The Fiction of Global Peace
Dr Salomé Molina Torres, Lacito, USN, Université de Lille
During the World Economic Forum in Davos (January 2026), Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Corney stated: “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. […] This fiction was useful […] So, […] we participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.”
Only one month later, a Colombian right’s defender said at the Forum for [Colombian] Peace in Paris (February 2026): “Peace cannot be dictated […] Peace negotiations are necessary but insufficient legal frames; participation of society is also needed […] Local armed conflicts need to be linked to a global analysis of the current world”.
At first glance, these two events had nothing in common. They did not share the same public, nor the same agenda: the first one hosted world leaders from different Nation-states and was internationally broadcasted; the second one was a local event where Colombian activists spoke about their national challenges to fellow migrant citizens. Yet, from very different perspectives, the utterances above shared a concern for world peace and international order at a time where the global rise of far-right movements have weakened international institutions capacity to guarantee world peace. Whereas Colombian activists seem to believe in a global peace project, Corney calls this a “fiction”. Even though both agree that the institutional rules do not work without the support of a constant micro-practices of individuals, not all seem to consider this order worth maintaining anymore.
In this presentation, I want to ask how the “fiction” of peace is maintained internationally. I consider the term “fiction” as a thinking tool for questioning not only the historical and discursive conditions that allow us to imagine peace, since the end of the Twentieth Century (when international institutions of justice are stabilized), but also the conditions that have led to the contestation of that same order. The “fiction” is no less than the instituted practiced by which local conflicts are regulated to maintain a supposed peace order. This instituted practiced is not true by itself but rather, in Foucauldian terms (1984), accepted as true in specific historical conditions. This leads to two questions: how is peace understood in this “fiction”? And how does it capture such opposed affects?
The starting point of my reflection is the recent institutionalization of Colombian peace since 2016’s Peace Agreement (Molina Torres 2024): an interesting “case” (Passeron et Revel 2005) not because of its political particularities, but precisely because the justice and peace device implemented there is founded on the legal and ideological principles advocated by international institutions as the UN. My working hypothesis is that local peace devices, as Colombian’s one, are a practice for maintaining the “fiction” of peace. Peace will be understood here as a “praxème” (Lafont 2004) whose meaning and value are under constant “social constriction” (Lafont 1978). As the praxème circulates from international texts to local texts (as the Peace Agreement), its definition is constrained, actualized and contested.
Bio: Salome holds a PhD in Linguistic Anthropology and is currently a linguistic teacher at Université de Lille. Her research explores forms of political participation in democratic regimes and in migratory contexts, as well as listening as a form of political agency.