CALL FOR PAPERS

Issue 55 / The end or transformation of the ‘liberal peace’?

Publication: February 2024

The objective of issue 55 is to analyse the transformation of the international peace-building agenda. In the last decade, peace-building has passed from an increase in offensive military operations for the imposition of peace, to the non-authorization of these missions, in a notable number of years. The wide spectrum of objectives associated with liberal peace have been limited to preparations for war, and, in absence of these measures, civil and development programmes have been prioritized that could be seen as a way of maintaining such a presence. At any rate, this is at some distance from the commitments of previous decades. The dividends that these changes have reaped regarding peace and stability in the short term have been limited, and it does not seem that they are going to improve in the long term. As we are going to see next, the literature has been exhaustive when analysing what is happening to the liberal peace and what are the new parameters under which the missions operate.

The literature has been dealing with how to conceptualize the current transformations in peace-building in recent times. Although there is a tendency to note militarized and aggressive postures in peace-building, there is disagreement about what this means and its causes. For some academics, these developments are counterproductive, but mainly in terms of the operationalization of the maintenance of peace, strictly speaking (Bush, 2004; Sloan, 2011; Tardy, 2011; Tull, 2018). For others, these developments represent, more broadly, the end of peace-building as it has existed until now. David Chandler (2017) maintains that peace-building has suffered a “20 year crisis” from the end of the 1990s and is now being replaced by a pragmatic focus that moves away from the idea that institutions, legitimacy and social processes can be exported or imposed. From a different perspective, David Lewis et al. (2018) argue that the liberal peace is being replaced by what they call “authoritarian conflict management,” characterized by its objective to control violence and not tackle the roots of conflict, its rejection of international mediation, and its uninhibited use of force and coercion. For John Karlsrud (2017: 1215; see also 2019), “peace-building may be on its way to the scrapyard of history” because the turn towards stabilization and counter-terrorism indicate an abandonment of institutional objectives in the long term and its replacement by those of security in the short term. By contrast, a final group of academics, among them Philippe Cunliffe (2015, 2016), Michael Pugh (2015) and Zubairu Wai (2014), suggest that this turn only reproduces power relations, global inequality and imperialism, without changing significantly the spirit of liberal peace.

Apart from this, a series of arguments have been put forward indicating the causes of these changes: firstly, the increase in terrorism, immigration and rebellions (Akkerman, 2018; Charbonneau, 2017; Karlsrud, 2019; Pugh, 2015); secondly, the contradictions inherent in liberal peace (Chandler, 2017, Belloni y Moro, 2019); thirdly, changes in the international political context (Karlsrud, 2019; Tardy, 2011), which some authors characterize as a withdrawal of western powers, and the rise of new powers like China and Russia in the maintenance of international order(Karlsrud, 2019; Tardy, 2011). Unfortunately, these factors have not been analysed systematically and some are not sufficiently substantiated. For example, the rise of actors like Russia and China does not seem significant, given that these changes have been led by the EU and the UN. At the UN, the P-3 (France, United Kingdom, and United States) are the ‘penholders’ of peace operations, who articulate and operationalize the missions (UN Security Council, 2018) and who have developed stabilization missions on the basis of their own stabilization doctrines (Belloni and Moro, 2019; Bachman, 2014). Likewise, while the liberal peace seems to be an exhausted paradigm, the literature has not been capable of establishing why these new militarized practices have emerged and not others.

In general, even if it is possible to affirm, as do Coleman and Williams (2021), that peace operations will continue, we still do not know in what form this will take. In this issue a call for contributions is made with the aim of offering a full understanding of how and why the consolidation of peace has changed and the consequences of this change.

With this in mind, the call invites responses to the following questions and areas for reflection: 

• Theme 1: The end of the liberal peace?
  For this theme contributions are sought that shine light on the debate surrounding the status of the liberal peace at present. In this sense we would like to receive papers of a similar vein to that of Coleman and Williams, David Chandler, Oscar Mateos or Itziar Ruiz-Giménez.
• Theme 2: The militarization of the liberal peace.
  This is perhaps the theme that has most penetrated into outlining what form the liberal peace is taking. For that we hope to receive contributions like those of Marta Iñiguez de Heredia, Iker Zirion and Rita Abrahamsen.
• Theme 3: Other forms of the liberal peace.
  In this theme contributions should be offered that value other characteristics of the contemporary liberal peace, like those of John Heathershaw that speak of authoritarian conflict-management.
• Theme 4: The geopolitics of the liberal peace.
  For this theme contributions are sought that study how the context of the last decade, with the so called crisis of liberalism, has caused ‘a return’ to more strategic ways of doing politics. Although this is contested, articles should tackle in some way this question, which is important in the debate about where liberal peace is currently.

