Conflict Over Peace? The United States’ and Russia’s Diverging Conceptual Approaches to Peace and Conflict Settlement

Abstract

Peace remains a highly contested analytical and political concept. Yet scholarly engagement with the empirical diversity of how states understand peace is strikingly rare. Following the constructivist view of peace as a subjective ontology, we investigate the peace conceptualisations of Russia and the United States as reflected in the contentious discourses at the United Nations Security Council. We seek to reveal whether the political debates reflect the plurality of analytical approaches to peace and study the conflict potentials that arise from clashes between conceptual subject positions. We find substantive divergence in the states’ basic understandings of peace and argue that the investigation of their respective conceptions opens an additional and much-needed perspective on the political discord between the two veto powers.

Notes

1 A notable exception is the edited volume The Palgrave Handbook of Disciplinary and Regional Approaches to Peace, which offers empirical observations on the various peace conceptions in Africa, Southeast and Central Asia, Central and North America, Europe and the Middle East (Richmond et al. 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Evgeniya Bakalova

Evgeniya Bakalova, Research Associate, Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS), Landshuter Str. 4, 93047 Regensburg, Germany. Email: [email protected]

Konstanze Jüngling

Konstanze Jüngling, Head of Migration and Human Rights Department, Academy of the Diocese Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Im Schellenkönig 61, 70184 Stuttgart, Germany. Email: [email protected]