Future peace with global justice in pluriversal order versus international authoritarian convergence

We are delighted to welcome Professor Oliver Richmond to deliver a seminar with the Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group on the UN International Day of Peace. Professor Richmond is a leading scholar in the field of IR, Peace and Conflict Studies, and is the founder of the MA in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Manchester. He has worked with international actors, especially the UN, and civil society organisations in several conflict-affected areas around the world, and was the recipient of the 2019 Eminent Scholar Award from the International Studies Association. He has contributed to numerous policy reports, documentaries, and recently to UNESCO's work on culture for peace, as well to the Nobel Centre's recent exhibitions on Artpeace. 

Along with Sandra Pogodda, and Gëzim Visoka, Oliver published ''Counter-Peace: Tactical Blockages to Peace and Strategic Risks for the International System’ with Oxford University Press in 2026. The publication is open access.

Please find the abstract below:

Given the collapse of legitimacy of the liberal peace, and the obvious echoes of systemic failure that authoritarian conflict management have also provided, there is a question firstly, of what type of transitional peacemaking is plausible, and secondly, what future peace forms are available after any interregnum? What can we learn from other literatures and cases about how innovations may develop, given what we know about the history and current state of the IPA and of local forms of peacemaking? Liberalism has turned out to be provincial and hypocritical, accentuating the broad-ranging legitimacy peace now requires, and authoritarianism has little to offer beyond a return to direct, structural, imperial, and other forms of violence. After the death of liberalism, illiberal conflict management is unlikely to bridge with new approaches more closely associated to scientific findings about scholarship. This article asks, what types of peace may be reborn from the bifurcated current transition towards pluriversality or multipolarity? How will innovation emerge in theories, practices and orders, and in what direction? Can an enhanced level of pluriversality and global justice be attained by building on the current international peace architecture, or upon multipolar epistemologies?

Registration will close two hours before the event begins.