While these lines of investigation will be prioritized, the acceptance of contributions will not be exclusively limited to these explicit avenues.

Issue 55 of Relaciones Internacionales will be published in February, 2024; the Editorial Team of the journal and the Coordination of the issue have established the following dates:

 

DUE DATE

SUBMISSION OF ARTICLES

The full document of the article must conform wholly and meticulously to the Style Manual of the journal. You can obtain our template for authors by clicking here (in Spanish). The submission stage ends on Monday 18th September, 2023 (up to and including).

The submission of the article will be made on the web-page of the journal through the management platform OJS (Open Journal System). It is essential that the authors —all of them in the event that there is more than one— are registered by completing the requested data on the platform registration page with the most up-to-date information: https://revistas.uam.es/relacionesinternacionales

EVALUATION process

Once the article is submitted correctly through the website, the double-blind evaluation process begins. The decision process will take between three and six months, depending on the case: this may include the return of the text to its author(s) for the revision or correction of changes and suggestions made by the anonymous reviewers. During the evaluation process, the reviewers will be responsible for certifying the quality of the work of the authors, as well as the appropriateness of the final texts for the topics proposed in the call for papers.

• PLEASE NOTE: suggestions by the authors of possible reviewers for the evaluation of their texts are permitted. With the text of your proposal, you can send us by email the names of academics with extensive knowledge of the aspects dealt with in your work so that- if the coordination considers it appropriate- these people can be contacted as blind reviewers.

Throughout the evaluation process (between October and December 2023), those authors whose text receives the complete approval of the assigned reviewers will be notified of the definitive acceptance of their article.

EDITING process

During the month of January 2024, the journal will proceed to the definitive editing of the text, to be published in February. The complete and careful compliance with the rules stated in the Style Manual of the journal is understood to be the responsibility of the authors, and this is a requirement for the final publication of the article in Issue 55.

PUBLICATION OF THE VOLUME

Throughout the month of February 2024 the 55^th edition of the journal Relaciones Internacionales, with the title “The end or transformation of the ‘liberal peace?’,” will be published in digital format, online, open access and free. All the articles that have fulfilled the requirements of the stages indicated above will be included.

LANGUAGES

Proposals in Spanish, English, and Portuguese will be accepted. Nonetheless, the articles will be translated to Spanish for publication in the journal. It will be the authors themselves who send the translated articles in Spanish.

OTHER INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS:

It is fundamental that the authors consult the Style Manual to get to know in detail the editing and evaluation requirements for publication in the journal. Moreover, the OJS system of the journal website allows for online tracking of all the administration processes and the state of the text.

Notification of copyright: the authors who publish in Relaciones Internacionales accept the following terms:

• The authors retain copyright and guarantee the right of first publication of the work to the journal, which will be simultaneously subject to the Creative Commons License Reconocimiento-NoComercial-SinObraDerivada 4.0 Internacional (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
• The authors will be able to make other non-exclusive licence agreements for the distribution of the published version of the work (e.g., deposited in an electronic institutional archive or published in a monographic volume) provided that the initial publication in this journal is indicated.
• It is permitted and recommended that the authors circulate their work through the internet (e.g., in electronic institutional archives or on their webpage) before and during the submission process, which can produce interesting exchanges and increase the citations of the published work.
• The authors are responsible for obtaining the appropriate permissions to reproduce material (text, images or graphs) from other publications and for citing their origins correctly.
• Relaciones Internacionales does not charge the authors any fees for the presentation, submission, or publication of the articles.

COORDINATION OF THE ISSUE

Marta ÍÑIGUEZ DE HEREDIA
Matthew ROBSON – matthew_robson@hotmail.com