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Peace interventions may engender their own kind of violence, as this book has argued. Not only do they institutionalize some forms of physical, material and structural violence enacted by conflicting parties (see Keen, 2000), but they may also embody forms of violence in their underlying logic and the means by which they are realized. In  Chapter 1, I framed peace interventions as a confrontation between different forms of world-building, of which specific models of peace and many kinds of conflictual praxis are examples. Peace interventions tend to deny the validity or worth of conflictual modes of world-building and impose their own forms upon perceived areas of "conflict". I then explored the meaning of the term "radical" and restored the complex ambiguity of the idea of the radical and in particular, "radical violence". The latter, I argued, refers not only to the kind of extremist violence which many of the acts of "dissidents' and paramilitary groups discussed here may enact. It may also be used to discuss violence against the radical sources of conflicting groups, or indeed, against conflictual forms of world-building. Transformative peace interventions, which literally attempt to remove the "roots' of conflict, may promote this kind of radical violence. In  Chapter 2, I explored how this approach is underpinned by a misconception about conflict and violence: that the former causes the latter, and that conflict left unattended – or rather, un-transformed – necessarily leads to violence. Here, I posed an alternative hypothesis: that conflictual practices may help to constitute and maintain "threatworks", the phenomena through which groups confront, resist and manage radical threats to them. When these threat-works are breached, or indeed eradicated – whether directly, indirectly, or through the "entropic" damage caused by some transformative processes – physical or material forms of violence are most likely to occur. To make this argument, I developed Arendt's (1965) statement that violence is the opposite of action, claiming that violence occurs when it is impossible to act against a threat to one's world. In  Chapter 4, I illustrated how the ethos of transformative peace interventions, driven by a powerful processual logic, may promote forms of radical threat and, in some cases, violence, that remain invisible until they reach the point of physical or material violence.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230297739_9

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