Counter-peace: From Isolated Blockages to Systemic Patterns (PDF)

Review of International Studies (2022), page 1 of 22 doi:10.1017/S0260210522000377 RESEARCH ARTICLE...

Review of International Studies (2022), page 1 of 22 doi:10.1017/S0260210522000377 RESEARCH ARTICLE Counter-peace: From isolated blockages in peace processes to systemic patterns Sandra Pogodda1* , Oliver P. Richmond1 and Gëzim Visoka2 1 Department of Politics, University of Manchester, United Kingdom and 2School of Law and Government, Dublin City University, Republic of Ireland *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] (Received 29 September 2021; revised 29 April 2022; accepted 29 June 2022) Abstract In the face of the current decline or spectacular collapse of peace processes, this article investigates whether peace has become systematically blocked. It investigates whether the ineffectiveness of an ‘inter- national peace architecture’ (IPA) can be explained by a more potent counterpeace system, which is grow- ing in its shadow. It identifies counterpeace as proto-systemic processes that connect spoilers across all scales (local, regional, national, transnational), while exploiting structural blockages to peace and unin- tended consequences of peace interventions. It elaborates three distinct patterns of blockages to peace in contemporary conflicts across the globe: the stalemate, limited counterpeace, and unmitigated counter- peace. Drawing on the counterrevolution literature, this research asks: Have peace interventions become the source of their own undoing? Which factors consolidate or aggravate emerging conflict patterns? Are blockages to peace systemic enough to construct a sedimentary and layered counterpeace edifice? Keywords: Counterpeace; International Peace Architecture; Blockages to Peace; Peacemaking; Ukraine; Russia Introduction Over the course of the twentieth century, a multilayered framework of interventionary practices, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000377 Published online by Cambridge University Press international law, multilateral institutions, donors, and civil society1 had emerged to support peace processes, peacemaking tools, and local peace activism. This ‘international peace architec- ture’ (IPA) brought together older conflict management methods such as diplomacy and the bal- ance of power, with the liberal international framework of the twentieth century, the demands for rights and development from anti-colonial movements, liberal peacebuilding, a further expansion of rights beyond basic forms after the 1980s, and statebuilding. This process was closely related to the agency of an emerging global civil society. The IPA had recently also been confronted with a growing critique of liberal peacebuilding:2 weak civil society networks became overloaded with responsibilities to reform conflict-affected states, while international support for peace processes tended to be limited and fluid. As a con- sequence, international peace interventions often produced frozen or stalemated peace processes. Many peace processes have stagnated, regressed, or faltered over the last thirty years as the cases 1 Throughout this article civil society will be understood as societal associations that embrace norms associated with the rejection of violence and the process of building peaceful societies. See Jenny Pearce, ‘Civil society and peace’, in Michael Edwards (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Civil Society (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011). 2 Oliver P. Richmond, The Grand Design:The Evolution of International Peace Architecture (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021). © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.  2 Sandra Pogodda et al. of Cyprus, Israel/Palestine, Libya, Yemen, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Colombia, Sudan, Lebanon, the Sahel region, Afghanistan, and the Balkans demonstrate. The contours of an IPA have emerged to overcome the different dimensions of violent conflict. Multilateral and intergovernmental organisations have combined efforts with transnational and domestic actors to end wars. As a result of this collaboration a toolbox of interventionary prac- tices has evolved over time, including peacekeeping, mediation, development, democratisation, peacebuilding, and statebuilding. Despite much concerted effort on behalf of diplomats, the UN, NATO, international courts, regional actors (such as the European Union and the African Union), donors, foreign policy, and NGO/INGO personnel, current peace processes have often failed to preserve peace and security, or to promote justice, rights, and development in many conflict-affected societies. There have been few success stories, and most cases are ambiguous at best.3 The IPA represents an awkward and unstable synthesis of state power, inter- ests, pragmatism, and internationalism along with science, transnational ethics, and transversal emancipatory claims. In practice, illiberal, and authoritarian outcomes are not unusual (as in Guatemala, Cambodia, El Salvador, or Afghanistan).4 In some cases, peace processes have become more important than a settlement (for example, Cyprus),5 or almost as loathed as open conflict (for example, Palestine and Colombia), while reform processes have been halted or reversed (for example, Bosnia, Tunisia, Libya).6 Conflicts and violence are on the rise around the world with grave human, political, economic, and global consequences.7 Many have been sub- ject to lengthy and often unsuccessful attempts to make peace. Across different regions, the inability of domestic actors to resolve disputes peacefully and the failure of external interventions necessitates a rethinking of existing policy