Local Peace, International Builders
How UN Peacekeeping Builds Peace from the Bottom Up

Demonstrates how legacies of colonialism shape the effectiveness of international interventions, peacekeeping, and statebuilding in the 21st century.

William G. Nomikos (Author)

9781009432160, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 16 January 2025

218 pages
23 x 15 x 1.2 cm, 0.32 kg

'This work is one of the few that empirically tests the effects of unbiased actions and underlines their importance. The book's findings and conclusion contain clear policy implications, even though it has been almost a decade since the UN authorized a new peacekeeping operation. … Highly recommended.' P. F. Diehl, Choice

Communal disputes over local issues such as land use, cattle herding, and access to scarce resources are a leading cause of conflict across the world. In the coming decades, climate change, forced migration, and violent extremism will exacerbate such disputes in places that are ill equipped to handle them. Local Peace, International Builders examines the conditions under which international interventions mitigate communal violence. The book argues that civilian perceptions of impartiality, driven primarily by the legacies of colonialism, shape interveners' ability to manage local disputes. Drawing on georeferenced data on the deployment of over 100,000 UN peacekeepers to fragile settings in the 21st century as well as a multimethod study of intervention in Mali – where widespread violence is managed by the international community – this book highlights a critical pathway through which interventions can maintain order in the international system. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Part I. Localized Peace Enforcement Theory: 1. Introduction: understanding interventions to stop local-level violence
2. The evolution of local-level UN peacekeeping
3. A micro-level theory of UN peacekeeping
4. Research design: developing empirical tests of the theory
Part II. Applying the Theory to a Case Study-Mali: 5. Introduction to ethnic conflict and international intervention in Mali
6. Individual peace: experimental tests on beliefs about cooperation
7. Communal peace: sub-national tests of escalation dynamics
Part III. Implications for Academics and Policy-Makers: 8. International peace: cross-national tests of impartiality
9. Conclusion: local-level conflict and the future of international intervention.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS]