Birte Julia Gippert – författare

What impact does UN peacekeeping have on the politics of authoritarianism in host countries? This book advances a theoretically innovative and empirically rich answer to this question: while the UN does not intentionally promote authoritarianism, it faces a number of constraints and dilemmas that give rise to what we call authoritarian enabling. Enabling can occur through two mechanisms, capacity building and the creation of a permissive environment, which enhance the ability of host governments to engage in authoritarian behavior and signal to them that doing so is low-cost. This book illustrates these two mechanisms with four in-depth case studies of UN peacekeeping operations: UNTAC in Cambodia, MONUC/MONUSCO in the Democratic Republic of Congo, MINUSTAH in Haiti, and UNMIL in Liberia. The analysis is based on primary interview data from over 200 interviews. The authors explore the sources of enabling, identifying the trade-offs and contradictions that give rise to these two mechanisms. They include respect for sovereignty, the importance of working relations with the host government, the tension between democracy and other mission goals, the pressure to demonstrate quick results, and divergences within missions and the broader international community. While enabling stops short of the outright promotion of authoritarianism, it explains why the UN's activities often appear to contradict its stated objectives and the outcomes it delivers fall short of its goals. In addition to its theoretical and empirical contributions, the book suggests how these dilemmas and challenges can be overcome.

This book analyses the role of legitimacy in explaining local actors’ compliance with international peacebuilding operations.The book provides a comparative, micro-level study of local actors’ reasons for compliance with or resistance to international peacebuilding. Specifically, it analyses three pathways to compliance –legitimacy, coercion, and reward-seeking – to explore local police officers’ compliance with the reforms stipulated by the EU Police Mission in Bosnia and the EU Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo. The work constructs a holistic framework of the mechanisms connecting each pathway to compliance and measures legitimacy using micro-level indicators. This study not only shines light on the question why local actors comply, a crucial factor in mission effectiveness, but it also illuminates exactly how compliance works. The book contributes nuanced evidence about the often-heralded importance of legitimacy in peacebuilding, showing exactly in which situations local legitimacy matters and in which it does not. 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 demonstrates the need for micro-level analysis by revealing the relevant processes of legitimation usually hidden behind commonly perceived social fault lines, such as the Serb-Albanian divide in Kosovo.This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, war and conflict studies, Balkans politics, security studies and International Relations.