and epistemic approaches to peace.8 There is no longer a widely agreed formula for social relations, reform, peace agreements, form of state and economy, or regional and international arrangements in which ‘peace’ should be nested. The liberal-international order of the twentieth century has become ineffective, if not moribund. Peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and peacemaking have been blocked, undermining the legitimacy and capacity of the wider IPA and nothing new has emerged to replace them. The IPA is riven with uncertain compromises and has itself become compromised. Some of its elements contradict each other and provide opportunities for systematic blockages of peace pro- cesses as this article demonstrates: Top-down statebuilding and peacebuilding interventions in ethnically divided societies have resulted in elite peace capture which exploits power-sharing https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000377 Published online by Cambridge University Press arrangements to obstruct reconciliation.9 Elites’ or identity groups’ control of state institutions and resources has survived the attempts of peace processes, social and revolutionary movements to redistribute.10 Hence, civil society struggles with these (externally supported) power structures, everyday nationalism within and outside institutional settings, unresolved legacies of the conflict, 3 Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Council on Hemispheric Relations, ‘Guatemala’s Crippled Peace Process: A Look Back on the 1996 Peace Accords’ (10 4 May 2011), available at: {http://www.coha.org/guatemalas-crippled-peace-process-a-look-back-on-the-1996-peace-accords/}; Report of the Secretary General, United Nations Verification Mission in Guatemala, General Assembly, Doc A/58/262, 58th Session, 8 August 2003, §34; Pierre P. Lizée, Peace, Power and Resistance in Cambodia: Global Governance and the Failure of Conflict Resolution (London, UK: Macmillan, 1999); Diana Villiers Negroponte, Seeking Peace in El Salvador (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2011), pp. x–xi. 5 Oliver P. Richmond, Mediating in Cyprus (London, UK: Frank Cass, 1997). 6 Roberto Belloni, The Rise and Fall of Peacebuilding in the Balkans (London, UK: Palgrave, 2020), p. 73; Oliver Richmond and Jason Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). 7 Håvard Strand and Håvard Hegre, ‘Trends in Armed Conflict: 1946–2020’ (Oslo: Peace Reseach Institute Oslo), available at: {https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Strand%20and%20Hegre%20-%20Trends%0in%20Armed%20Conflict%2C %201946-2020%20-%20Conflict%20Trends%203-2021.pdf}. 8 Daniel Philpott and Gerard Powers, Strategies of Peace (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010). 9 Christine Wade, Captured Peace: Elites and Peacebuilding in El Salvador (Athens, GA: Ohio University Press, 2016). 10 John Brewer, Peace Processes: A Sociological Approach (London, UK: Polity, 2010).  Review of International Studies 3 and with socioeconomic impoverishment reinforced by post-2000s neoliberal statebuilding. The failure of international statebuilding to respond to local culture, needs, and interests, as well as questions related to global justice, has empowered unstable neoliberal, criminalised power structures, and warlords.11 This undermines conciliatory forms of peace, and has given rise to even more narrowly based ‘stabilisation’ approaches.12 In this process, rights and material gains that should be associated with peace and reform, especially from an ethical and scientific basis, have been undermined. Meanwhile the networked, scalar, and mobile elements of a ‘digital’ shift in international relations has been ignored, especially where it countermands rights and global civil society campaigns and supports authoritarian forms of power. Through this critical lens ,13 counter-processes and peace-breaking dynamics have perhaps become more of a plausible ‘process’ than any peace process itself.14 Indeed, the latter looks epis- temologically naïve. Inadvertently, this may reflect long-standing debates about the dynamics of counter-revolution.15 Yet, contemporary revolutionary agency has fared even worse than peace agency: despite its sophisticated understandings of justice, legitimacy and reconciliation, it has not overcome the counter-revolutionary processes that are connected to the state as well as across scales.16 As a broader dynamic these counter-processes represent reactions against ‘progress’ in ethical and scientific understandings of peacemaking, and enable a winding back of reformist, revolutionary, and internationalised versions of peace, democratisation, human rights, and the rule of law. They rest on justifications for elite power, geopolitics, nationalism, stratification, and inequality, as well as on the state’s deployment of violence. Hence, this article aims to shift the academic focus away from the shortcomings of peace processes to shed light on their polar opposites: blockages and counter-peace processes at the international, national elite, and societal level. We argue that distinct patterns are emerging in the blockage of peace and reform processes. We aim to identify, how reactionary processes operate to challenge peace praxis in order to preserve power, stratification, hostile identity framings, and economic privileges. Furthermore, we analyse how peace interventions have become entangled with counter-peace processes. Which factors consolidate or deteriorate emerging conflict patterns? Are blockages to peace sys- temic enough to construct a sedimentary and layered counter-peace edifice? This study intro- duces the concept of counter-peace as a tool to critically interrogate a potentially systemic array