Chapter 9 concludes the book by highlighting implications that are relevant for academic researchers as well as policymakers. The book’s findings suggest at least three areas for future research. First, a more comprehensive analysis of the sources of perceptions of bias in conflict settings would productively inform scholarship and practice. Second, future work should investigate the conditions under which communal peace aggregates up to the national level. Third, scholars should examine whether governments and their partners succeed in leveraging gains from localized peace enforcement into states with robust institutions. The book also has two important implications for the practice of peacekeeping. First, given the importance of perceptions, policymakers must ensure that peacekeepers remain impartial. International actors perceived by local populations as relatively impartial are much more effective at promoting intergroup cooperation and facilitating the peaceful resolution of communal disputes. Second, given that communal peace in the analysis relies so heavily on the presence of UN peacekeepers, the international community must consider how to design peaceful transitions out of PKOs.

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.

Chapter 8 draws together the major themes of the analysis and prompts further thinking on decolonial feminist modes of conflict resolution. This chapter concludes that the UN’s attempt to stay relevant through developing mediation expertise is counterproductive, and contends that it should instead adopt a solidaristic approach that foregrounds politics and aims to produce ‘knowledge encounters’ between different worlds. The bulk of the chapter discusses some principles for decolonial feminist approaches to mediation, which include encounters across different ontologies of peace, decolonising expertise, solidarity, and establishing relations of care and accountability.

The conclusion of the book summarizes its main arguments and findings and considers their implications for research on forced migration, conflict, and political violence. Beyond strategic displacement, the book illuminates the politics of civilian movements in wartime, which can shape the perceptions of civilians as well as combatants during and after war. To demonstrate this, the chapter provides evidence of a survey experiment from Iraq that shows how displacement decisions during the ISIS conflict influence people's willingness to accept and live alongside others after war. The chapter also discusses the policy implications of the analysis in five areas: displacement early warning, justice and accountability, humanitarian aid, post-conflict peacebuilding, and refugee resettlement and asylum. It also discusses some of the limitations of the analysis in the book and pathways for future research.

This chapter considers five practices, or constellations of practices, that emerge from imitating Jesus: (1) care for the poor and needy, including the contested practice of seeing Christ in the poor; (2) sacramental practices of the Lord’s Supper and baptism; (3) prayer, including lament; (4) forgiveness, reconciliation, and peacemaking; and (5) self-giving or kenōsis. Each practice flows in its own way from the twin imperatives to love God and the neighbor.

Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021 despite peace talk efforts in late 2020 and early 2021. International pundits had been predicting that Ashraf Ghani’s government might need to share power with a resurgent Taliban, but none had expected such a swift and complete takeover as the Americans readied to leave for good. Two decades of international intervention in Afghanistan were erased. The efficacy and desirability of intervention has been thrown into serious doubt, and with it the prospects for post-conflict state-building. This chapter introduces the rise, and possible fall, of the post-conflict state-building agenda. It introduces the reader to important concepts, noting the relationships between state-building, peace-building and nation-building, as well as underscoring the role of liberal ideology in shaping post-conflict state-building efforts, asking readers to reflect on what they believe external actors should, or should not, do.

This chapter presents the outlines of a constructivist understanding of world politics. We begin with a discussion of state identity and explore how identity defines and bounds state actions. To illustrate this concept, we address issues central to the study of world politics: change, governance and security. Overall, our goal is to present a textured, layered understanding of the international realm based on a notion taken for granted in much of IR theory, meaning. Constructivism is the newest but perhaps the most dynamic of the main theories of international relations. Unlike liberalism and realism (see Chapters 2 and 3), which have taken their bearings from developments in economic and political theory, constructivism – like Critical Theory (see Chapter 4) – is rooted in insights from social theory (e.g. Berger and Luckmann 1967; Giddens 1984) and the philosophy of knowledge (Golinski 2005; Hacking 1999; Searle 1995).

This chapter explores third-party mediation and peacekeeping. Mediation, along with arbitration and adjudication, is a form of peacemaking. Peacekeeping means maintaining durable peace after conflict has ended. The UN is one of several kinds of actors that engage in peacekeeping missions. They leverage the costs belligerents would pay if they return to war, provide information, reduce uncertainty, and provide political cover to facilitate political concessions. Also discussed in the chapter are peacebuilding efforts, including developing the proper political, legal, social and economic infrastructure to stabilize the security environment. Challenges for third parties seeking to engage successfully in peacekeeping and peacemaking include the difficulties they face in providing long-term incentives for peace, the possibility of distorting information flows such that peace is less stable, and being sensitive to local contexts. The chapter applies many of its concepts to a quantitative study of the causes of peacekeeper sexual exploitation and abuse, and a case study of third-party involvement during the conflicts in the Great Lakes region of Africa in the 1990s and 2000s.

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.