Introduction: Peace-Building or World-Building? Peace Interventions, Conflict and Violence

Abstract

Peace-building can be an act of violence. Conflict, on the other hand, may not be a cause of violence, but rather a crucial means for resisting, constraining and preventing it. Violence occurs when the plural worlds occupied and created by conflicting groups are damaged or even destroyed, and when it is impossible to resist or counteract this destruction. However unintentionally, transformative peace interventions, which aim at radically altering conflict to produce a particular model of peace, may enact violence against the plural worlds they transform. This, in turn, can produce subtle cycles of violence that may evade the attention of intervening actors until they manifest themselves in acts of physical or material violence that endanger the peace process. If peace interventions are to be non-violent, I argue, they should be premised not on particular models of peace-building, but rather on supporting plural world-building, or creating the conditions in which plural worlds can exist non-violently.