of blockages to peace, juxtaposing peace processes with counter-revolutionary theory. This may help to understand why so many peace processes and peacebuilding missions appear https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000377 Published online by Cambridge University Press to have led to illiberal and authoritarian outcomes. Counter-peace processes may display a similar relationship to peace processes as counter-revolution does to revolutions. The article evaluates 11 Oliver Richmond, Failed Statebuilding: Intervention, the State, and the Dynamics of Peace Formation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Susan Woodward, The Ideology of Failed States: Why Intervention Fails (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 12 David Keen with Larry Attree, Dilemmas of Counter-Terror, Stabilisation and Statebuilding (Saferworld, January 2015), p. 2: See also Stabilisation Unit, ‘The UK Government’s Approach to Stabilisation’ (FCOD, 2014): International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, ‘A New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States’ (IDPS, 2011). 13 Fred Dallmayr, Peace Talks: Who Will Listen? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004). 14 Gezim Visoka, Peace Figuration after International Intervention: Intentions, Events and Consequences of Liberal Peacebuilding (London, UK: Routledge, 2016). 15 Here, counterrevolution is understood as a range of strategies and structural blockages to halt or reverse the transform- ation of the state or class structures, aiming to restore a pre-revolutionary order. Ideologically, counterrevolution is a conser- vative project that considers existing forms of authority, stratification, and hierarchies as historically consecrated. Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). 16 Sandra Pogodda, ‘Revolutions and the liberal peace: Peacebuilding as counter-revolutionary practice?’, Cooperation and Conflict, 55:3 (2020), pp. 347–64.  4 Sandra Pogodda et al. whether the blockages add up to a more sophisticated counter-peace edifice than previously understood. Its constituent parts, tactics, strategies, combined with structural obstacles and unintended concequences of flawed peace processes may well add up to an overall counter- peace architecture, which shapes the international system itself, just as a counter-revolution depends on and occupies the state. As a first step, this article outlines the concept of the counter-peace and distinguishes it from related concepts. A subsequent section elaborates three categories of its empirical manifestation and develops a model of how these categories may be linked. They are informed by a number of reports commissioned by the authors in partnership with local scholars and civil society organi- sations in a range of cases, as well as by the wider, secondary, empirical literature.17 A conclusion elaborates whether, based on the paper’s findings, the assumption of systemic connections between blockages to peace can be upheld. Locating the counter-peace This section distinguishes the counter-peace from other concepts before drawing on the literature on counter-revolutions to see what analysis of blocked peace processes can learn from it. At first glance, Johan Galtung’s negative peace might appear to be a similar concept since some empirical manifestations of counter-peace processes are also characterised by a combination of surface stability and underlying violence. Both negative peace and counter-peace try to analyse why peace processes are often unstable. Yet the two concepts rest on divergent assumptions and drive towards different epistemologies: Galtung’s negative peace explores different types of violence that had escaped our understanding of peace, especially structural and cultural vio- lence.18 However, his concept essentially follows a ‘curative rationality’, which prescribes ‘a road from war to positive peace’.19 Hence, Galtung examines connections between different actors’ needs and ideals with the aim of moving our understanding of peace from a confrontation of unbridgeable differences (in which the realisation of one peace vision only occurs at the expense of other actor’s aspirations) to one of interconnectedness. Counter-peace, by contrast, is a diagnostic tool to explore the links between systemic challenges to peace. Here, the assump- tion is that blockages to peace might be connected in ways that have hitherto been overlooked. Hence, it goes beyond negative peace by searching for patterns that connect different types of https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000377 Published online by Cambridge University Press blockages to peace across different conflict spheres as well as cases. This epistemological interest also goes beyond the literature on spoilers.20 The spoiler debate provided a rich conceptualisation of peace spoiling actors, goals, tactics, and actions, but less on their connections across all scales. For instance, Stephen Stedman’s typology of peace spoilers focuses mostly on the elite level, and touches only briefly on the role of global and regional actors. It does not examine transnational blockages to peace, nor local and grassroots counter-peace movements beyond organised politics.21 Crucially, due to its focus on 17 Over a three-year period (2019–21), these included reports on Bosnia-Herzogivina, Cambodia, Colombia, Ethiopia, Kosovo, Myanmar, Sierra Leone, Southern Thailand, Sri Lanka, Timor Leste, and Tunisia. They were supported by a grant from the University of Manchester. 