Hintergrundleuchten und kritischer Begriff. Der Friede in den Internationalen Beziehungen. Eine Replik.

The establishment of International Relations as a field of study in part responded to the experience of World War One. Its consolidation and differentiation after World War Two went hand in hand with the entanglement of the incipient discipline with the Cold War. Peace research emerged as a reaction to this development. It established itself as critical research insofar as it was concerned with clarifying the connection between (if not unity of) the East-West and North-South conflicts on the one hand, the deformation of international communication under the conditions of nuclear deterrence and global ideological confrontation on the other. In this context, theory building focused on the concept of peace as a challenge to the dominant understanding of global conflict (for instance as an object of strategic studies). Towards the end of the Cold War, the focus shifted to the interaction between democracy and peace and the possibility of conceptualizing peace as a civilizational process. Debates on peace theory, for some years, were also subsumed under a rapidly blossoming interest in an 'expanded concept of security' in the social sciences. At the same time, the practical promotion of peace (peacebuilding) came to the fore, while theory building on the democratic peace was increasingly confronted with (interventionist) wars by democracies. As a result, the focus of theory building in IR shifted again, now in favor of examining the development of global orders and the significance of norms in this context. This also involved a debate on the limits of 'peace through law' (i.e. the constitutionalization of international law), the justification of force as part of normative ordering in world politics and issues of peace ethics. Can we nevertheless speak of a fading of peace-theoretical interests in IR - even in the face of the escalation of the threat of war? If so, do the ideas presented in this ZIB-Forum present some points of departure for reviving interest in peace theory as part of IR? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]