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.

This chapter introduces the concept of regulatory contestation as a lens for analysing the development of transnational normative orders. It critiques mainstream conceptualisations of regulation in International Relations (IR) and international law as unnecessarily narrow and advances a broader definition of regulatory governance as actions that steer the flow of events towards specified regulatory goals. This definition allows for the analysis of the creative and generative function of regulation and shows that the process of regulatory contestation facilitates the mediation of international norms into varied social and political contexts. Studying regulatory contestation provides insight into the power dynamics that are shaping fundamental institutions of international order at a micro-level. The chapter illustrates this process through a case study of the accountability turn in the implementation of human protection norms. The recent proliferation of juridical and institutional mechanisms to prevent, protect and prosecute mass violations of human rights is indicative of an emergent transnational human protection order. It applies the lens of regulatory contestation to these global efforts. It concludes by considering the value of regulatory contestation as an analytical lens in IR, contributing to an understanding of constitutive processes that build transnational normative orders.

International Relations theory has dealt extensively with norms and agency in normative environments, including the impact of norms on state behaviour; their diffusion and localisation; and their evolution, contestation, and change. Yet, to date the issue of norm conflict has remained theoretically and empirically understudied in International Relations. We still have little understanding of the judgements that governments or institutions make regarding compliance when the directives inherent in the norms to which they have committed appear to be mutually exclusive. The objective of this chapter is to conceptualise norm conflict as a challenge to decision-making in normative international environments and to outline a theoretical framework for studying and understanding norm conflict, including – most importantly – the ways in which states and international institutions seek to resolve it. In so doing, we draw from International Law and Sociology, two disciplines that have extensively dealt with norm conflict.

This chapter examines Lakhdar Brahimi’s agency as a mediator in Syria, while also clarifying how his strategic perceptions affected his mediation behavior. Adopting a slightly different structure than its predecessor, it consists of two sections. The first assesses the mediator’s agency in determining the main mediation policies and responses from his appointment on August 17, 2012 till his resignation on May 13, 2014. During this period, five policy responses stand out—the Eid al Adha Ceasefire, the May 7 Communiqué, responding to the use of chemical weapons, Geneva II, and the mediator’s resignation. A first-level analysis is applied to clarify the mediator’s input on each. The second section moves to explain the dynamics behind his decision-making. To do so, it focuses on the mediator’s perceptions regarding the four categories outlined in the contingency model—the identity of the mediator, the context of mediation, the parties, and the process of mediation. Such analysis helps shed light on the links between the mediator’s perceptions on these four categories and his decision-making in Syria as well as the formulation of more generalizable principles.

This chapter brings to light the main conclusions of this work, while also presenting generalizable principles for future research to expand on. This part of the book contributes to the theoretical study of mediation and aims to encourage further first-level analysis approaches to the study of mediation and mediators. Most importantly, it clarifies the actual input of Kofi Annan, Lakhdar Brahimi, and Staffan de Mistura to the mediation efforts in Syria. It leaves readers with a detailed record of what Kofi Annan, Lakhdar Brahimi, and Staffan de Mistura have done in their roles as mediators in Syria and presents a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics that shaped their decision-making. Outside the cases of these three mediators, it introduces a method by which to forensically identify a mediator’s fingerprints on the mediation process and charts a map to guide investigations into the decision-making processes of mediators. In doing so, it hopefully serves to encourage steps toward developing institutional mechanisms to evaluate the performance of these mediators – to hold them accountable for their successes and their failures.

This chapter turns to the third UN mediator in Syria, Staffan de Mistura, and has the same two objectives as the preceding case studies in this book – to delineate the mediator’s agency as a decision-maker and to elucidate the strategic dynamics behind his decision-making. It is split into two sections dedicated to each objective. The first section investigates the mediator’s input to the main mediation policies during the period studied. Of which there are six – the Aleppo Freeze, sanctioning military action against ISIS, the Geneva Consultations, the intra-Syrian Talks, the Astana Process, and the mediator’s resignation. Building on these findings, the section uncovers the dynamics behind the mediator’s decision-making using the categories of perceptions drawn from the contingency model. This analysis also helps produce more generalizable knowledge concerning associations between mediation perceptions and behaviors.

This chapter considers the impact of the discovery of mandatory securitization on global security institutions. While ties of community and friendship, specifically at the sub-systemic level, ensure that the burden of mandatory securitization on the international community is relatively small, the international community – in the form of the UNSC – is obligated to act when (1) states or sub-systemic actors fail (note, in other-securitization they may fail for legitimate reasons), or (2) where there is no other designated protector. This chapter suggests that the UN charter amounts to a social contractual situation between the people of the world and the UNSC, rendering its duty to securitize – when conditions are met and there is no other protector – overriding. It goes on to examine the nature of these duties as they already exist by examining RtoP provisions. It shows that even if RtoP was in perfect working order and always acted on, it does not cover the moral duties of the UNSC regarding securitization; notably, it does not cover intent-lacking threats. Much like in Chapter 4 where mandatory securitization is used to update NATO’s Article 5, this chapter shows how mandatory securitization can refocus and thus help RtoP.