18 Johann Galtung ‘An editorial’, Journal of Peace Research, 1:1 (1964), pp. 1–4; Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, peace and peace research’, Journal of Peace Research, 6:3 (1969), pp. 167–91; Johan Galtung, ‘Towards a grand theory of negative and positive peace: Peace, security and conviviality’, in Yoichiro Murakami and Thomas J. Schoenbaum (eds), A Grand Design for Peace and Reconciliation: Achieving Kyosei in East Asia (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2008), pp. 90–106. 19 Johan Galtung and D. Fischer, ‘Positive and negative peace’, in Johan Galtung, Springer Briefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice, Vol. 5 (Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer, 2013). 20 See, for example, Stephen John Stedman, ‘Spoiler problems in peace processes’, International Security, 22:2 (1997), pp. 5–53; Edward Newman and Oliver Richmond (eds), Challenges to Peacebuilding: Managing Spoilers During Conflict Resolution (Tokyo: UNU Press, 2006); Oliver Richmond, ‘Devious objectives and the disputants’ view of international mediation: A theoretical framework’, Journal of Peace Research, 35:6 (1998), pp. 707–22. 21 Newman and Richmond (eds), Challenges to Peacebuilding.  Review of International Studies 5 intentionality, the spoiler debate neglects structural factors, path dependencies, and unintended consequences.22 These limitations have prevented a fuller assessment of the ways in which differ- ent blockages to peace are connected across conflict spheres and cases. Scholarship in different theoretical and disciplinary fields has produced a large range of coun- ter concepts, which usually position themselves towards power: Concepts such as counter-con- duct,23 counter-hegemony,24 and counter-power25 challenge dominant forms of power, while counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism, and counter-revolution aim to restore them. Concepts such as counter-law,26 counter-rights,27 and counter-justice28 denote actions to contain human rights and undermine democratic institutions. The most insightful analysis for this article among the various counter concepts is the literature on counter-revolutions though, since it ana- lyses most clearly the ways in which actors try to erode, contain, or eliminate emancipatory agency. So what can we learn from the critical-historical concept of the counter-revolution for our understanding of counterpeace processes? In their broader outline, counter-revolution and counter-peace are similar in that our understanding of both processes is derived from what they oppose: broad security, rights, just- ice, and equity as the hallmarks of a positive, hybrid, and everyday peace29 running parallel to the emancipatory objectives of freedom and equality in revolutions.30 Accordingly, the most obvious tactics to thwart emancipatory movements involve mobilising coercive state institu- tions, media, and other influential social and political structures. However, counter-revolution and counter-peace both cover a spectrum of political responses to societal and international pressure for change, which expands well beyond oppression, restoration, and war. Instead, both processes are most effective, if they do not constitute the opposite of revolution and peace processes, but represent watered-down alternatives to them. They may maintain some of their benefits, such as basic security, while rejecting human rights or significant reform, for example. There is continuity in power structures in both, in other words. In order to avoid fundamental transformation, counter-revolutionary, or counter-peace elites may be forced to enact substantive reforms. The 1848 revolutions for instance, showed that even after the military defeat of revolutionary movements, counter-revolutionary governments might be compelled to enact fundamental political or social reforms if deep structural changes can no longer be postponed.31 Yet in contrast to revolutionary transformations, counter-revo- lutionary reforms only bow to a limited set of demands for change in order to protect social or political hierarchies against deep transformation.32 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000377 Published online by Cambridge University Press 22 Gëzim Visoka, Peace Figuration After International Intervention: Intentions, Events and Consequences of Liberal Peacebuilding (London, UK: Routledge, 2016). 23 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collage de France 1977–1978, ed. M. Senellart and trans. G. Burchell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 24 Antonio Gramsci, Quintin Hoare, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1973). 25 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Tim Gee, Counterpower: Making Change Happen (Oxford, UK: New Internationalist Publications Ltd, 2011). 26 Richard Ericson, Crime in an Insecure World (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007). 27 Christoph Menke, Critique of Rights (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2020). 28 J. G. Hansen, ‘Decolonizing indigenous restorative justice is possible’, in Sue Matheson and John A. Butler (eds), Horizon North: Contact, Culture and Education in Canada (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), p. 117. 29 Johan Galtung, ‘Peace’, in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, Vol. 17 (2nd edn, 2017), p. 618; Oliver P. Richmond, Peace in International Relations (2nd edn, London, UK: Routledge, 2020). 30 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London, UK: Penguin, 1990 [orig. pub. 1963]). 31 Arnost Klima, ‘The bourgeois revolution of 1848–9 in Central Europe’, in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds), Revolution in History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 98. 32 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Revolution’, in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds), Revolution in History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 11.  6 Sandra Pogodda et al. In contemporary peace processes, similar types of conflation occur. Peace agreements, for instance, may harbour within them the seeds of a counter-peace. While the Ta’if and Dayton Agreements stopped further bloodshed in Lebanon and Bosnia, respectively, they also constituted the institutional framework for peace capture. Former warlords turned into political powerholders, preserving ethnic or sectarian power structures. Like the Thermidor in revolutions, peace agree- ments’ initial success in ending violence soon gave way to exclusion, segregation, and marginalisa- tion, pre-empting reconciliation and progressive forms of peace (as will be further analysed below). Hence, revolution and counter-revolution – as much as positive peace and counter-peace – are dialectically related.33 This understanding of the counter-revolution and counter-peace resonates with Michel Foucault’s understanding of power. Of the various factors, which make up Foucault’s notion of power, our concept of counter-peace investigates the multiplicity of dominant force relations and their institutional organisation; their mutual support and the ways in which they disconnect and marginalise the struggles to transform and reverse those force relations.34 In their relationship with violence, counter-revolution and counter-peace cover a range of strategies. As long as revolutions were still characterised by terror, war, and vengeance to an extent that revolutions had been inconceivable ‘outside the domain of violence’,35 counter-revo- lutions may have appealed to many as a form of moderation.36 Indeed, counter-revolutionary alli- ances often regarded themselves as guardians of vertical as well as horizontal security.37 However, in terms of their strategies of political contestation and their relationship to state power, revolu- tions have changed drastically over time. Due to the growth of social movements, armed takeovers of state power have been replaced by non-violent, leaderless, and non-ideological movements with little ambition to own the state.38 In the face of these weaker forms of revolutionary contest- ation, counter-revolutions have been able to refine their own strategies. Coercion and oppression, for instance, can be combined with democratic legitimacy as the violent reign of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt has shown. External counter-revolutionary intervention operates through aid and diplomacy as much as through proxy wars and direct military intervention. Equally, the counter-peace ranges from unmitigated forms (for example, wars, dictatorship and military occupation) to the more subtle forms of political stalemate (see next section). Counter-peace processes and counter-revolution both capture the institutions of the state in order to change the tactics of state formation processes.39 Elites and their criminal networks can continue their state formation project without war by controlling state institutions. Corruption and state violence are used in this new phase of the counter-peace and counter-revo- https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000377 Published online by Cambridge University Press lutionary process. Since foreign governments work with and through state structures, this state capture allows aid and the counter-processes to align themselves: Foreign aid that overdevelops the coercive power of the state40 may thus strengthen counter-peace forces. In contemporary Hobsbawm, ‘Revolution’, p. 11. 33 34 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1 (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 92–3. 35 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 18. 36 Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York, NY: Random House, 1965 [orig. pub. 1938]). 37 Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (New York, NY: Palgrave, 1999), pp. 212–13. 38 Andre Gunder Frank and Marta Fuentes, ‘Civil democracy: Social movements in recent world history’, in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds), Transforming the Revolution: Social Movements and the World-System (New Delhi: Aakar Books, 1990); Carne Ross, The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century (London, UK: Schuster & Schuster, 2011); John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: the Meaning of Revolution Today (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2010); Sharon Nepstad, Nonviolent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011); Asef Bayat, Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016). 39 Gëzim Visoka, ‘Everyday peace capture: Nationalism and the dynamics of peace after violent conflict’, Nations and Nationalism, 26:2 (2020), pp. 431–46. 40 Richmond, Failed Statebuilding.  Review of International Studies 7 non-violent revolutions, a similar process occurs, in which external support reinforces the oppres- sive and exclusionary structures of the state.41 As in counter-revolutions, the alliances between domestic and international counter-peace actors and their ability to generate societal support is of crucial importance. Hence, our analysis takes inspiration from scholarship on counter-revolutions by looking into the ideological, socio- economic, and political connections between populations and counter-peace elites. Ideologically, nationalism in counter-peace and traditionalism in counter-revolutions may forge cross-class alli- ances on similar grounds: ‘to reclaim an idealised but imperilled past and present’.42 Yet, in coun- ter-revolutions, divergent ideologies and material interests of the different classes have ultimately resulted in fragile alliances.43 Hence, we will analyse whether the counter-peace shows a similar