Commissioned Book Review: Global Governance and Local Peace: Accountability and Performance in International Peacebuilding by Susanna P Campbell
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Author | Ramon Blanco |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929920902362 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(2) NP9 –NP10
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
902362PSW0010.1177/1478929920902362Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2020
Commissioned Book Review
Global Governance and Local Peace:
Accountability and Performance in
International Peacebuilding by Susanna P
Campbell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2018. 292 pp. ISBN 9781108418652
It is hardly disputable that the overcoming of
violent conflicts and the construction of
peace are the fundamental pillars of interna-
tional politics. Consequently, every rigorous
analysis that clarifies the elements that affect
the performance of an international organiza-
tion in peacebuilding efforts is definitely a
relevant contribution to the scholarly and
policy debates about the theme. This is
exactly what Susanna Campbell successfully
does in her Global Governance and Local
Peace: Accountability and Performance in
International Peacebuilding.
One could argue, quite correctly, that to
interrogate why peacebuilding efforts succeed
or fail in a post-conflict scenario is far from
being a pioneering question in the area.
However, the way in which Campbell answers
this question is quite innovative. She focuses
on the organizational learning of the country
office, the actors of international peacebuild-
ing at the local level in her view, and measures
performance in terms of ‘whether the country
office acts to reduce the gap between its peace-
building aims and outcomes’ (p. 6). Campbell
analyses five country offices during six impor-
tant phases in Burundi between 1999 and
2014, totalizing 28 cases. They are the country
offices of the United Nations (UN) peace
operations, the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP), the United Kingdom’s
Department for International Development
(DFID), the CARE International and the
Burundi Leadership Training Program (BLTP)
of the Woodrow Wilson International Center
for Scholars. From this sample, Campbell
develops a typology of a country-office per-
formance, which is peacebuilding learner,
micro-adaptors, sovereign reinforcers and
stagnant players. Campbell argues that only
one type, the peacebuilding learners, is more
likely to achieve its peacebuilding aims. This,
in her view, occurs due to a combination of
two indispensable conditions: formal peace-
building accountability and informal local
accountability. Whereas the former incentiv-
izes the country office to respond to headquar-
ters and donors demands, the later gives to the
country office the proper local feedbacks in
regard to its actions.
In order to develop her analysis, the book is
structured, in addition to the introduction and
the conclusion, in five chapters. Whereas
chapter 1 develops the book’s theoretical
framework, chapter 2 delineates the context
and background of different phases of the
peacebuilding process in Burundi. Chapters 3,
4 and 5 problematize the practices of country
offices of different kinds of international
actors in the country, respectively: (a) interna-
tional organizations, namely UN missions and
UNDP; (b) international non-governmental
organizations (INGOs), specifically CARE
and BLTP; and (c) bilateral donor agencies,
more precisely DFID.
Notwithstanding its contributions, the
book has two major limitations. The first one
has to do with the fact that Campbell’s book
does not question the very understanding of
peace underpinning peacebuilding processes.
As a consequence, the book does not problem-
atize, even slightly, the destabilizing effects
inherent of the liberal peace. Therefore, the
book gives the impression that the main part of
the failure of peacebuilding processes is
related to the fact that country offices do not
properly achieve its peacebuilding aims. This
understanding of the process is very limited
since it misses a series of issues and processes
that are quite important to have a comprehen-
sive understanding of peacebuilding pro-
cesses, starting with the problematization of
the very aims that are set to be pursued in these
post-conflict scenarios.
The second major limitation of the book is a
direct consequence of the first. It has to do with
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