The Politics of Local Peacemaking

This book project examines how UN peace missions engage with the messy, fragmented realities of local conflict.

While peacekeepers are often deployed to support national peace processes, they increasingly find themselves navigating localized violence between non-state armed groups. This book asks how effective peacekeeping really is at resolving these non-state conflicts, and under what conditions. Focusing on the political work of UN peace operations, the book shows that peacekeeping’s success at the local level depends not only on military tools, but also on its ability to empower local ownership and manage elite instrumentalization. Drawing on original data and fieldwork conducted in Sudan, South Sudan, DRC, CAR, and Mali, it combines quantitative analysis with case studies to uncover when and how peacekeepers can help forge sustainable local peace. By re-centering the “primacy of politics” in UN peace missions to include the local level, this book offers a new lens on what political solutions actually look like on the ground, and how peacekeepers can support them.