Systemic anxiety and the impasse of peacebuilding

Abstract

Building on recent existentialist contributions to IR and ontological security studies, this article contends that anxiety has become a systemic mood in contemporary international affairs, because of the deepening of uncertainty and the ongoing decay of the liberal international order. This systemic anxiety is generating an impasse in peacebuilding by driving stronger attachment to conflicts as means of suppressing existential uncertainty, generating doubt about the value and attainability of peace, and encouraging enactments of radical and heroic agency often manifest in violence. Nevertheless, these adverse effects of systemic anxiety can be mitigated by highlighting the insignificance of conflict in the context of more fundamental uncertainties, enhancing the stability of peace as a system of meaning, and re-associating peacebuilding with the values of autonomy, heroism, and radical agency.