mix of ideological unity and disunity across its various actors. In order to understand how the counter-peace can be overcome, we can draw on analysis of the defeat of counter-revolutionary alliances. The search for an institutional epicentre of a counter-peace process, for instance, may give us clues about its durability. In revolutions, the collapse of such core institutions has often heralded the fragmentation of the counter-revolution.44 Whether a similar weakness can be detected in the counter-peace will be investigated in this analysis. Empirical manifestations In an attempt to illustrate and elaborate various forms of counter-peace, this section examines three different types of empirical manifestations, ranging from a ‘stalemate pattern’ to a ‘limited counter-peace’ and an ‘unmitigated counter-peace’. Since this article is conceptual, we explore patterns that characterise different types of conflicts. In this exploration, we draw on examples rather than presenting comprehensive case studies to illustrate these categories. While still not at the level of a fully developed case study, the Russia-Ukraine conflict will receive more attention in this article in order to show how conflicts can move across our three counter-peace patterns. Moreover, this conflict highlights the connection between revolutions and conflict and shows that our typology also extends to interstate wars. The presented categories are not exhaustive, but rather a starting point for our examination of how counter-peace is constituted. Drawing on the counter-revolution literature, we will look for the following: (1) an epicentre of the conflict system; (2) the possibility for a broad counter-peace alliance that includes large segments of the population as well as the backing of external actors; and (3) whether peace interventions https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000377 Published online by Cambridge University Press have inadvertently contributed to the counter-peace process. Stalemate pattern This pattern is characterised by frozen conflict, in which violence has been circumscribed but intergroup tensions persist unabated. In the stalemate pattern civil society, international donors and the multilaterals form a weak alliance. The state has been integrated into a peace and devel- opment process and all parties and levels are somewhat interdependent. They are captured by a range of legal, political, economic, and geopolitical codependencies, which are finely balanced but block both progress as well as the collapse of the stalemate. At the heart of this pattern lies a ‘formalised political unsettlement’, through which a war has been ended, but which fails to resolve the radical disagreement between the conflict parties.45 41 Pogodda, ‘Revolutions and the liberal peace’. 42 Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 99. 43 Ibid., pp. 58–9. 44 Ibid., p. 57. 45 Christine Bell and Jan Pospisil, ‘Navigating inclusion in transitions from conflict: The formalised political unsettlement’, Journal of International Development, 29:5 (2017), pp. 576–93.  8 Sandra Pogodda et al. Such unsettlements have managed to end war either through the separation of former conflict parties by continuously contested borders (as in the territorial divisions in Cyprus, Kosovo, India/Pakistan) or through power-sharing agreements (as in BiH, Lebanon, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Burundi). While necessary to stop large-scale violence, ethnic segregation and power-sharing agreements have turned into blockages to reconciliation by reinforcing ethnic or sectarian divisions in society.46 Rather than resolving the conflict, the formalised political unsettlement only translates the war into political institutions, which become deadlocked and thus it perpetuates the radical disagreement between the conflict parties.47 While the conflict parties remain fully committed to their incompatible posi- tions, the conflict appears ‘frozen’ as long as neither attempts resolution through accommodation, withdrawal, or military conquest. In the stalemate pattern, war is replaced by ‘non-violent war’ as an intense power struggle over the new state institutions ensues, in which the conflict parties maintain close alliances with violent forces.48 This dynamic has implicated peacemaking in extended dead- locks (as in Cyprus since 1963,49 or Bosnia since 1995),50 and is perhaps now the norm. This also reflects the limitations of the relationship between peace, self-determination, and sovereignty at a practical level, as well as legacies of imperial history (many frozen peace processes emerged in for- mer colonies and post-socialist states with acute development and economic problems). In continuous disputes over territory, self-governance, sovereignty, rights, and entitlements, peace interventions supply conflict parties with valuable resources: time to reorganise, inter- national legitimacy, alliances, material support, etc. Conflicts in the stalemate category are thus symptomatic of internationally sponsored peace settlements, protracted dependency on external aid and intervention. While this extensive involvement of the IPA might raise hopes for a strong role for civil society and a dynamic peace process, this is not the case. Indeed, the following ana- lysis will identify the stalemate as a product of state capture by counter-peace elites, rendering civil society and international peace interventions unable to move the peace process forward. Power-sharing agreements are supposed to ensure that the interests of all former conflict parties are represented in the political system. Competition between the conflict parties thus moves from the battlefield into the parliament. However, power-sharing institutions