Peace in an age of power
The editors of Peacebuilding are commissioning a Special Issue on peace and power. Much recent critical academic work in Peace and Conflict Studies has concentrated on the agential aspects of peace but has somewhat neglected structural issues and the different types of power that are an obstacle to peace. The proposed Special Issue will concentrate on how peace scholarship and agendas can be furthered in an era of realism, hard power, the primacy of geo-politics, nationalism, authoritarianism and unfettered capitalism. Furthermore, structural power and the defence of privilege may also be being extended by the advent of new technologies of governmentality.
Peace and Conflict Studies has been very well-served by the local turn and ethnographically-inspired fieldwork. We are seeing very rich field and project data in terms of publications, which has made a contribution to the UN’s recent Sustaining Peace agenda. This fore-grounding of the local often means that the wider context – especially that involving the international, the politics behind international institutions, and the hard power of militaries – is somewhat neglected. Yet, for peace to take root and to be truly transformative and emancipatory, it seems that issues of hard power, geo-politics and the structures of states, societies and economies need to be re-addressed in a new set of contexts. Indeed, the local turn has highlighted far more than merely descriptive frameworks of localised peace or the limitations of liberal peacebuilding, but also the ways subaltern and intersectional political claims are forming and traveling from local to global and back again, as well as how such claims may be blocked.
We are particularly interested in theoretical and conceptual treatments of these dynamics and encourage authors to be bold and experimental (this includes being experimental with the format of journal articles). We envisage some of the articles in the Special Issue being longer than normal (up to 14,000 words) – although this will be through negotiation with the editors. Submissions that are comparative, seek to cover the ‘bigger picture’, and those that engage in horizon-scanning are particularly welcome. Possible themes include (but are not limited to):
– Power and the post-liberal peace
– Peacemaking and the persistence of national sovereignty
– Peace in a post-human rights era
– Methodologies to capture power
We seek extended abstracts (500 words) by 15 September and plan to get back to authors by 1 October. The Special Issue would be published in mid to late 2020. Email: oliver.richmond@manchester.ac.uk and roger.macginty@durham.ac.uk
rogermacginty 
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