The liberal peace fallacy: violent neoliberalism and the temporal and spatial traps of state-based approaches to peace

Abstract

The liberal worldview is founded on two interlinked promises: the inherent capacity of markets to deliver prosperity and development globally; and the increased prospects for peace in contexts of inter-state integration along liberal institutional and market lines. This paper takes issue with the latter, now often prescribed as a remedy against the geopolitical instability brought about by unpredictable ‘populist’ leaders. While decades of neoliberal integration have brought nation-states closer together and engendered degrees and forms of inter-state equality within world market capitalism, populations across the world have fallen prey to the violence of markets and growing intra-state inequalities. In such a context, the contemporary rise of nationalism and populisms across the world is not some liberal order antithesis emerging from a vacuum, but rather a logical consequence of this liberal order, constituting an often reactionary ‘counter movement’ that cannot be tackled with prescriptions for increased market globalization. A focus on the everyday forms of violence fomented beyond the inter-state level by processes of marketization demonstrates that neoliberalism’s rescaling of violence and risk from the international stage down to the individual has resulted in the contemporary rise of illiberal politics and, indeed, new prospects for global peace.