Comparing how peace operations enable or restrict the influence of national staff: Contestation from within?
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| Author | Steffen Eckhard |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836718815528 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
815528CAC0010.1177/0010836718815528Cooperation and ConflictEckhard
research-article2018
Article
Cooperation and Conflict
2019, Vol. 54(4) 488 –505
Comparing how peace
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operations enable or restrict
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the influence of national staff:
Contestation from within?
Steffen Eckhard
Abstract
A large share of civilian staff working in international peace operations are nationals of the host
state. Academic research has not yet investigated the effect of these locally recruited bureaucrats
on peacebuilding. Theoretically, it is argued that to accomplish their missions in complex
environments, peace operations require crucial knowledge about local perceptions, politics,
and customs. Local staff can have a positive performance impact by soliciting such knowledge.
But information advantages create new principal-agent problems. Peace operations have a hard
time scrutinizing their employees’ allegiances, and they risk sabotage from within. Empirically, it
is shown that peace operations conducted by the United Nations (UN), the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and the European Union (EU) differ significantly
in how they navigate the ensuing tension by enabling or restricting the influence of their local
staff. A new data set on the staffing of 52 peace operations as well as analysis of internal staff
policies yields significant variance in the potential of local staff to influence peacebuilding policy
implementation, which is most extensive in the OSCE, followed by the UN and the EU. This
finding warrants more attention on the role of local staff as information gatekeepers who could
be at the center of potential frictions between international and local norms and knowledge.
Keywords
Bureaucracy, international organizations, knowledge generation, local staff, norm contestation,
peacebuilding
Introduction
Peacebuilding is a key tool used by the international community to deliver peace and secu-
rity in countries plagued by violence. Modern multidimensional peacebuilding includes a
host of activities by which outside actors, such as foreign governments, non-governmental
Corresponding author:
Steffen Eckhard, University of Konstanz, Universitätsstr. 10, 78457 Konstanz, Germany.
Email: steffen.eckhard@uni-konstanz.de
Eckhard
489
organizations, and international organizations (IOs), support a recipient state in building
liberally oriented, rights-based state institutions embedded in the rule of law. The focus of
this article is on multilateral peace operations by the United Nations (UN), the European
Union (EU), and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). The
term ‘peace operation’ captures the administrative setting in which peacebuilding policy
implementation takes place, which usually unfolds in the form of a field mission.
As outside actors, peace operations navigate a boundary between international and
local. In this article, the term ‘local’ refers to anything that is not international. This is
opposed to the use of ‘local’ as a designation of state levels (capital versus community).
It is rarely recognized that the majority of the civilian staff working in peace operations
are locally recruited. These are individuals who do not pursue an international IO career
and are predominantly nationals of the host state (henceforth local or national staff). In
2015, as many as 80% of the civilian staff in some UN missions were recruited locally.
In OSCE missions, the average local-staff share was 75%, stretching to 93% in one case
(see Figure 1(b) below). Despite the imbalance between the number of local and interna-
tional personnel, the planning and implementation of peace operations is generally
assumed to be driven by ‘internationals.’ While some studies question this assumption
(e.g., Autesserre, 2014, 2017), surprisingly, researchers have not asked about the specific
impact that national staff have on the conduct and outcome of peacebuilding missions
(but see Eckhard, 2014).
This article is a first step toward filling this void in international studies, both theoreti-
cally and empirically. Key to the argument is the observation of a discernible local turn
in the practice of multidimensional peace operations, including such key principles as
local ownership and bottom-up peacebuilding (for an overview, see Leonardsson and
Rudd, 2015). The local turn dovetails with the acknowledgment of the paramount impor-
tance of local information—knowledge of the history, politics, customs, and societal
environment of the host state and its inhabitants—to peacebuilding operations (e.g.,
Bliesemann de Guevara and Kostić, 2017; Bueger, 2015; Da Costa and Karlsrud, 2012,
2013; Verkoren, 2006). The assumption is that if peacebuilders were better able to inte-
grate the ‘“banality” of the everyday challenges’ (Mac Ginty, 2014: 548), this would lead
to better peacebuilding (Hirblinger and Simons, 2015). Others, however, warn that fric-
tions may emerge when international and local norms meet (Björkdahl and Gusic, 2015;
Björkdahl and Höglund, 2013; Hellmüller, 2013; Millar et al., 2013; Schia and Karlsrud,
2013; Tholens and Groß, 2015).
