A materialist reconsideration of international peace practice and its human and non-human constituents

Abstract

The international community's sobering track record of sustainably reducing the number of armed conflicts worldwide, as well as the increasing involvement of non-human complexities in times of climate crisis suggest that current approaches to foster peace are too narrow and inflexible. So far, demands and calls for more flexible and adaptive peace practice made by policy-makers and researchers have not led to a related paradigm shift. In order to contribute to such a change of practice, this article advances a speculative analytical attempt that seeks to conceptually uncover new modes of engaging with the world for the purpose of peace. It builds on Baruch Spinoza's materialism and describes peace as intimately interrelated with the issue of political community. Following Spinoza, the article reconsiders the imaginary of political community as something that is constantly being rearticulated by a contingent complexity of human and non-human actors, and thus transcends the geographic scope of its formal borders as well as its epistemic scope across power hierarchies. Finally, the article introduces the human-non-human multitude as political subject that is able to detect and interpret the constituents of a political community, and therefore to maintain and sustain peace.