About the event: Communal disputes over local issues such as land use, cattle herding, and access to scarce resources are a leading cause of conflict across the world. In the coming decades, climate change, forced migration, and violent extremism will exacerbate such disputes in places that are ill equipped to handle them. Local Peace, International Builders examines the conditions under which international interventions mitigate communal violence. The book argues that civilian perceptions of impartiality, driven primarily by the legacies of colonialism, shape interveners’ ability to manage local disputes. Drawing on georeferenced data on the deployment of over 100,000 UN peacekeepers to fragile settings in the twenty-first century as well as a multimethod study of intervention in Mali – where widespread violence is managed by the international community – this book highlights a critical pathway through which interventions can maintain order in the international system.

About the speaker: William G. Nomikos is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he directs the Data-driven Analysis of Peace Project (DAPP) lab. His research looks at how domestic political considerations shape the conduct of international interventions in fragile settings. His first book, Local Peace, International Builders: How the UN Builds Peace from the Bottom Up, examines the conditions under which international actors successfully bring order, peace, and stability to fragile settings. His follow up work on this subject examines what peacekeepers can do to mitigate climate change-induced social conflict in weakly institutionalized settings.

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