This introductory chapter explains the book’s motivating puzzles and outlines its theoretical and empirical strategies. The book focuses on local-level peacekeeping operations designed explicitly to prevent communal violence. It argues that deploying UN peacekeepers to fragile settings fundamentally changes the structural incentives facing communities in conflict. Scholars typically pinpoint the UN’s success at the negotiating table: peacekeepers help armed group leaders make lasting agreements that stabilize conflict settings from the top down. Yet such negotiations seem unable to prevent communal violence in places as diverse as South Sudan in East Africa, Mali in West Africa, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa. This book shifts the analytical lens to the local level to investigate the conditions under which peacekeepers successfully build peace from the bottom up. The book’s main argument is that UN peacekeepers succeed when local populations perceive them to be relatively impartial enforcers who are unconnected to the country of deployment, the conflict, and the parties to the dispute. Impartial peacekeepers convince all parties that they will punish those who escalate communal disputes regardless of their identity, which increases communities’ willingness to cooperate without the fear of violence.

The founding father of the laws of armed conflict, Hugo Grotius assumed a ceasefire to be a temporary state of affairs that did not alter the legal state of war. He wrote that if hostilities resumed after a ceasefire is declared, there is no need for a new declaration of war to be made since the legal state of war is ‘not dead but sleeping’. While the official legal state of war may be sleeping’, Grotius’ metaphor perhaps does not imply that nothing happens. Even during sleep, much can and does occur that we are temporarily unaware of. However, ceasefires continue to be largely considered in relation to how to better bring warring parties to the negotiating table, hostilities to a halt and/or their influence on peace processes. The argument advanced in this book is that ceasefires in fact rarely only ‘cease fire’. Consequently, the book offers a more nuanced examination of two core questions: what ceasefires actually are and what areas they affect.

Despite the longevity and the relative simplicity of the concept of a ceasefire, there has been little agreement, and much confusion, around their nomenclature. This chapter is primarily devoted to better understanding and interrogating these definitions. It moves away from the conventional view of ceasefires that focusses primarily on their success at reducing violence and battle related deaths or their ability to lead to a peace agreement, and instead traces the genealogy of the literature on conflict resolution and the state to the scholarship on the construction of order beyond the state to argue that ceasefires should not only be considered military tools but types of wartime order that have statebuilding implications.

Chapter 1 begins with the story of the 2015 La Línea customs fraud scandal and its connections to the criminal structures mounted by military intelligence at the height of the 36-year civil war. Drawing on this illustrative example, the chapter reframes debates on post-conflict statebuilding and puts forward a novel argument about how counterinsurgent elites introduce institutional innovations that undermine core state activities. It further lays out the key theoretical contributions of the book, specifically as they relate to war and state formation and post-conflict peacebuilding and reconstruction. The chapter also introduces the Central American context and explains why it is a fruitful setting in which to explore the institutional legacies of civil war. It then discusses the book’s methodology and the unique archival and interview sources of data.

This chapter concludes with a summary of the work, as well as a discussion of the implications thereof. In particular, the book identifies implications for research on civil wars and insurgencies, governance and statebuilding, as well as revolution. Critically, if some forms of rebel governance are not directly related to rebels’ military strategy in that they do not necessarily confer resources and recruits, then the consequences of rebel governance institutions are not yet fully known. This chapter suggests instead that the consequences of rebel groups imitating burdensome governance learned from the Chinese Communist Party can affect international politics, national institutions, subnational social cohesion, and individual behavior in ways that have implications for scholars and policy practitioners. The chapter then discusses how the findings of this work relate to research on governance and state formation and calls for a greater synthesis of scholarship on these topics. Finally, it reviews the importance of governance to revolutionaries generally, beyond rebel groups, and demonstrates that learning and imitation about how to govern for revolution has persisted for centuries.

This chapter outlines the nature of the “Franco-Chadian state” and its early postcolonial political evolution. It highlights the deep embeddedness of French influence in the Chadian economy and security services. It also provides an overview of the broader context of postcolonial Franco-African relations and French strategic aims in its former empire. The chapter then examines the outbreak of civil war in the country. In 1965, communities in central Chad rebelled against abusive governmental taxation. Quickly the revolt spread throughout the country and gradually its disparate factions became more organized under the loose banner of the Front de Liberation Nationale du Tchad (Frolinat). By early 1969, Frolinat elements threatened Fort-Lamy, Chad’s capital. This chapter examines the nature of this rebellion and French President Charles de Gaulle’s decision, in the final weeks of his presidency, to launch a sizeable military intervention on behalf of Tombalbaye’s regime. This intervention included an important statebuilding component, the Mission pour la réforme administrative (MRA). It aimed to address the administrative failures that French policymakers saw as a root cause of the rebellion. The chapter concludes with a description of the MRA’s mission and an analysis of its ultimate failure.

The rule of law is indispensable for sustained peace, good governance, and economic growth, especially in countries recovering from civil war. Yet for all its importance, the rule of law has received surprisingly little attention from political scientists and international relations scholars. This book proposes a new theory to explain how international organizations can restore the rule of law in the world’s weakest and most war-torn states, focusing in particular on the crucial but underappreciated role of the UN. The book tests the theory by combining analysis of original, highly disaggregated survey data from Liberia with cross-country analyses spanning all post-conflict countries in Africa since 1989. The book combines these quantitative results with qualitative insights gleaned from hundreds of interviews with UN officials, local leaders, citizens, and government and civil society representatives in Liberia and beyond. The book shows that UN intervention can have a deeper, more lasting, and more positive effect on the rule of law than the prevailing pessimism would lead us to believe.

Liberia is both a hard and a crucial case for testing the effects of UN intervention on the rule of law after civil war. This chapter presents a mixed methods research design for evaluating the UN Mission in Liberia's (UNMIL) impact on Liberia both quantitatively and qualitatively. Drawing on original qualitative interviews and extensive quantitative survey data collected over fifteen months of fieldwork in the country, the chapter complements and extends previous assessments of UNMIL's role in Liberia by providing rich, highly granular data on exposure to UNMIL at both the individual and community levels over multiple years and in multiple Liberian counties. By combining surveys with in-depth interviews, the analytical approach described in this chapter substantiates and contextualizes quantitative findings with qualitative insights gleaned from Liberian citizens, local leaders, and government officials, as well as from UNMIL personnel.

The rule of law is a necessary condition for sustained peace, good governance, and economic growth. Yet for all its importance as a policy goal, the rule of law as a concept remains widely misunderstood. This chapter develops a conceptual framework for understanding the necessary conditions for the rule of law in countries where the state is just one of many providers of security, justice, and other public goods. The chapter begins by reviewing the most prominent definitions of the rule of law from both policy and scholarly circles. These definitions are grounded in the experiences of rich Western countries, and are generally inappropriate for the developing world, and for post-conflict settings in particular. The chapter then proposes a more unified definition that preserves the attractive features of existing accounts while introducing additional dimensions that better capture the nuances of legality and daily life in countries recovering from civil war.

Can UN intervention help create the necessary conditions for the rule of law at the local level in countries recovering from civil war? This chapter answers this question through a quantitative and qualitative case study of the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL). The case study combines an original three-wave panel survey with in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted with dozens of UN personnel, citizens, local leaders, government officials, and civil society representatives in Liberia. The survey spans a period of four years, covers a wide range of topics, and captures the views of over 10,000 rural Liberians across three waves of data collection. The richness of this data helps isolate the causal impact of UNMIL's activities. The chapter demonstrates that UNMIL increased citizens' willingness to rely on the Liberian police and courts to resolve the most serious incidents of crime and violence, while reducing their use of illegal mechanisms of dispute resolution -- especially trial by ordeal. These effects persist even for at least two years, even in communities that report no further exposure to UNMIL personnel.

As UN missions have grown in scope and complexity, restoring the rule of law has become increasingly central to their mandates and exit strategies, which hinge on the transfer of legal and political power to legitimate, effective security and justice institutions. UN missions now regularly assume responsibility for drafting laws and lobbying for their passage; revising constitutions; training judges, prosecutors, and police officers; building courthouses, police stations, and prisons; monitoring extrajudicial punishments, arbitrary arrests, indefinite detentions, and other abuses; assisting with criminal investigations and prosecutions; improving coordination both between and among state and non-state authorities; and more generally elevating the role of the state as a purveyor of security and justice. All of these activities are designed in part to foster the rule of law. This chapter traces how the rule of law became so central to UN mandates around the world, providing empirical examples along the way to illuminate the UN's approach to rule-of-law reform in practice.

Can the international community help establish the rule of law in countries recovering from civil war? If so, how? This chapter develops a theory to explain how third parties like the UN can help rehabilitate state security and justice sector institutions at the national level, while simultaneously legitimizing those institutions in the eyes of citizens at the local level. The chapter provides illustrations of the theory at work, gleaned from the secondary literature and primary accounts of the successes and shortcomings of UN missions around the world. The UN is especially adept at combining carrots and sticks to encourage compliance with new rule of law standards, even in countries where the rule of law has never existed before. The theory stands in stark contrast to the overly pessimistic accounts that tend to dominate scholarly and policy debate.

The UN is intimately involved in efforts to restore the rule of law in countries recovering from civil war. Have these efforts succeeded? This chapter provides a systematic, cross-national quantitative test of the relationship between UN missions and the rule of law across all post-conflict countries in Africa since the end of the Cold War. The chapter draws on original datasets gleaned from sources that have never been used for purposes of research. The chapter demonstrates a strong positive correlation between UN presence and the rule of law in the one- to three-year period after a peace agreement has been signed. The relationship is stronger for the UN's civilian personnel than for troops and military observers, and is stronger when the UN engages host government officials in the process of reform, rather than bypassing them entirely.