The (Dis)Order of Things and the Perception of History

Re-reading Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping in its 20^th anniversary is revealing of how history keeps reinventing itself and coming back to haunt us in its different forms and appearances, but it also offers us an opportunity to challenge our linear perceptions of temporality. In many ways, the book was ahead of its time and remained relevant as an exploration of ‘disciplinary liberalism’ as the dominant ideological formation of post-cold war international politics propagated through all sorts of simulations and performances aimed at hiding the formal emptiness, or lack of meaning, of institutions and the ideals they represented. Peacekeeping, as one of those performances of an order, has been constantly re-envisioned and reconfigured throughout the years in desperate attempts to discipline a certain ‘vision’ of the future while avoiding the truth about its impossibility of being. This essay examines some continuities and transformations in the liberal order explored by François Debrix two decades ago while also questioning the quest for order in the world, which will be always limited by a perception of history shaped by events inevitably filtered through our cognition and linguistic structures.