1st Edition

Local Legitimacy in Peacebuilding Pathways to Local Compliance with International Police Reform

By Birte Julia Gippert Copyright 2018

    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.

    Introduction

    PART I: Legitimacy and EU Policebuilding

    1. Theory and Literature

    2. EU Peacebuilding and Police Reform

    PART II: European Poloce Mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina 

    3. EU Police Mission in Bosnia- Herzegovina

    4. EUPM Case Study I: Community-oriented Policing

    5. EUPM Case Study II: Public Complaints Procedure

    PART III: European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo

    6. EU Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo

    7. EULEX Case Study I: Community-Oriented Policing

    8. EULEX Case Study II: Victim Ethnicity in Crime

    PART IV: Comparison and Analysis 

    9. Local Compliance with EUPM and EULEX

    10. Analytical Implications

    Conclusion: The Real-World Effect

    Biography

    Birte Gippert is Lecturer of International Relations at the University of Liverpool, UK, and holds a PhD from the University of Reading, UK.