Peace is central to liberalism. It is reported that Adam Smith said, “Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.” Over a century and a half later, Ludwig von Mises noted that “Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things.” Given its importance to the liberal project, it makes sense to ask: What is the source of peace? This article considers two alternatives; each offers a different understanding of what constitutes peace and a different path to achieving it.[1]
Peacemaking is often understood as a top-down phenomenon: Peace, defined as the absence of large-scale violence, results from state action. Consider the frequently used terms Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, and Pax Americana, which refer to periods of peace, understood as the absence of widespread violence, attributed to economic and military dominance by hegemonic states. From this perspective, peace cannot exist without a sufficiently strong state capable of projecting its influence. I call this view pax imperii (“peace of government”) because it holds that peace and order come from top-down design, intervention, and control by state actors.
A second view emphasizes peacemaking as a bottom-up process. This perspective recognizes that peace is not a one-size-fits-all policy or outcome, but rather an emergent result of exercising diverse micro-level skills. Peace, in this view, must be continually discovered, cultivated, and adapted over time. This view also elevates the individual over the state as the central source of peacemaking. It emphasizes cooperative power through horizontal relationships among equals, rather than the coercive power through vertical relationships that defines top-down peacemaking. It recognizes heterogeneous cultures of peace that empower ordinary people to navigate conflicts without resorting to violence. I call this second view pax hominum (“peace of human beings”) to emphasize that this view centers ordinary people as the main drivers of peacemaking.
But what exactly is peace? Conceptually, we can differentiate between “positive peace”—the conditions, factors, and processes that contribute to peace—and “negative peace”—the absence of violence. As the economist and peace activist Kenneth Boulding noted, “On the positive side, peace signifies a condition of good management, orderly resolution of conflict, harmony associated with mature relationships, gentleness, and love. On the negative side, it is conceived as the absence of something—the absence of turmoil, tension, conflict, and war.” My discussions of pax imperiii and pax hominum will consider both of these dimensions of peace, top-down and bottom-up. Neither can ultimately stand well in isolation.
Pax Imperii
A Hobbesian image of the world inspires this view of peacemaking. The international order is in a state of anarchy, with life for a nation-state being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” For Hobbes, the solution to the state of nature in a single country is Leviathan, a sovereign capable of exerting authority over society’s members. Pax Imperii develops this analogy to international relations. By emphasizing Leviathan as the key source of social order, this view is inherently state-centric. Governments are the fundamental unit of analysis and are assumed to be the primary source of peace and order, both domestically and internationally. Violence and disorder are due to the absence of Leviathan, while peace and order are a result of its presence.
For those who hold this view, the logic applies both domestically and internationally. In his argument for liberal empire, economist Deepak Lal argued that “The definition of order is congenial to an economist, for it deals with the provision of the pure public goods of defense and law, the primary function and duty of every state … The goal of an international order is to preserve the peace. This is an international public good…” It’s standard in economics to say that public goods may be undersupplied absent state intervention. Underlying Lal’s argument is the assumption that a dominant nation-state is not only necessary to bring liberal peace and order to the world, but also possesses the knowledge and incentives to do so.
Similar reasoning appears in contemporary development economics, which views the international community—a mix of government agencies and international organizations entangled with non-governmental organizations and private contractors—as indispensable to creating peace and economic development, also in a top-down manner. Political scientist Séverine Autesserre describes the international community’s dominant approach to peacemaking as “a formulaic, top-down, outsider-led approach.” One consequence is that homogenized expert knowledge replaces local knowledge and decisionmaking. This poses a challenge because, as sociologist Elise Boulding noted, “As societies become more complex and elites become differentiated from ‘common people,’ center-periphery problems based on mutual ignorance develop. Elites not only cease to share locally based knowledge but cease to literally share a common language with locals.” This prevents local peacemaking processes from emerging, while running the risk of imposing ineffective, if not harmful, “solutions” from above.
