Towards an Ecology of Peace as a Political Topology after the End of History

Abstract

The post-Cold War promise of liberal democracy as history’s endpoint has collapsed. Illiberalism has resurged globally, while both liberal and illiberal peacebuilding strategies have repeatedly failed to prevent societies from relapsing into armed conflict. This paper argues that both approaches share a fundamental flaw rooted in their underlying political topology representing the conceptual framework through which space, power, and actors are perceived and prioritized in political interventions. Grounded in universalist, state-centric, and Eurocentric assumptions, both liberal and illiberal peace strategies enact epistemic violence: imposing external knowledge systems that erase, delegitimize, and silence local ways of knowing and being, thereby systematically misrepresenting the lived realities of post-conflict actors and preparing the ground for renewed violence. To move beyond this impasse, the paper proposes an ecology of peace as an alternative political topology. Rejecting universalist reductionism, it embraces relational ontologies that recognize the vast diversity of human and non-human relationships, positionalities, and cosmologies as constitutive foundations for sustainable peacebuilding interventions.