Mark Leonard

For thirty years after the Cold War, the governing assumption of Western statecraft was that connection pacifies. Wire the world together — through trade, finance, the internet, shared institutions — and war becomes too costly to contemplate. Mark Leonard spent the early part of his career as an apostle of exactly that open, connected world. Then he watched it curdle, and became one of its most articulate diagnosticians. His verdict, delivered in The Age of Unpeace, is that the connections meant to bind nations together have instead become both the arena and the arsenal of a new kind of conflict.

He calls the result “unpeace”: an unstable, crisis-prone world of perpetual competition and endless low-level attack, where the line between war and peace dissolves. Sanctions, cyber-operations, weaponised migration, throttled gas supplies, and manipulated information replace tanks and territory. It is not war. But it is not peace either — and Leonard’s achievement was to name the condition and explain why connection itself produces it.

The Network Theorist of European Power¶

Leonard is the co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the first genuinely pan-European think-tank, which he built in 2007 into one of the continent’s most influential foreign-policy institutions. Before that he ran the Foreign Policy Centre, which he founded in his mid-twenties, and directed foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform. His career has been a continuous argument about a single question: what kind of power does an interconnected world reward?

His earlier books trace the arc. Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century (2005) argued that the European Union wields a different and more durable kind of power than the United States — a network rather than a state, transforming countries by drawing them into its legal and normative orbit rather than coercing them. What Does China Think? (2008) mapped the internal intellectual debates of a rising China that most Western observers treated as a monolith. The through-line from the optimistic network-power thesis of 2005 to the dark connectivity thesis of 2021 is the intellectual drama of his career: the same connections he once saw as Europe’s superpower, he came to see as everyone’s vulnerability.

The Age of Unpeace¶

The book’s hinge is a concept Leonard calls the connectivity-security dilemma. The more connected states become, the more exposed each is to the others through the networks they share — so connection itself generates insecurity, suspicion, and a scramble for advantage. The plumbing that was supposed to make conflict unthinkable instead hands every state a set of weapons and a set of vulnerabilities, and the result is a permanent, low-grade struggle conducted through the ties of interdependence themselves.

What makes Leonard distinctive is that he does not stop at the political economy. He reaches for psychology. Drawing on the theory of mimetic rivalry associated with René Girard, he argues that proximity and visibility breed not amity but envy, resentment, and zero-sum comparison — that the more we see of one another, the more we define ourselves against one another. Social media fragments societies into warring micro-tribes; great powers become “mimetic doubles,” each growing more like its rival as it competes, so that the West edges toward the surveillance and statecraft of its adversaries in the very act of opposing them. It is a darker reading of human nature than the liberal optimism it replaced, and a more recognisably realist one: connection does not dissolve the security dilemma, it supercharges it.

Leonard’s catalogue of weaponised connection has become the standard set of examples. Belarus funnelling migrants to the EU’s border to extract concessions. Russia turning off the gas. The dollar and the financial-messaging system weaponised into chokepoints. The internet, in his sharp phrase, “repurposed” — into hyper-capitalism in America, surveillance in China, and a tool of subversion in Russia. Civilians, from the English Channel to the Polish frontier, becoming the unwitting ammunition of a conflict that never declares itself.

The Three Empires of Connectivity¶

One of the book’s most useful contributions is a typology of how the great powers weaponise connection differently — and it doubles as a neat summary of Leonard’s whole worldview. The United States wields instrumental power: it sits astride the chokepoints of the global system — the dollar, the financial-messaging network, the physical internet — and uses its position to surveil and to deny, the gatekeeper’s form of leverage. China wields relational power: it builds dependencies through the Belt and Road and the export of technology and social-control systems, binding others into asymmetric relationships it can later cash in. And the European Union wields normative power: it sets the standards — on privacy, on product safety, on competition — that others must meet to reach its market, the rule-setter’s form of leverage that Leonard had identified two decades earlier in Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century.

The typology matters because it clarifies what kind of contest “unpeace” actually is. It is not a straightforward race for military supremacy but a three-way struggle over different channels of power — finance, dependency, and rules — in which each pole plays to its own strength. And it explains Leonard’s anxiety about Europe: the EU’s normative power is real but passive, exercised through the gravitational pull of its market rather than through any capacity to act. In a world where the other two empires are willing to weaponise their channels aggressively, a Europe that can only set standards risks being a rule-maker with no means of enforcement — which is exactly the gap his strategic-sovereignty agenda is meant to fill.

The European Complement to Weaponized Interdependence¶

Leonard’s work is best read alongside the American scholarship on weaponized interdependence developed by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman. Where they supply the structural mechanics — how control of a network hub confers the power to surveil and to choke — Leonard supplies the broader canvas and the psychology: migration and energy and information as well as finance, and an account of why connection breeds rivalry rather than restraint. They explain the machinery; he explains the motive and the mood. Together they describe the same world from two sides of the Atlantic.

This is also where the sharpest criticism lands. Sceptics argue that “unpeace” is a vivid new label on older furniture — that it repackages hybrid warfare, gray-zone conflict, geoeconomics, and weaponized interdependence without adding a genuinely new mechanism. There is something to the charge, though Leonard’s choice of “unpeace” over “cold war” is itself a useful insistence that this is something below war, not a return to it.

The Engine of European Sovereignty¶

Leonard’s influence runs through institutions as much as books. From the European Council on Foreign Relations he has been a principal architect of the European debate over “strategic sovereignty” — the argument that Europe must recover the capacity to act independently in a weaponised world, not from its member states but from the great powers, China, Russia, and the United States, that would otherwise set the terms. His work with Jeremy Shapiro on strategic sovereignty mapped the domains — defence, sanctions, technology, hybrid threats — in which Europe is exposed, and argued that the answer is not to retreat from connectivity but to build the strength to operate within it.

The logic ties directly back to Unpeace: if the connections that bind the world have become weapons, then a Europe that cannot defend its own networks, payment systems, and supply chains is not sovereign at all. Leonard’s diagnosis and his prescription are two halves of one argument, and together they have shaped how Brussels thinks about its predicament between Washington and Beijing.

The Critics¶

Beyond the “old wine in new bottles” objection, reviewers have found the book’s remedy — “disarming connectivity” through new international rules — thinner than its diagnosis, and ill-suited to the speed of real crises. Leonard, in this reading, is better at naming and dramatising the condition than at curing it; the Girardian psychology is suggestive rather than rigorously proven. And there is a fair charge of Eurocentrism: the book’s gravitational centre is Europe’s anxiety, its typology privileges the European normative model, and its policy payload is European sovereignty — a global disorder framed, in the end, from one continent’s vantage.

Why He Matters¶

Leonard’s gift is for the concept that crystallises a moment. “Unpeace” did for the 2020s what “the end of history” and “the clash of civilisations” did for earlier decades — gave a confused present a name and a frame. He took the structural insight that interdependence had become a weapon and married it to a psychology of rivalry and a programme for European action, producing the most influential European account of why a hyper-connected world feels not safer but perpetually, exhaustingly at war with itself. The realists were right that the security dilemma never went away. Leonard showed how connection made it worse.

Sources & Further Reading¶

• “The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict” (2021) — the book that named the condition. (See Recommended Reading below.)

• “Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century” (2005) and “What Does China Think?” (2008) — his earlier work on network power and on China’s internal debates.

• “Strategic Sovereignty: How Europe Can Regain the Capacity to Act” by Mark Leonard & Jeremy Shapiro (ECFR, 2019) — the blueprint for the European autonomy agenda.

• “The Connectivity War,” Project Syndicate (2021) — his short essay on weaponised migration and unpeace.

• “Mark Leonard’s World in 30 Minutes” (ECFR podcast) — his running commentary on Europe between the great powers.