Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency

Abstract

Complex are intimately related to the liberal peace of global governance.1 They are said to occur at the boundaries of liberal peace, where that regime of power encounters institutions, norms, and practices that violently differ from its own. Global liberal governance does not, however, simply encounter other socalled rogue states such as Iraq, Libya, Serbia, or Iran at the frontiers of the peace that it celebrates. There has been a widely acknowledged weakening and dissolution of the state form in those regions of Africa and Eurasia where are said to arise. That is among the reasons why liberal peace encounters what it calls complex emergencies there. Here, liberal peace finds itself deeply implicated in a terrain of disorder in which some states are powerful, some states are in radical dissolution, traditional societies are collapsing and civil conflict is endemic, where international corporations and criminal cartels are also deeply involved, and where international organizations and nongovernmental organizations are inextricably committed as well.