Chapter 12 is the story of Iraqi reparations imposed after the Gulf War. The rise in Iraqi indebtedness was a consequence of global geopolitical trends in the 1980s, when political lending trumped solvency concerns. It allowed Iraq to obtain financing on terms more favourable than offered by the US government. Reparations were a consequence of the end of the Iran–Iraq War when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Reparations were imposed by a UN Resolution with a direct enforcement mechanism to take money from oil revenues. I use oral history sources to trace how Iraqi debt was restructured after the US invasion in 2003. The restructuring was permeated by politics to inflict harsh terms on creditors at the Paris Club, at a time when creditor-friendly restructurings were the norm. Despite its apparent success, however, in going for a politically expedient deal at the Paris Club, I argue the restructuring missed an opportunity to enshrine a doctrine of odious debt in international law. All debt was written off, except war reparations, which were paid in full through sanctions and war. They proved to be senior to all other debt and did not enter the sovereign debt restructuring.

The chapter looks at China’s approach to regional and global institutions. It starts with a quick review of Asian regionalism first led by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Japan, focusing on how Asian regionalism facilitated China’s socialization in the 1980s–1990s. The chapter then explores China’s multipronged strategy in dealing with its evolving institutional environment. First, China has pursued a latent regionalism, which is centered on East Asia, relies on the BRI, and takes advantage of ASEAN-led mechanisms to mitigate geopolitical trends harmful to its interests. Second, China has undertaken limited institutional innovation, opting instead to promote its targeted reformist agenda towards the Bretton Woods economic order. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the only institution China created and has led, demonstrates its preference of reform over innovation concerning the global economic order. Finally, to project influence, China has relied on its leadership positions in regional organizations such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the United Nations system, including the World Health Organization. Taken together, China’s institutional tactics show that instead of offering an alternative Chinese order, China has been mainly interested in reshaping the institutional settings of its international environment.

Global aspects of biodiversity loss are widespread. Tropical habitats in Africa, South America and South-East Asia have been decimated by deforestation and encroachment by increasing numbers of people. International organisations including the United Nations (UN) have considered population issues, but the list of sustainable goals propounded by the UN makes no more than peripheral mentions of population pressures. There have been international conferences on major environmental issues including climate change and biodiversity declines, but again with few mentions of the impact of the human population. However, there has been a series of international meetings concerned with population growth. Unfortunately, these have proved disappointing, frequently sidetracked into areas that have not resulted in any consensus on the development of population policies.

The end of the British Mandate created a vacuum. The Zionist leadership was better prepared and Britain betrayed its obligations under the mandate and disregarded the Palestinian quest for independence. The result was a free hand to the Zionist movement to carry out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that led to the expulsion of half of its population and the destruction of half of its villages and most of its towns.

This chapter offers an analysis of the multilateral efforts conducted over the past decade to build cyber peace in a context of proliferation of cyber conflicts and exacerbated geopolitical tensions, not to mention the global COVID-19 pandemic that has largely disrupted international meetings. It studies more specifically how international law has been leveraged in UN negotiations to serve strategic objectives.

Chapter 7 considers languages that are less translated from and into than other languages. Focusing on institutional translation, it examines the translation regimes of the United Nations, the European Union, selected multilingual states and selected multilingual regions within or without multilingual states, focusing, in the first case, on Spanish with respect to English and French in the UN system; in the second case, on translation in several EU institutions; in the third case, on the asymmetric interpreting regime of the Spanish Senate, in which Spain's minority languages may be translated from but not into, and there is no translation at all between minority languages; and, in the fourth case, on multilingual regions like Catalonia and South Tyrol.

This chapter focuses on how the application of an IO’s jurisdictional immunities prevent victims from accessing justice at the national level. The discussion first focuses on the basis of an IO’s domestic legal personality which allows suits to be brought against them at all. The chapter then identifies how IO immunities are applied today. Whereas IO immunities were intended to be functional, they have become by and large de facto absolute. This means that a claimant’s case is procedurally defeated and the merits do not get a chance to be ventilated. There are some indications that the tide might be shifting in favour of the claimant. Still, the way in which claims against IOs are addressed at the national level is unsustainable and requires a fundamental reframing.

The introductory chapter presents the argument of the book, that transnational lawmakingcoalitions exist beneath the surface of the UN human rights treaty bodies’ formal actors, rules, and processes. TLCs shed light on the particularities of the treaty interpretation process and provide an analytical lens to understanding the key role expert bodies and issue professionals play in the development of human rights law. The chapter situates the book in the relevant literatures and outlines its research methods and structure.