Rethinking Peace, Conflict, and the Post-Liberal Order

• The global landscape of peace and conflict has undergone significant transformation, with the erosion of post–Cold War principles such as multilateralism, legal norms, and rights-based peacebuilding. Contemporary conflicts, including the war on Gaza, highlight the limitations of liberal peace frameworks and reflect a shift toward securitisation, geopolitical bargaining, and conflict management rather than resolution.

   

  Today’s conflicts are increasingly shaped by complex and overlapping factors, including regional power competition, identity politics, and digital mobilization, blurring traditional distinctions between war and peace. As a result, conflicts have become more protracted and difficult to resolve, while peace is often maintained through containment and informal mechanisms.

   

  This short course provides participants with a structured and accessible framework to understand these evolving dynamics. It equips students with critical analytical skills to interpret contemporary conflicts, apply global insights to regional and local contexts such as Sri Lanka, and engage more effectively in academic, professional, and policy-oriented discussions on peace and conflict in the post-liberal era.

Anyone who wants to interpret contemporary conflicts and engage more effectively in discussions on peace and conflict in the post-liberal era.

open to anyone

Andrea Novellis holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Milan. He is currently Civil War Paths Fellow at the Centre for the Comparative Study of Civil War, University of York, and a Fellow at ITALIM (Italy and the Politics of Food Security), University of Naples L’Orientale. His research examines rebel governance, wartime and post-war party transformation, and the ideological trajectories of armed movements, with a regional focus on the Kurdish regions and Sri Lanka. His broader research interests include early warning systems, crisis anticipation, and the political economy of conflict.

His recent publications include “The Divided Self: How Ideological Compartmentalization Drives Rebel-to-Party Success in Sri Lanka” (Democratization, 2026) and “Programmatic Incompatibility: Ideology, Trust, and the Limits of Rebel Cooperation among Syria’s Kurdish Actors” (Civil Wars, forthcoming)