International Status and Regime Legitimation Beyond the ‘(il)liberal Peace’ Dichotomy: Theorizing 'Authoritarian Peace Entrepreneurship' in the Gulf:

The surging Authoritarian International Order (AIO) is argued to redefine ‘peace’ as violent and amoral, in contrast with the democratic peace traditionally associated with the declining Liberal International Order (LIO) (Richmond 2025). Such dichotomy has shaped much scholarship on the Middle East, which is portrayed as a region where illiberal peacemaking is the consolidating practice for state action (Calculli 2025). Yet small authoritarian countries such as Oman and Kuwait have been able to escape this dichotomy by carving for themselves a reputation of moderate peace-loving actors that has been praised in the liberal world long before the decline of the LIO. By introducing the concept of authoritarian peace entrepreneurship, derived from the literature on small states’ status-seeking strategies as norms entrepreneurs, I argue that these states perform peacefulness as a status-seeking strategy that reinforce the international legitimation of their authoritarian regimes without pressures from liberal actors such as the U.S., the E.U, and the U.N.. Drawing on discourse theory, I treat “peacefulness” as a nodal point (Fairclough 2003) and conduct a systematic analysis of collocations and chains of signification across a large corpus of official documents, statements, and international media (Howarth, Norval & Stavrakakis 2000). I then assess discourse stabilisation across both liberal and illiberal audiences, using an adapted version of the concept of narrative success in terms of pervasiveness and transformativity (Garcés-Mascareñas & Pastore 2025). Ultimately, the paper contends that the dichotomy between “authoritarian” and “liberal” peace is itself a discursive construction that obscures the complexities, ambiguities, and contestations that underlie democratic and authoritarian state-led peace practices alike.