There are two additional concerns for liberals. One is that top-down efforts to achieve liberal ends may involve embracing illiberal means. For example, Patrick Porter, a political scientist, argues that the post–World War II, U.S.-led international order has not been as liberal as some suggest. “Even America’s most glorious achievements—with liberal ‘ends,’” he writes, “were not clean pluses on a balance sheet, made by liberal ‘means’. They relied on a preponderance of power, a preponderance that has brutal foundations. America’s most beneficial achievements were partly wrought by illiberal means, through dark deals, harsh coercion and wars gone wrong that killed millions.” The tension is that adopting illiberal means to pursue potentially liberal ends threatens the liberal project from the start.
Another concern is that a government capable of influencing the global order requires an expansive and awesome range of discretionary powers over both domestic and foreign economic, legal, political, and social institutions and, hence, the people living within them. These awesome powers place severe pressure on both the formal constitutional constraints and the informal norms intended to constrain government. Activities undertaken in the name of promoting peace to protect and reinforce liberty and freedom may do just the opposite. A narrow focus on top-down peace minimizes these issues and the importance of alternative views of peacemaking, such as pax hominum.
Pax hominum
The importance of bottom-up peace, though, is evident in the empirics of everyday life. If one pays attention, one sees large numbers of people from different backgrounds, experiences, and identities living in a wide variety of geographic locations, interacting peacefully and resolving conflicts without resorting to violence. These diverse forms of peacemaking are often bottom-up and not planned or imposed by an outside expert or authority.
To understand this phenomenon, we can again turn to Kenneth Boulding, who noted that human activity can be split into two categories: non-conflict situations, where interests align, and conflict situations, where interests are at odds, and the distribution of resources matters for the parties. Conflict situations can be resolved peacefully or through violence. The boundary between violence and peace is a “taboo line,” which delineates those actions that are physically possible but deemed unacceptable in dealing with other human beings.
The position of the taboo line shapes what parties to the conflict view as feasible reactions. Formal laws can influence the taboo line, but informal norms, expectations, and historical experiences also play a central role. This line, which is not fixed, determines whether people are more inclined to turn to peaceful or violent means to navigate conflicts; it reflects what is considered acceptable behavior and shapes expectations about how others will act in conflict situations. This matters because even when we have the physical capacity to do violence to others, we often refrain from doing so because it falls outside of what is considered an appropriate response. This framing of conflict, peace, and violence applies to all human actions, whether private or public, domestic or international.
Recognizing this basic point—that each of us is involved in numerous conflicts daily—opens the door to appreciating bottom-up peacemaking. Each of us is involved in numerous arenas of human relations. We are members of family and friend networks, engage in a wide array of business interactions, and participate in various community and political organizations. Each of these settings is unique, both in the types of conflict that arise and in the means of conflict resolution judged appropriate and effective. What works for resolving international conflict peacefully may not work in your workplace. Likewise, what works to resolve conflict in my family may not work in yours. This has two important implications for how we think about peace.
First, there is no single “peace” that is homogeneous and all-encompassing. Instead, numerous and diverse “cultures of peace” allow people to navigate context-specific conflicts across the social spaces they inhabit. Peace techniques that work in one’s family may not work with co-workers or with trading partners. Second, cultures of peace are not exogenously given and fixed; rather, they are endogenous and variable. Elise Boulding used the term “peaceableness” to refer to the active, evolving process by which individuals discover, practice, and promote methods of peace in their daily lives. The term suggests that people have agency to exercise creativity and continually reshape their environments to foster either nonviolence or violence.
Because it is grounded in individual action, bottom-up peace starts locally. But that doesn’t mean that its effects remain local. Roger Mac Ginty, a political scientist, emphasizes that everyday peace actions can be scaled up to contribute to larger-scale peace. As he notes, “Cumulative small acts often can have larger outcomes in terms of preventing conflicts from escalating and in saving or protecting lives. By disrupting the narrative and logic of conflict, small acts of everyday peace can create space for civility, reciprocity, solidarity, and possibly more expansive concepts such as reconciliation.” To understand why this is important, consider two settings where individual behaviors have broader effects.