Although local staff in peace operations are a cornerstone of local-international inter-
action, their role and policy impact is not well understood. This article argues that local
staff are likely to perform a crucial bridging function between frequently rotating inter-
national peacebuilders and the local societal context. By supplying international peace-
builders with knowledge on the local context—both formally as part of their job
description and informally per casual exchange—local staff can have a positive impact
on the performance of peace operations (local linkage). But, such information advan-
tages create new principal-agent problems. Peace operations have a hard time scrutiniz-
ing their employees’ real allegiances, and they risk being sabotaged from within (local
capture). How peace operations navigate this tension by enabling or restricting the local
footprint in their operations is the empirical focus of this article.1
490
Cooperation and Conflict 54(4)
The article compares the potential influence of local staff in peace operations by the
UN, the OSCE, and the EU, understood as the scope of opportunities that exist for local
staff to feed local information into the policy implementation process. Data are derived
from qualitative research interviews and a novel data set of the number of local staff in
52 field missions belonging to the UN, the OSCE, and the EU between 2000 and 2016
(see data set in Supplementary material), as well as the three IOs’ staff policies and rel-
evant guidance documents. The article finds that there are significant opportunities for
local staff in the OSCE, and more moderate opportunities in the UN, to feed local infor-
mation into policy implementation processes. By contrast, the scope for such informa-
tion linkage is significantly narrower in EU missions. Policy documents also show that
peace operations, at least in the UN, purposefully restrict the leeway of local staff, which
highlights the possible ambivalence of local staff policy influence.
This article makes contributions to the study of peacebuilding interventions. A grow-
ing literature addresses the role of local agents in the context of local ownership (e.g.,
Donais, 2012; Von Billerbeck, 2015, 2017; Wilén and Chapaux, 2011), local knowledge
generation (e.g., Bliesemann de Guevara and Kostić, 2017; Bueger, 2015; Da Costa and
Karlsrud, 2012, 2013; Verkoren, 2006), and contestations between international and
local norms (e.g., Björkdahl and Gusic, 2015; Björkdahl and Höglund, 2013; Hellmüller,
2013; Millar et al., 2013; Tholens and Groß, 2015). This article theorizes that peace
operations may be challenged not only from the outside but also from within by local
staff. The empirical finding of variance in opportunities for local-staff policy influence is
indicative of this argument and merits further research. This finding also corresponds
with recent calls for a more nuanced understanding of the diversity of local actors in
post-war peacebuilding (Hughes et al., 2015; Paffenholz, 2015).
The local knowledge gap in peace operations
Since the first UN operations in the 1960s, peacekeeping has evolved significantly to
encompass a host of activities now known broadly as peacebuilding (see, for instance,
the 1992 Agenda for Peace or the 2008 Capstone Doctrine). Modern multidimensional
peacebuilding operations seek to deliver a broad array of services, including security,
and attempt to build peace from the bottom up. This reflects a notable ‘local turn,’ fol-
lowing the argument that integrating the perspectives and customs of the local society
(including at sub-national levels) into the peace processes and any political settlement is
key to more effective peacebuilding (for an overview, see Leonardsson and Rudd, 2015).
At the heart of this local turn is the nature of international peace operations as external
actors who lack knowledge about the local context. Professional peacebuilders are inter-
national experts who usually make a career by rotating frequently between countries and
missions. Within the expert community, methodological training and expertise in various
peacebuilding techniques...
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