Identity, Resilience and Social Justice: Peace-making for a Neoliberal Global Order

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between peace and structural power by developing a critical framework to understand how the politics of inclusion in peace processes shape and limit the actors included at the negotiating table, and in turn, the politics of peace processes. It argues that the politics of inclusion–or the setting of the boundaries of the ‘political’ in peace processes–is a dynamic interplay between dominant liberal political inclusion and liberal security exclusion narratives of elites, and resistant social justice discourse, which consists of the class politics of redistribution and the identity politics of recognition of social movements and subaltern actors. It argues the structural power of inclusion/exclusion operates to persistently criminalise and exclude class politics, unconventional violent non-state actors and marginalised actors from the political sphere, leaving the material sources of oppression that promote conflict in the neoliberal era to apolitical community mediation to increase resilience.