The pieces kept after peace is kept: Assessing the (post-exit) legacies of peace operations

Journal article

Do internationally-backed peace operations and state-building efforts leave legacies of sustainable peace and viable states?1 To answer this question – which lies at the heart of the study and practice of multidimensional peacekeeping and peacebuilding – we need to document conditions that prevail after peace operations have ended, and consider the extent to which those conditions are the consequences of international interventions. That is, to understand the lasting impact of peace operations, we need to examine what happens after missions close. While this may seem intuitive, scholars and practitioners have made surprisingly few efforts to systematically document and explain conditions on the ground in former host states after peace missions have exited. In this forum of nine short contributions, we aim to partly remedy that empirical gap and, in so doing, generate debate and discussion about the legacies of peace operations.

This introductory piece opens the forum by offering a brief overview of existing evaluations of peace(keeping) operations, highlighting the common tendency of analysts, scholars, and assessors to focus on the short-term, rather than lasting, impacts of interventions. I then identify and discuss three ‘types’ of legacy after peacekeepers exit and missions close, illustrating each by making reference to examples drawn from the contributions that follow.

Authors: Gledhill, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis
• Journal: International Peacekeeping
• Volume: 27
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 1-11
• Publication date: 2020-01-23
• Acceptance date: 2019-09-30
• DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2019.1710367
• EISSN: 1743-906X
• ISSN: 1353-3312
• Language: English
• Keywords: FFR