The Seductive Power of Grand Narratives of Peace
By Roland Bleiker
15 September 2025
Context of this Blog
This blog reviews the book Oliver P. Richmond, The Grand Design: The Evolution of the International Peace Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
A version of this blog has appeared as part of a collective discussion of Richmond’s book, edited by Gëzim Visoka and Annika Björkdahl and published open-access in the journal Cooperation and Conflict (online first, 9 September 2025).
Oliver Richmond’s scholarly contributions have become essential to understanding peace in International Relations. His latest book is, in many ways, his magnum opus. It attempts to synthesise decades of knowledge and practical insights to uncover a ‘grand design’ of the various ‘architectures of peace’ that have superseded each other over the past centuries.
Richmond’s effort is bold and ambitious: to identify and analyse large-scale phenomena that have shaped conflict and peace over extended periods of time and across a wide range of geographical, political and cultural spaces. The book’s reach is excpetinally wide.
We are taken on a long journey across a multitude of diverse political events and phenomena, from the Magna Carta to the Treaty of Westphalia, from Rwanda, Cambodia and Afghanistan to Iraq, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Timor Leste. We learn about and from thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Kant, Dante, Rousseau, Nkrumah, Fanon, Gandhi, Clausewitz, Nasser, Marx, Morgenthau and Nehru. We dip in and out of old and contemporary scholarly debates, from everyday and hybrid peace to discussions on relationality and embodiment.
Richmond identifies six historical phases that correspond to six grand peace designs. These are overarching political, social, legal and moral orders that each lasted over decades, sometimes overlapping and intersecting with each other. They include regimes based on realist balance-of-power politics, Westphalian state-state formation, Marxist challenges, decolonisation processes, liberal peacebuilding, neoliberal statebuilding and current phenomena linked to digitalisation, transnational flows, and the advent of the Anthropocene (Richmond, 2022a: 12–14, 196–200, 205–208).
In the Cyprus Green Zone, Nicosia, September 2014. © Roland Bleiker
It is not my task here to summarise and evaluate each of these six grand designs except to say that Richmond discusses them with both panache and nuance. Take, for example, the phenomenon that Richmond (2011) previously analysed in detail: the area described as ‘liberal peace’. Anchored in 17th- and 18th-century European philosophical ideas and numerous subsequent political events, liberal approaches to peace emerged as particularly powerful ways to ward off the dangers of fascism, communism and other forms of authoritarian rule. Ensuing peace formations became intrinsically linked to specific values, including the promotion of the rule of law, democracy, individual human rights, international cooperation and, particularly in its neo-version, market-oriented capitalism.
Richmond offers a nuanced account of the ensuing international peace architecture, one that recognises the progressive nature of liberalism and its ability to bring stability and human rights to a world teetering at the brink of chaos and disintegration. But Richmond also exposes the undersides of liberal peace: how Eurocentric concepts and regimes of power were imposed from above on different cultures around the world, at times with various levels of implicit and explicit force, and all too often leading to structural violence and injustice that, in turn, generated more conflict.
Herein lies the main contribution of this book: the remarkable ability to make sense out of a bewildering array of political phenomena and ideas across centuries. It is the product of a scholar who has not only travelled the world for decades, interviewing peace activists from Kosovo to Timor Leste, but also kept abreast of scholarly debates across a wide range of disciplines.
As a critical reader and thinker, Richmond shows that these grand designs of peace were emancipatory and revolved around collective efforts to ward off conflict and establish order. But these designs were also implicated with vested interests and intertwined with power dynamics that inevitably created new conflicts.
Seoul, South Korea: Protests against the Regime of General Chun Doo-Hwan, June 1987. © Roland Bleiker
The main issues I have been struggling with when reading and engaging The Grand Design have to do with the nature of grand narratives and how to write about them.