One is markets—interactions between people we categorize as “buyers” and “sellers”—which serve as an environment for bottom-up peacemaking. Entrepreneurs contribute to peacemaking by offering people space to acquire what they desire peacefully, by establishing commercial links across social and geographic distances, and by cultivating and reinforcing habits of peacefulness. What are often treated as mundane economic interactions and exchanges establish, reinforce, and extend cultures of peace between participants as part of the broader emergent order of the market process. The bottom-up peacemaking aspect of markets is easy to miss if one focuses on market structure, production, efficiency, and distribution rather than on the human-relationship component.
Another example is the global nuclear disarmament movement that emerged in the wake of the U.S. government’s atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The historian Lawrence Wittner argues that nuclear deterrence alone cannot explain why nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945. He points to the rise of the nuclear disarmament movement as an important source of pressure on political elites, contributing to peace in the nuclear era. The global disarmament movement is bottom-up: it comprises people from different backgrounds, professions, ideologies, and organizations, with distinct missions and goals, loosely coordinated around a shared aim of preventing nuclear war. No central entity plans and coordinates the movement as a whole, whether within or across countries. This movement shows how bottom-up dynamics can contribute to peace on a large international scale, without top-down design. It is easy to miss this if one focuses exclusively on standard deterrence theory, grounded in the actions of nation-states, as the source of peace.
Conclusion
Economist James Buchanan concluded his Nobel Prize address by posing the following question—“How can we live together in peace, prosperity, and harmony, while retaining our liberties as autonomous individuals who can, and must, create our own values?” If we hope to answer this question, we need a more nuanced conception of what peace and peacemaking entail.
The pax imperii view treats peace as a top-down object of choice. From this perspective, peace is a public good presumed to be undersupplied because of a collective action problem among individuals. With government presumed to be the corrective, this formulation of peace results in technocratic experts instructing political operatives on how to “fix” societies by delivering more of the right sort of peace. This both invites and necessitates top-down, technocratic control.
The pax hominum view, in contrast, treats peacemaking as a bottom-up, open-ended process spanning multiple margins of human activity. It emphasizes individual choice, diversity in human associations, creativity, experimentation, learning, and adaptation through time. It also stresses discovery and emergence, whereby cultures of peace arise through the purposeful actions of people pursuing their specific goals through interactions with others. Pax hominum locates the power of peacemaking in ordinary people who interact with others to figure things out, rather than in external actors who impose their vision of the world.
To be clear, pax hominum is not a panacea. Bottom-up processes may fail to avert violence or may themselves lead to coercive, illiberal outcomes. I also recognize that aspects of bottom-up and top-down peace can interact and, in some instances, potentially serve as complements. But emphasis matters, and the focus so far has often been on the state’s role in creating and maintaining peace in a top-down manner. Bottom-up peace offers the possibility of achieving liberal ends through liberal means. Top-down peacemaking efforts, by contrast, risk achieving liberal ends through illiberal means, thereby undermining the liberal project.
Appreciating pax hominum is valuable for three reasons. First, given the ubiquity of bottom-up peacemaking across time and geography, it matters for understanding the world as it is, regardless of one’s normative commitments. Second, for those concerned with the liberal project, understanding bottom-up peacemaking is important because it contrasts with the illiberalism of top-down peacemaking. Finally, appreciating the nuances of bottom-up peacemaking has implications for how scholars think about their role as students of society. If bottom-up cultures of peace are important, then ordinary people need elbow room to exercise and develop their self-governing muscles.
Perhaps, then, the focus of scholars and practitioners should not be on how they think they might bring peace to the world through top-down state planning and control. That approach, noted F.A. Hayek, will make the practitioner “a tyrant over his fellows.” Instead, we might focus on finding opportunities to remove barriers and empower ordinary people to participate in bottom-up peacemaking in our shared pursuit of peace.
Note
[1] This article draws on “Peacemaking: Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up,” Markets & Society, forthcoming, and the associated keynote address at the 2023 Markets and Society Conference.