encourage mono-ethnic or sectarian political parties, which in turn reinforce identity-based voting pat- terns. The division of power along identity lines turns ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ into gatekeepers of access to political influence.51 This creates fiefdoms for former conflict actors and thus inscribes corruption, clientelism, and patronage into state institutions.52 For example, in Kosovo, corruption among ministers from minority communities was tolerated to preserve https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000377 Published online by Cambridge University Press the multi-ethnic composition of Kosovo’s institutions.53 As a result, the state remains weak and internally divided. Since neoliberalism widens the gap between the beneficiaries of patronage and corruption and the impoverished rest of the population, the political economy of sectarianism or ethno- 46 See, for example, Andreas Mehler, ‘Peace and power sharing in Africa: A not so obvious relationship’, African Affairs, 108:432 (2009), pp. 453–73; Roberto Belloni, ‘Bosnia: Dayton is dead! Long live Dayton!’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 15:3–4 (2009), pp. 355–75. 47 Bell and Pospisil, ‘Navigating inclusion’; Mary Kaldor, ‘How peace agreements undermine the rule of law in new war settings’, Global Policy, 7:2 (2016), pp. 146–55. 48 Phillippe Leroux-Martin, Diplomatic Counterinsurgency: Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 49 See Richmond, ‘Devious objectives and the disputants’ view of international mediation’, pp. 707–22. 50 Belloni, The Rise and Fall of Peacebuilding in the Balkans, p. 73. 51 Stephan Rosiny, ‘A quarter century of “transitory power-sharing”: Lebanon’s unfulfilled Taif Accord of 1989 revisited’, Civil Wars, 19:4 (2015), pp. 485–502. 52 Reinoud Leenders, Spoils of Truce: Corruption in Postwar Lebanon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Bassel F. Salloukh, ‘Taif and the Lebanese State: The political economy of a very sectarian public sector’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 25:1 (2019), pp. 43–60. 53 Gëzim Visoka, Shaping Peace in Kosovo: The Politics of Peacebuilding and Statehood (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).  Review of International Studies 9 nationalism fosters political instability.54 Contributing to the frequency of political crises in power-sharing polities is their veto-mechanism, which discourages compromise and stable cross- identity alliances.55 It allows some groups to block the advancement of the rights of others, while asserting their exclusive political and security agendas. In the resulting antagonistic political fra- meworks, parties have no incentive to reach out, bridge differences and promote reconciliation. Thus, power-sharing arrangements have allowed (ethno-)nationalist elites to co-opt the peace process and inscribe counter-peace processes into state institutions, while subterranean move- ments militarise the public sphere. As Lebanon’s various political crises show, power sharing does not imply responsibility-sharing between former warlords. Between 2014 and 2015, a series of peace negotiations sought to transform Ukraine’s con- flict in the Donbas from war into a political stalemate. The conflict emerged after the elected President Viktor Yanukovych was toppled by the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. Initially peaceful counter-protests in the South and East of Ukraine against the Westward orientation of the new government were militarised by Russia’s infiltration of the Donbas through mili- tants, taking over government buildings and expanding their occupation through warfare.56 In order to de-escalate the conflict, the pro-European national government and the pro-Russian secessionist leaders in Donetsk and Luhansk agreed to share power through decentralisation as laid down in the Minsk I and II agreements. However, since neither side implemented their obligations to demobilise their troops, the conflict never settled into the stalemate pattern. Alternatively, stalemates occur if wars are ended through the establishment of continuously contested borders and ethnic segregation as in Kashmir, Cyprus, and Kosovo. Newly erected borders may terminate hostilities, but freeze rather than resolve the underlying conflict. Border infrastructure formalises a political disagreement between the conflict parties if land claims on both sides continue to contest the territorial integrity of the new entities. In such contexts, uneven international recognition and external geopolitical interventions distort the political playing field between the conflict actors in a way that makes a peace agreement unlikely. Indeed, the conflict party whose sovereignty is recognised might have little incentive to compromise.57 Geopolitical meddling in stalemates tends to distort conflict dynamics and reduce the possi- bility of conflict resolution (as frequently occurred during the Cold War). It might even facilitate a descent into new wars as Russia’s role in the escalation of conflict in Ukraine demonstrates. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000377 Published online by Cambridge University Press After the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, a conflict emerged on different levels:58 between the Euromaidan and anti-Maidan protesters; between local elites in the south/east of Ukraine; between local elites and the new revolutionary government in Kyiv and between Russia and Ukraine. Yet, Russia’s interventions dominated the conflict dynamics. The Kremlin replaced local elites in the Donbas region with pro-Russian militants, conducted covert and overt military interventions and bankrolled the military destabilisation of Ukrainian society. This meddling generated an important shift in the underlying power dynamics. It allowed the Russian-supported militants to establish an unrecognised border between the secessionist oblasts and the rest of the country. Despite the opposition of the majority of local residents to the Russian-led takeover of 54 Salloukh, ‘Taif and the Lebanese State’. 