The Fragmentation of War and Peace: Rethinking Peace Processes in a Polycentric World
Authors: Christine Bell, Matthew Benson-Strohmayer, Luke Cooper, Mary Kaldor, Mateja Peter
This Special Issue of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding argues that fragmentation is a structuring condition of contemporary conflict, operating within domestic conflict systems and across the international order. Domestically, authority is dispersed among elites, armed groups, and civic actors; internationally, peacebuilding frameworks have given way to parallel mediation, regionalised intervention, and competing geopolitical projects. These forms are mutually reinforcing. What appears as disorder is a patterned architecture of authority through which peace processes reconfigure rather than consolidate power. The articles show that contemporary peace architectures manage fragmentation rather than resolve it, producing a post-liberal peace that blurs the boundaries among settlement, stabilisation, and predatory governance.
This introduction to the Special Issue shows how these levels are mutually constitutive, producing transcalar conflict systems – systems in which authority is continually assembled and reassembled across local, national, regional, and international scales – rather than being contained within any one of them. Rather than treating fragmentation as a breakdown, we conceptualise it as an ordering condition: what appears as disorder is, in practice, a patterned architecture of authority structured by coercive relationships, resource flows, and recognition practices. This Special Issue brings into sharper focus not fragmentation itself, but its stabilisation as a durable governing logic, and the ways in which domestic and global fragmentation reinforce one another.