Local Peace, International Builders: How UN Peacekeeping Builds Peace from the Bottom Up by William G. Nomikos, is an important intervention into peacekeeping scholarship. Professor Nomikos's book takes a complex, comprehensive, multilayered, and genuinely multimethod approach to argue that civilians’ perceptions of peacekeepers shape their ability to manage local disputes. More specifically, Nomikos argues that peacekeepers who are perceived to be impartial by local populations can help resolve communal disputes by making these local communities believe peacekeepers will punish those who escalate communal violence, regardless of their identity; this, in turn, increases these communities’ willingness to cooperate and resolve conflicts without fear of violence. Put another way, successful peacekeeping is possible in communities that trust UN peacekeepers to be impartial, and peacekeepers can build peace from the bottom-up specifically because they are outsiders.

Over the last three decades, scholars of peacekeeping have examined its efficacy from every angle, trying to square their findings on its aggregate success with their immersive studies of its staggering failures. An uneasy synthesis emerges from these works: when warring parties are committed to a political settlement for their disputes, peacekeeping works astonishingly well at e