Peace can be as disturbing as war when it functions not as an alternative to violence, but as its enabling condition. In the case of Taiwan, the rigid opposition between peace and war has become a discursive technology—one that disciplines public debate while quietly intensifying the very conflict it claims to prevent.
This binary sustains a triangular role structure: victim, protector, and aggressor. Each role derives legitimacy and material benefit from the reproduction of threat. A polity facing internal crises of governance and accountability may inhabit the role of victim, amplifying external danger to consolidate authority at home. Under the banner of national security, dissent can be recoded as disloyalty, and political incompetence reframed as existential vulnerability.
The role of protector thrives on this anxiety. By positioning itself as indispensable to peace, it converts fear into strategic leverage—through arms transfers, economic conditionalities, technological realignments, and the reshaping of investment flows. Peace, in this sense, becomes a profitable industry. The protector does not merely deter war; it manages insecurity.
These two roles are not simply aligned against an aggressor; they are co-constitutive. Their interaction relies on maintaining a credible horizon of catastrophe. Think tanks, media, and academia often provide the interpretive labor required to translate ambiguity into imminence, producing theories of threat that normalize escalation while claiming to avert it. The result is a self-fulfilling dynamic in which the alleged aggressor is gradually compelled to perform the role assigned to it.
Yet the arrangement is riddled with tension. The role-victim tends toward overconfidence, escalating symbolically under the assumption that deterrence has been fully outsourced. The protector, meanwhile, must continuously balance effective signaling against the risk of provocation. Where this line lies is never fixed; it depends on the aggressor’s perceptions, temperament, and tolerance for humiliation. Recent patterns of military exercises and gray-zone actions can be read as efforts to blur the boundary between peace and war, forcing all parties into chronic interpretive uncertainty.
Ironically, this uncertainty drives further escalation. To sustain the perception of threat, the victim and protector intensify their performances—often in each other’s name. Domestically, the success of this strategy depends on how convincingly anxiety can be staged and controlled. When legitimacy erodes, the performance hardens. At extreme levels, the fabrication of vulnerability risks internal fracture, exposing the role-victim as an unstable assemblage rather than a coherent actor.
Such fractures invite intervention by greater powers acting vicariously, collapsing the distinction between peace and war altogether. Preventing conflict over Taiwan therefore requires more than choosing peace over war. It demands confronting how peace itself has been mobilized as a technology of escalation.
Chih-yu Shih (石之瑜) is a distinguished professor at School of Political Science and International Relations, Tongji University, Shanghai.