How Peace Operations Work: Power, Legitimacy, and Effectiveness – eBook

How Peace Operations Work: Power, Legitimacy, and Effectiveness (PDF) offers a new approach to studying the effectiveness of peace operations. It asks not whether peace operations work or why, but how: when a peace operation attains its goals, what causal processes are at work?

By determining how peace operations work, this new approach provides five distinctive contributions. First, it explores peace operations through a local lens, examining their interactions with actors in host societies rather than their genesis in the politics and institutions of the international realm. In doing so, it emphasizes the centrality of local compliance and cooperation to a peace operation’s effectiveness. Second, the ebook structures a framework for explaining how peace operations can mold the behaviour of local actors in order to attain greater cooperation. That framework differentiates three dimensions of a peace operation’s power-coercion, inducement, and legitimacy—and illuminates their effects. The third contribution is to emphasize the contribution of local legitimacy to a peace operation’s effectiveness and recognize the means by which an operation can be locally legitimized. Fourth, the new power-legitimacy framework is applied to examine two peace operations in-depth: the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI). Finally, the ebook concludes by examining the implications of this new approach for practice and identifying a set of policy reforms to assist peace operations work better.

The ebook argues that peace operations work by persuading the decisions and behaviour of diverse local actors in host societies. Peace operations work better—that is, attain more of their objectives at lower cost—when they receive high-quality local cooperation. It concludes that peace operations are more likely to achieve such cooperation when they are perceived locally to be legitimate

NOTE: The product includes the ebook, How Peace Operations Work: Power, Legitimacy, and Effectiveness in PDF. No access codes are included.