On the ‘Greats’ and Peace: Part 1: Towards an International Peace Architecture

International relations theory, with a few honourable exceptions, has generally avoided drawing attention to the biases of the ‘Greats’ and their contributions on the politics of social order, change, and progress within the state or the international system. Yet, they have been deeply–and somewhat problematically–influential in providing the basis for a contemporary ‘international peace architecture’ (IPA). The limitations of the ‘Greats’ help explain its conceptual and practical instability, as the following essay outlines. Work on the state, international system, justice and rights, and intervention, did not anticipate the limited scope of such concepts and have themselves become sources of instability ‘after liberalism’.