a significant scale, Somaliland, is noteworthy precisely for the lack of international involvement( Bradbury 2008, 245 – 46; Cairns 2006; Eubank 2010; Lewis 2008, ix – x and 95; Menkhaus 1996; Renders 2012, 3).
Worse, research on the local impacts of international efforts has yielded disheartening findings. Costalli( 2014) argues that, despite some positive outcomes, peacekeeping deployment does not reduce subsequent violence at the municipal level. Mvukiyehe and Samii( 2010) demonstrate that peacekeepers neither promote local security nor help restore local authority. Likewise, both communitydriven reconstruction projects and disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs regularly fail to reach many of their intended goals( Gilligan, Mvukiyehe, and Samii 2012; Humphreys, Sanchez de la Sierra, and Van der Windt 2012; Humphreys and Weinstein 2007). Some foreign peace efforts have even increased the number and severity of human rights violations in Uganda( Branch 2011), hampered democracy in Malawi and Tajikistan( Englund 2006; Heathershaw 2009), amplified gender disparities and sexual abuse in Bosnia, Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone( Simm 2013), disrupted local economies in Congo, Liberia, and South Sudan( Bøa˚s and Jennings in progress), and fueled violence in Congo and Afghanistan( Autesserre 2012; Martin 2014). There is some research on successful international support to local or bottomup peacebuilding processes. Unfortunately, most of those existing studies focus on one program, initiative, organization, or sector instead of adopting a broader view of the situation( for instance, Ford 2006; Sambunjaka and Simunovi ch 2007; Shank and Schirch 2008). This approach overlooks the interplay between various peacebuilding efforts and limits the generalizability of any theoretical findings. Moreover, these studies are often written either as reports by the donor or implementing organization, who try to paint themselves in the best possible light( e. g., McGuinness 2012; Pinnington 2014), or as contracted outside evaluations, which also include biases such as self-censorship, data manipulation, and nonpublication of critical findings( author’ s interviews, 2010 – 2016; Church and Rogers 2006, 195). Finally, the handful of scholarly studies on successful international peace efforts at the local level have all produced very different findings( Autesserre 2014b; Cairns 2006; Campbell 2017; Holohan 2005; Moore 2013; Zanotti 2010; Zelizer and Rubinstein 2009). This wide variation in findings is also present in the ninety-seven evaluations of recent international peacebuilding projects that I reviewed for this article. This leaves us with no clear understanding of the mechanisms through which foreign interveners can best contribute to grassroots conflict resolution and which international actors or actions are particularly helpful on the ground. In sum, existing research lacks analysis of what allows peacebuilding to succeed at the subnational level. As a result, as the next section details, many policymakers and practitioners rely on unsupported assumptions rather than on empirical evidence to formulate and implement their programs.
Understanding the Role of Assumptions in Peacebuilding The Critical Role of Assumptions
Studies of what policymakers and practitioners call“ theories of change” underscore the crucial role of assumptions in current peacebuilding efforts. Theories of change are not“ theories” in the academic understanding of the term; instead, they are“ explanations of how and why a set of activities”— for instance, a disarmament project— will achieve desired objectives, such as a more peaceful society( Lederach, Neufeldt, and Culbertson 2007, 25). One might expect all peacebuilding initiatives to be grounded in theories of change that enunciate a clear causal chain and are substantiated by evidence. However, most peace projects instead rely on unsupported assumptions. Explicit theories of change are absent from many peacebuilding program documents and,“ in many cases, theories of change or logical frameworks are not a key part, or a part at all, of the programme-planning process”( Brown et al. 2015, 9, see also 5, 14, and 31). Rather, these programs rest upon implicit and implicitly shared theories of change, which are rooted in the project designers’ cumulative experience. The problem with both stated and unstated theories of change is that they are often unrealistic or overly simplistic( Brown et al. 2015; Cameron et al.