This paper assesses the discursive environment of post-conflict intervention as a prism through which to view the international politics of the post-Cold War era. I argue that the `liberal peace' is not a single discourse but a tripartite international discursive environment that dynamically reproduces technical solutions which fail to address the core issues of conflict in a given place. The paper starts from the assumption that over the last twenty years we have seen a shift from an understanding of peace as a state of affairs in a given territory (as explored by Michael Banks in a 1987 paper) to peace as a process of post-conflict intervention; a move from peace to peacebuilding. This `liberal peace' sets a standard by which `failed states' and `bad civil societies' are judged according to ethical, spatial and temporal markers. However, the apparent homogeneity of the model obscures the divisions and mergers which characterise the scholarship and practice of international peacebuilding. The boundaries of the peace debate remain; the political differences latent in Banks' three conceptions are retained in the evolving discourses of democratic peacebuilding, civil society and statebuilding. The paper shows how these three basic discourses are reproduced in international policy analyses and major academic works. Moreover, the discursive mediation of their differences is the dynamic by which the liberal peace is sustained, despite its detachment from the lived experiences of post-conflict environments. It is in this sense that we can comprehend international peacebuilding as a virtual phenomenon, maintained in the verbal and visual representations of international organisations, diplomats and academic policy-practitioners. In light of this disaggregation of the discursive environment, a better, more nuanced understanding of the liberal peace can be attained: one that is able to grasp how critics and criticisms become incorporated into that which they seek to critique. The paper concludes with three propositions regarding the nature of world order in the era of the tripartite `liberal peace'. During this time coercion, military force and even warfare have become standard and legitimate features of peacefare. The discursive dynamics of international peacebuilding illustrate how peace has become ever more elusive in contemporary international politics.

In a contested international order, ideas of liberal peacebuilding are being supplanted by state-centric, authoritarian responses to internal armed conflicts. In this article we suggest that existing research has not yet sufficiently recognised this important shift in conflict management practice. Scholarship in peace and conflict studies has avoided hard cases of ‘illiberal peace’, or categorises them simply as military victories. Drawing on accounts of state responses to conflicts in Russia, Sri Lanka, China, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Turkey, we develop an alternative conceptual framework to understand authoritarian conflict management as a form of wartime and post-conflict order in its own right. Although violence is central to these orders, we argue that they are also dependent on a much wider range of authoritarian policy responses, which we categorise in three major domains: firstly, discourse (state propaganda, information control and knowledge production); secondly, spatial politics (both military and civilian modes of controlling and shaping spaces); and thirdly, political economy (the hierarchical distribution of resources to produce particular political outcomes). In conclusion, we propose a research agenda that moves on from discussions of liberal peace to examine hard cases of contemporary conflict and conflict management.

Despite the ubiquity of conspiracy theories in the former Soviet Union, there is an almost total lack of systematic research on the issue. The relative absence of writing about conspiracy theories in Russia and the former Soviet Union is noteworthy as, since the Tsarist era, conspiracy theories have found fertile ground across the Russian empire and indeed the Soviet Union, and they continue to abound during in the post‐Soviet space. Perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to say that anyone recently doing social science or humanities research on the region will have come across conspiracy theories as a form of historical analysis or artistic expression, as has recently been explored with regard to the novels of Andrei Pelevin. The phenomenon seems to operate in fictional and nonfictional accounts both on the level of popular narratives and, in the case of Russia and some regional governments, in the official discourses of state power. Some of the reasons for the rise in popularity of conspiracy theories in the post‐Soviet era will be explored below. In fact, this introductory article serves a dual purpose: both to discuss the theoretical implications of analyzing conspiracy theories in the post‐Soviet space and to sketch out a research agenda for what is a largely unexplored field. The latter demands that we attend to questions of what might be specific and especially significant about conspiracy theories in the post‐Soviet space, and how the post‐Soviet type adds to the emergence of a field of conspiracy theory studies which seeks to understand this apparently increasingly prominent feature of the post‐modern world.

Kleptocracy and grand corruption are now under scrutiny as never before. With renewed global attention on these abuses, a relatively clear picture has emerged of the domestic political economies shaped by kleptocratic rule. Analysts have shown how state institutions are set up to allow elites and their families to systematically loot, while protecting these elites politically. In particular, this research has placed under the microscope the resource-rich countries that are vulnerable to kleptocratic state capture.Yet to understand the operations of today's jet-setting kleptocrats, one must look beyond the borders of the polities they despoil. Copious news items feature kleptocrats and their families purchasing luxurious penthouses and cars; attending international cultural galas and charitable initiatives; and enlisting Western agents, lawyers, spokespeople, and pillars of the establishment to whitewash their reputations. Watchdogs and policy makers are beginning to turn their attention to the wide range of kleptocratic activity that takes place in the West itself 1 -whether this entails Equatorial Guinea's vice-president standing trial in France for corruption, the former president of Uzbekistan's daughter facing investigations for money laundering in a half-dozen countries, or the Malaysian prime minister under suspicion in connection with the diversion of more than US$4.5 billion from his country's sovereign wealth fund into personal bank accounts around the world. Conceptual analysis explaining how these pieces fit together, however, remains scarce.Kleptocrats do not just transform their polities in order to system-

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