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

Communal disputes over local issues such as land use, cattle herding, and access to scarce resources are a leading cause of conflict all over 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. Despite abundant evidence that international peacekeepers limit armed group violence, we know little about their ability to contain more localized forms of violence. Local Peace, International Builders explains the conditions under which international peacekeeping operations promote peaceful interactions between civilian communities in fragile settings. Its central theoretical insight is that civilian perceptions of peacekeepers' impartiality shape their ability to manage local disputes. My argument draws on georeferenced data on the deployment of more than 100,000 peacekeepers to localities across Africa from 1999 to 2019 as well as a multimethod study of peacekeeping in Mali, a West African country with widespread violence managed by peacekeepers. This data includes nearly 50 interviews with local political, religious, and traditional leaders; behavioral games with more than 500 Malians from 14 ethnicities; and surveys of 1,400 civilians. The book highlights a critical pathway through which UN peacekeeping may successfully maintain order in the international system. The findings have clear implications for how we think about foreign interventions---and how they can be better designed in the future to prevent violence in conflict and post-conflict settings.