The idea of complexity outlined in the first chapter provides the theoretical backdrop to the rest of the argument in this book, in particular the position that ‘in a complex world there are no simple binaries’ (Mol and Law 2002: 20). This is a pivotal insight insofar as it unsettles and disrupts many prevalent ideas in democratic discourse, not the least of which is the assumption that democratisation and the inculcation of democratic practice around the world is the forerunner to a reduction in political conflict. Although binaries can help to reduce complexity and thus make it ‘readable’, the resulting knowledge is too often bereft of sufficient intricacy to enable sophisticated political analysis. Complexity theory challenges the binary separation of peace and conflict, for example, or the simple juxtaposition of democracy and political violence in such a way as to undermine the pious promotion of a peaceful, democratic world order. As such, it has fundamental ramifications for the ways in which we understand phenomena such as political unrest, war and terrorism. Moreover, complexity has an important bearing on the ways in which specific disputes are conceived and translated into the paradigm of contemporary democratic debate. It enables problematisation of the dynamics of conflict situations and many of the assumptions about political identities and their interests that underpin understandings of a particular ‘problem’ (Finlayson 2006). Complexity theory is, then, a means of challenging the articulation of contemporary political issues in certain ways that often lend themselves to pious discourses of democracy as the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ that has been identified.