Dr Gearoid Millar has published his latest article, 'Ambition and ambivalence: Reconsidering positive peace as a trans-scalar peace system', in the Journal of Peace Research.
In his fourth piece for the journal, he looks back on the discourse of positive peace between 1970-2020, and traces the shift towards an ambivalent perspective as scholars discover that the existing theories, policies and practices have failed to support positive peace.
"These manifest failures, and the tendency of interventions to lead (at best) to continuing latent and (at worst) to further overt conflict, have led to a great amount of ambivalence in contemporary PCS, perhaps most evident in the subfield of IR often labelled ‘critical peacebuilding’."
With a nod to current global instabilities and uncertainties, Millar recommends that peace and conflict studies must build on the lessons of the local turn to progress with 'genuinely global aspirations', while rethinking positive peace as a trans-scalar peace system.
To read the full article, visit the latest volume of the Journal of Peace Research, here.