Jean-François Lyotard (1979) famously described grand narratives or metanarratives as the kind of overarching frameworks through which societies – and scholars – understand and legitimise knowledge practices, societal norms and political institutions. Lyotard was highly critical of such grand narratives. While often progressive in nature and providing us with a sense of meaning and stability, the ensuing universal frameworks are also oppressive because they inevitably exclude, favouring some perspective and peoples over others (Lyotard, 1979: 63–68).
Richmond describes such grand narratives of peace: overarching architectures that are intended to be modern and progressive in nature.
Richmond, being well-versed in critical literature, is all too aware that such grand narratives inevitably do violence because they exclude those who do not fit into them. He recognises that the grand peace designs he describes are complex and messy and defy the simple stories we tell about them. He writes of “fluid and a fragile palimpsests” (Richmond, 2022a: 11), “multiple and entangled strands” (Richmond, 2022a: 18), “systemic fragility” (Richmond, 2022a: 24) and ‘different stages, layers, and sediment that reflect such instability and fluidity’ (Richmond, 2022a: 24). Richmond (2022a: 8) also makes it clear that most of these grand designs are not just modern but also Eurocentric in nature. He writes of peace architectures that are “heavily biased towards the global North” (Richmond, 2022a: 38). And he explicitly acknowledges a fundamental contradiction: that the need for ‘universal standards’ to secure meaningful human rights is always and inevitably linked to ‘powerful interests’ and the kind of regimes of power that impose and defend those interests against others (Richmond, 2022a: 199).
Richmond’s book is an ambitious endeavour to capture how peace architectures emerged and evolved over centuries. Even equipped with critical and postcolonial sensitivity, Richmond’s ambitious endeavour comes with the type of challenges that all overarching explanations engender. In making sense of the complex world around us, The Grand Design imposes one narrative over many others. It filters facts, phenomena and ideas in a way that reflects a scholar’s conscious and subconscious biases. Richmond’s story, in this sense, is the dominant story of peace, even if narrated from a critical perspective. It is the story of how we have come to understand the search for peace, dominated by significant events from Versailles to Dayton and by powerful and mostly Western and male thinkers, from Kant to Galtung.
If I could wish for more, it would be for extensive counter-narratives of peace: accounts that expose grand designs from the vantage point of those suffering their violent consequences. Such counter-narratives would do what the feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe (1989) has advocated for long: to explore and theorise power relationships not through the grand design and the thinkers that uphold them, but from the position of those at the margins, such as migrant workers.
Peace architectures inevitably look very different from the margins. Richmond (2022a: 19) is well aware of this, acknowledging that we must also look at peace formations “from the perspective of power-relations and from the positionality of the subaltern”. But once we do so the story might be a different one: not one of successive grand peace designs, but of manifestations of colonialism and the imprint they have left on today’s peace architectures. Challenging these legacies of violence and injustice would, in turn, require more than post-colonial critiques. Just as important are decolonial approaches that transcend the epistemological violence upheld by grand designs. Needed, in short, are “pluriversal and interversal paths that disturb the totality from which the universal and the global are most often perceived” (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 2). Needed are approaches that do not start with the archive of Western knowledge, but with different ways of understanding human insights and relations (Smith, 2021).
I am making this point less as a critique of Richmond’s book but more as a suggestion for how to move forward. The Grand Design achieved what it was meant to achieve, and it did so exceptionally well. But the book needs to be read and seen as what it is: a political project aimed at making sense of the Western history of peace architecture and how the ensuing visions and practices have been imposed on the rest of the world. Telling this history is both important and incomplete: important because it exposes how dominant forms of peace have been established and implemented; incomplete because we need more counter-narratives that document the struggle for peace from the vantage point of those who have been left out of the grand design.
References
Enloe C (1989) Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Pandora.
Lyotard J (1979) La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir. Les Editions De Minuit.
Mignolo WD, Walsh C (2018) On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Duke University Press.
Richmond OP (2011) A Post Liberal Peace. Routledge.
Richmond OP (2022a) The Grand Design: The Evolution of the International Peace Architecture. Oxford University Press
Smith LT (2021) Decolonizing Methodologies. Zed Books.
Roland Bleiker is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland.
