This book analyses the role of legitimacy in explaining local actors’ compliance with international peacebuilding operations. The book provides a comparative, micro-level study of local actors’ reasons for compliance with or resistance to international peacebuilding. Specifically, it analyses three pathways to compliance –legitimacy, coercion, and reward-seeking – to explore local police officers’ compliance with the reforms stipulated by the EU Police Mission in Bosnia and the EU Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo. The work constructs a holistic framework of the mechanisms connecting each pathway to compliance and measures legitimacy using micro-level indicators. This study not only shines light on the question why local actors comply, a crucial factor in mission effectiveness, but it also illuminates exactly how compliance works. The book contributes nuanced evidence about the often-heralded importance of legitimacy in peacebuilding, showing exactly in which situations local legitimacy matters and in which it does not. It is also highly relevant for policy-makers as it unpacks and explains the mechanisms behind local legitimacy, assisting in understanding this usually nebulous concept. This book demonstrates the need for micro-level analysis by revealing the relevant processes of legitimation usually hidden behind commonly perceived social fault lines, such as the Serb-Albanian divide in Kosovo. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, war and conflict studies, Balkans politics, security studies and International Relations.

This volume searches for pragmatic answers to the problems that continue to beset peacebuilding efforts at all levels of society, with a singular focus on the role of legitimacy. Many peacebuilding efforts are hampered by their inability to gain the support of those they are trying to help at the local level, or those at regional, national or international levels; whose support is necessary either for success at the local level or to translate local successes to wider arenas. There is no one agreed-upon reason for the difficulty in translating peacebuilding from one arena of action to another, but among those elements that have been studied, one that appears understudied or assumed to be unimportant, is the role of legitimacy. Many questions can be asked about legitimacy as a concept, and this volume addresses these questions through multiple case studies which examine legitimacy at local, regional, national and international levels, as well as looking at how legitimacy at one level either translates or fails to translate at other levels, in order to correlate the level of legitimacy with the success or failure of peacebuilding projects and programs The value of this work lies both in the breadth of the cases and the singular focus on the role of legitimacy in peacebuilding. By focusing on this concept this volume represents an attempt to build beyond the critical peacebuilding approach of deconstructing the liberal peacebuilding paradigm to a search for pragmatic answers to the problems that continue to plague peacebuilding efforts at all levels of society. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, development studies, security studies and International Relations.

* Looks at the ways people have used sanctuary throughout history and in present-day conflicts to avoid or challenge violence * Authors with practical experience in peace zones throughout Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America The notion of having sanctuary from violence or threat has probably existed as long as conflict itself. Whether people seek safety in a designated location, such as a church or hospital or over a regional border, or whether their professions or life situations (doctors, children) allow them, at least in theory, to avoid injury in war, sanctuary has served as a powerful symbol of non-violence. The authors of this collection examine sanctuary as it relates to historical and modern conflicts from the Philippines to Colombia and Sudan. They chart the formation and evolution of these varied "zones of peace" and attempt to arrive at a "theory of sanctuary" that might allow for new and useful peacebuilding strategies. This book makes a significant contribution to the field of conflict resolution, using case studies to highlight efforts made by local people to achieve safety and democracy amid and following violent civil wars. The authors ground the emerging interest in sanctuary by providing a much needed description of the complexity of these peace zones. Other Contributors: Kevin Avruch, Pushpa Iyer, Roberto Jose, Jennifer Langdon, Nancy Morrison, Krista Rigalo, Catalina Rojas and Mery Rodriguez.

This edited volume focuses on disentangling the interplay of local peacebuilding processes and international policy, via comparative theoretical and empirical work on the question of legitimacy and authority.

Contemporary practices of international peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction are often unsatisfactory. There is now a growing awareness of the significance of local governments and local communitites as an intergrated part of peacebuilding in order to improve quality and enhance precision of interventions. In spite of this, ‘the local’ is rarely a key factor in peacebuilding, hence ‘everyday peace’ is hardly achieved. The aim of this volume is threefold: firstly it illuminates the substantial reasons for working with a more localised approach in politically volatile contexts. Secondly it consolidates a growing debate on the significance of the local in these contexts. Thirdly, it problematizes the often too swiftly used concept, ‘the local’, and critically discuss to what extent it is at all feasible to integrate this into macro-oriented and securitized contexts. This is a unique volume, tackling the ‘local turn’ of peacebuilding in a comprehensive and critical way. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Local Peacebuilding and National Peace is a collection of essays that examines the effects of local peacebuilding efforts on national peace initiatives. The book looks at violent and protracted struggles in which local people have sought to make their own peace with local combatants in a variety of ways, and how such initiatives have affected and have been affected by national level strategies. Chapters on theories of local and national peacemaking are combined with chapters on recent efforts to carry out such processes in warn torn societies such as Africa, Asia, and South America, with essays contributed by experts who were actually actively involved in the peacemaking process. With its unique focus on the interaction of peacemaking at local and national levels, the book will fill a gap in the literature. It will be of interest to students and researchers in such fields as peace studies, conflict resolution, international relations, postwar recovery and development.

The book offers a critical analysis of legitimacy in peacebuilding, with a focus on peace negotiations and civil society participation in particular. The aim of this book is to unpack the meaning of legitimacy for the population in peacebuilding processes and the relationship this has with civil society involvement. There is a growing consensus for addressing local concerns in peacebuilding, with the aim of ensuring local ownership. Moreover, scholars have noted a relationship between civil society inclusion in peace negotiations and legitimacy. Yet, the very idea of legitimacy remains a black box. Using data from original empirical fieldwork – including over 100 semi-structured interviews and 12 focus group discussions – the book focuses on two case studies of negotiations that, respectively, ended a long civil war in Liberia in 2003 and ended the post-election violence in Kenya in 2008. It argues that civil society involvement is conceptually insufficient to show a multidimensional understanding of legitimacy. Instead, the book shows a complex picture of legitimate peace negotiations, based on outcome and participation-based characteristics with the involvement of both ‘guarantors’ of legitimacy and a more general civic agency which includes the general population. Through forms of participative communication, the passive audience become active stakeholders in the construction of legitimacy. This has repercussions for how we think about civil society and peacebuilding more generally. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, security studies and IR in general.