55 Rosiny, ‘A quarter century’; A. McCulloch, ‘The use and abuse of veto rights in power-sharing systems: Northern Ireland’s petition of concern in comparative perspective’, Government and Opposition, 53:4 (2018), p. 735. 56 For a rebuttal of the assumption that the conflict is grounded in local resistance to the economic decline of the affected-regions, see Vlad Mykhnenko, ‘Causes and consequences of the war in Eastern Ukraine: An economic geography perspective’, Europe-Asia Studies, 72:3 (2020), pp. 528–60. 57 William Zartman, ‘The timing of peace initiatives: Hurting stalemates and ripe moments’, The Global Review of Ethnopolitics, 1:1 (2001), pp. 8–18. 58 Tatyana Malyarenko and Stefan Wolff, The Dynamics of Emerging De-Facto States: Eastern Ukraine in the Post-Soviet Space (London, UK: Routledge, 2019).  10 Sandra Pogodda et al. the local government in the spring of 2014,59 Russia’s strategy of escalating hybrid warfare, creep- ing occupation and ever-expanding political demands effectively partitioned Ukraine within a year.60 Yet, in contrast to stalemate contexts such as Cyprus or Kosovo, the erection of border infrastructure, policing and military enforcement only limited the battlefield rather than produ- cing a stalemate. Since Russian President Putin’s larger political ambitions of establishing a ‘New Russia’ were thwarted by continued Ukrainian resistance, he settled for a territorially confined conflict in the Donbas between 2014 and February 2022. Due to Russia’s meddling, Ukraine slid into a limited counter-peace pattern. Once the formalisation of unsettlement in stalemate contexts happens, it becomes persistent.61 Further peace interventions in frozen conflicts often fail to advance the process beyond stabilisa- tion. For instance, while the Dayton Peace Accords envisaged the return of internally displaced people to their homes, hidden strategies of ethnic cleansing have allowed ethno-nationalist actors to create mono-ethnic spaces as a major blockage to peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina.62 This ter- ritorial consolidation of ethnicity has supported the rise of extreme nationalist parties, which fur- ther obstruct inter-ethnic reconciliation.63 The EU’s efforts to effect changes in the nature of the Bosnian state in the accession process and through the European Court of Justice have so far been resisted by the elites who benefit from the stalemate. In other cases (for example, Cyprus and Lebanon), the UN’s long-term commitment to peacekeeping might have helped to prevent a relapse into war. Simultaneous mediation attempts to resolve the conflict in Cyprus, however, have remained blocked by ‘devious objectives’ on both sides since 1964, entangling the UN and EU as well as providing a platform for destabilising forms of regional geopolitics.64 As shown in Figure 1, the last blockage to peace is constituted by ethno-nationalism or sect- arianism. While both types of stalemate situations (power-sharing agreements and ethnic segre- gation) have generated different responses from their populations, both enable counter-peace alliances between the elites and the masses through identity politics. In segregated conflict con- texts, popular support for a formalised political unsettlement can be secured as long as nation- alism or sectarianism constitutes a cultural hegemony.65 In such cases, dissent against the political stalemate only emerges in micro-political initiatives of peace formation, which have not been able to constitute a counterweight to powerful alliances or to undermine mass support for counter-peace elites.66 Hence, civil society demands to include economic, cultural, and social rights in any peace process (as well as gender, reconciliation, justice, and restitution) tend to be easily diverted by counter-peace alliances. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000377 Published online by Cambridge University Press In consociational democracies, alliances between counter-peace elites and large shares of the population are volatile due to the crisis-prone nature of the polities and their failure to satisfy the needs of the population. Indeed, beneath the surface, there might even be revolutionary fer- vour fermenting within societies affected by power-sharing agreements.67 In Bosnia (in 2014) 59 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, ‘Views and Opinions of Southeastern Regions’, Residents of Ukraine (March 2014), available at: {https://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=eng&cat=reports&id=302&page=7}. 60 Tatyana Malyarenko and Stefan Wolff, ‘The logic of competitive influence-seeking: Russia, Ukraine, and the conflict in Donbas’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 34:4 (2018), pp. 191–212. 61 Bell and Pospisil, ‘Navigating inclusion’. 62 Gerard Toal and Carl T. Dahlman, Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and its Reversal (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 246. 63 Florian Bieber, Post-War Bosnia: Governance, Inequality and Public Sector Governance (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 89. 64 Richmond, ‘Devious objectives and the disputants’ view of international mediation’. 65 Gramsci, Hoare, and Nowell-Smith, Prison Notebooks. 66 Oliver Richmond, Peace Formation and Political Order in Conflict Affected Societies (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016). 67