Chapter 3 draws on the historical basis laid out in the prior chapter to establish how the current national security arenas of each country came about and what it means for the local cases under scrutiny here. Going beyond the national level, decisions made by peacekeeping headquarters and mission contributors inform the actions of international actors and form a sort of international security arena. The described historical legacies, narratives, and capacities of actors on the national and international levels shape the corridor in which different ordering practices can be negotiated at the local level.

Chapter 4 focusses on the local level in order to examine the way different parts of arenas lend themselves to varying forms of ordering. Within an inner circle, actors engage more regularly, revealing themselves to one another and thereby creating pressure for a stable order. An outer circle is more illegible, diffuse, and widespread, which allows actors to use it as a refuge for fluid ordering. The shape of an arena is not a deterministic structure but rather one that actors deliberately mould to support the forms of ordering that benefit them most. This line of research ascertains (1) why, how, and where actors create the dividing line between an inner and outer circle (drawing the line), (2) why and how actors enter or leave an inner circle (crossing the line), and (3) what forms of interactions make a line obsolete between inner- and outer-circle actors (erasing the line).

The Conclusion sums up by establishing patterns of how actors order different parts of an arena and create security. It presents the key findings along the four dimensions of the historical legacies of centre–periphery relations, distinctions between inner and outer circles, competition or complementation between stable and fluid ordering forms, and embedding or detaching interventions. My analysis contributes novel answers to questions about local security in conflict-affected countries and an original framework capable of facilitating future comparative analyses on the matter.

Chapter 1 provides the research framing of this book. First, it discusses relevant academic works on arenas and combines them with the author’s own empirical insights. It defines ‘security’ and describes the two key dimensions of actors and their interactions. Second, descriptive commonalities and differences in ordering practices in the local security arena lead to analytical insights that call for more in-depth investigation – namely, the respective roles and interactions of state, non-state, and international actors; the dividing lines between inner and outer circles in the local arena; and different relations between peripheral local cases and their respective centres. In the methodological section, the chapter explains the selection of these three countries and the local arenas within them, how data was gathered through an explorative mix of methods, and its analysis through process tracing and the Comparative Area Studies approach.