilding studies and the libidinal economies of peace processes.