Peace, when described in the language of institutions, is often framed as an architectural project: build the right frameworks, enforce rules, align incentives, and stability will follow. There is truth here—institutions provide scaffolding for cooperation, absorbing shocks that might otherwise fracture societies. Yet beneath this architecture lies a deeper symmetry. Both democracies and autocracies rely on the continual play of variance—forces pulling in different directions that, paradoxically, sustain coherence. Autocracies externalise variance, fabricating threats to unify their grip while fostering internal fractures to justify control. Democracies embed variance in contestation, designing rules that allow difference to circulate rather than rupture. What looks on the surface like opposition—protection versus domination—is, at the systemic level, a shared reliance on relational invariance under transformation. Peace, in this light, is not the absence of opposition but the managed persistence of adaptive variance, where forms survive only by never fixing themselves too rigidly.
This is why the notion of static peace is misleading: to freeze variance is to extinguish the very dynamics that make survival possible. Identities persist not through closure but through boundaries that flex, defined by the inverses that press against them. Continuity is not resolution but circulation, a recursive movement of forces sustaining form by refusing stasis. The patterns here are topological, not moral: invariant across regimes, resilient because they transform while relation endures. This does not equate democracy and autocracy; it shows that both depend on the same systemic dynamics—only that democracy, at its best, adapts variance into openness rather than repression. Peace is thus metastable: a probabilistic field where stability is provisional, held by interplay of frequencies rather than the illusion of finality. To see this is to recognise that the real task is not to perfect form but to engage the flows—an unsettling demand, yet the only one equal to the scale of the problems before us.
Adam Day (Head of Programs at United Nations University Centre for Policy Research) argues that much contemporary peacebuilding treats conflict systems like elaborate Rube Goldberg machines—linear chains of institutional levers and policy switches, where the right sequence of procedures is expected to generate stability. His book, The Forever Crisis: Adaptive Global Governance for an Era of Accelerating Complexity (Routledge, 2024), shows how this approach rarely resolves underlying problems and often amplifies them, producing perverse incentives that deepen fragility. By treating language as a spell that can conjure peace if uttered correctly, the field risks mistaking description for transformation, building constructs too fragile to withstand their own assumptions.
This is precisely why institutions and their language matter. If institutions, whether democratic or autocratic, are sustained by relational variance rather than static form, their survival depends not on mechanical fixes but on engaging the deeper flows of meaning that structure human systems. Identities endure through adaptive variance; boundaries are defined by their inverses; continuity arises not from resolution but from circulation. Language is therefore not cosmetic—it is constitutive of the realities institutions claim to govern. Peace cannot be manufactured by linear scripts; it must be cultivated as a metastable pattern, resilient only in its capacity to transform while holding relation intact. Few will want to hear this. Yet it suggests that language itself, understood not as instrument but as systemic medium, is the terrain on which peace either collapses or survives. Here, if anywhere, the work must begin.
Daedelus Kite 