2014 Articles

Going Micro: Emerging and Future Peacekeeping Research

Autesserre, Severine

In the past fifteen years, scholars have started studying the local and micro-level dimensions of peacekeeping. They have investigated the nature and effectiveness of bottom-up peacebuilding, assessed the local versus national impacts of peacekeeping interventions, and studied the decentralized actions of international peacebuilders on the ground. This commentary shows that, despite the approach’s limitations, delving into these three topics opens up fruitful areas for further research, in particular analyzing micro-to-macro linkages, evaluating peacekeeping’s subnational impacts across cases, explaining peacebuilding successes, and understanding the causes of peace itself.