This article is interested in the interface between internationally supported peace operations and local approaches to peace that may draw on traditional, indigenous and customary practice. It argues that peace (and security, development and reconstruction) in societies emerging from violent conflict tends to be a hybrid between the external and the local. The article conceptualizes how this hybrid or composite peace is constructed and maintained. It proposes a four-part conceptual model to help visualize the interplay that leads to hybridized forms of peace. Hybrid peace is the result of the interplay of the following: the compliance powers of liberal peace agents, networks and structures; the incentivizing powers of liberal peace agents, networks and structures; the ability of local actors to resist, ignore or adapt liberal peace interventions; and the ability of local actors, networks and structures to present and maintain alternative forms of peacemaking.

Hybrid peace: The interaction between top-down and bottom-up peace

Energy supply security and geopolitics: A European perspective

In current discussions, many commentators express a fear that ‘broad’ human security approaches are being sidelined by the rise of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) and the ‘narrow’ focus on military intervention. An alternative reading is sketched out here, which suggests that debates over ‘narrow’ or ‘broad’ human security frameworks have undertheorized the discursive paradigm at the heart of human security. This paradigm is drawn out in terms of the juxtaposition of preventive human security practices of resilience, working upon the empowerment of the vulnerable, and the interventionist security practices of liberal internationalism, working upon the protection of victims. It is suggested that human security can be conceptually analysed in terms of post-intervention, as a shift away from liberal internationalist claims of Western securing or sovereign agency and towards a concern with facilitating or developing the self-securing agency – resilience – of those held to be the most vulnerable. This approach takes us beyond the focus on the technical means of intervention – whether coercive force is deployed or not – and allows us to see how international intervention, including under the R2P, increasingly operates under the paradigm of resilience and human security, thereby evading many of the problems confronted by liberal framings of intervention.

Resilience and human security: The post-interventionist paradigm:

▪ Abstract The late twentieth century has seen far-reaching changes in the translocal cultural regimes known as world religions. This review examines the politics and meanings of recent changes in three such religions: Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. It highlights the nature of the forces reshaping religious meanings and authority, the processes promoting conversion and standardization, and the implications of these religious refigurations for our understanding of late modernity itself. Though modernity is multiple and every tradition unique, this review suggests that all contemporary religions confront a similar structural predicament, related to the globalization of mass societies and the porous pluralism of late modernity.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/223364.pdf

MULTIPLE MODERNITIES: Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in a Globalizing Age

Essence of diplomacy

In this book, Robert Cooper sets out his radical interpretation of the new world order that has emerged from the debris of communism. It is an essential account of the times in which we live. 'A fluent, stimulating and often original book' Brendan Simms, Sunday Times 'An excellent new analysis of the cracks in today's geopolitical landscape.'Philip Stephens, Financial Times 'Intelligent and stylish' Robert Skidelsky, New Statesman'A seminal work: a brilliant and successful attempt to bring intellectual order to the chaos of the twenty-first century.' Francois Heisbourg, International Institute for Strategic Studies

Robert Cooper

Papers

The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century

The post-modern state and the world order