In recent years, the United Nations (UN) has increasingly turned towards stabilisation logics in its peace operations, focusing on the extension of state authority in fragile, conflict-prone areas. However, this concept of stabilisation relies upon a series of binaries — formal/informal actors, licit/illicit activities, governed/ungoverned space — which often distort the far more complex power relations in conflict settings. As a result, UN peace operations tend to direct resources towards state institutions and ignore a wide range of non-state entities, many of which are crucial sources of governance and exist at the local and national level. In response, this article places the UN’s stabilisation approach within a recent trend in peace research focused on the hybrid nature of socio-political order in conflict-affected regions, where non-state forms of governance often have significant and legitimate roles. Rather than replicate misleading state/non-state binaries, the article proposes a relational approach and develops a novel analytical framework for analysing a wide range of governance actors in terms of different forms of symbiotic relationships. It then applies this approach to specific examples in Mali and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), demonstrating the highly networked power arrangements present in conflict settings. The article posits that a relational approach would avoid many of the false assumptions at the heart of today’s stabilisation interventions and would instead allow the UN to design more effective, realistic strategies for pursuing sustainable peace in modern conflict settings. It concludes that relationality could be used more generally, including to explain the waning potency of the so-called ‘third wave’ of democratisation.

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联合国稳定行动和非线性变化问题：干预治理生态系统的相关方法

近年来，联合国（UN）在其和平行动中越来越转向稳定逻辑，重点是在脆弱、易发生冲突的地区扩大国家权力。然而，这种稳定概念依赖于一系列二元因素——正式/非正式行为者、合法/非法活动、受治理/不受治理的空间——它们往往会扭曲冲突环境中更为复杂的权力关系。因此，联合国和平行动倾向于将资源用于国家机构，而忽略了范围广泛的非国家实体，其中许多是治理的重要来源，存在于地方和国家层面。作为回应，本文将联合国的稳定方法置于近期和平研究的趋势中，重点关注受冲突影响地区社会政治秩序的混合性质，非国家形式的治理通常具有重要和合法的作用。本文没有复制误导性的国家/非国家二进制文件，而是提出了一种关系方法并开发了一种新颖的分析框架，用于根据不同形式的共生关系分析各种治理参与者。然后将这种方法应用于马里和刚果民主共和国 (DRC) 的具体例子，展示了冲突环境中存在的高度网络化的权力安排。文章认为，关系方法将避免当今稳定干预措施核心的许多错误假设，而是允许联合国设计更有效、更现实的战略，以在现代冲突环境中追求可持续和平。它得出的结论是，可以更普遍地使用关系性，