Local Legitimacy in Peacebuilding ─ Analysing Pathways to Compliance

This book offers a comparative, micro-level study of the impact of local legitimacy on local actor’s reasons for compliance with or resistance to international peacebuilding reforms.

Specifically, the book analyses three pathways of power – legitimacy, coercion, and reward-seeking -- as reasons for why local police officers in Bosnia and Kosovo choose to comply with the police reforms stipulated by the EU Police Mission in Bosnia and the EU Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo. The book constructs a framework which illustrates the causal mechanisms connecting each power pathway to compliance, and is the first IR study to measure legitimacy directly using micro-level indicators developed by the author. Based on empirical data from interviews, primary documents, and a legitimacy survey conducted with local police officers, this work not only shines a light on the question of why local actors comply, a crucial factor in mission effectiveness, but also illuminates how exactly compliance works in a causal process. Among other things, the book provides nuanced evidence about the often heralded importance of legitimacy in peacebuilding, showing in exactly which situations local legitimacy matters and in which it does not. This helps to overcome the binary debate in the literature about whether rational-choice approaches to compliance (coercion and reward-seeking) or legitimacy are more significant. 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 will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, war and conflict studies, Balkans politics, security studies and International Relations.

Birte Gippert is?a Teaching Fellow in the War Studies Department of King’s College London?and holds a PhD from the University of Reading.