Military force and the resultant wars cannot compel either party to sign a final peace agreement. In order to reach a peace treaty, they need to negotiate and offer concessions. Contingent factors like leadership and third-party mediation still matter for closing the diplomatic deal. Egypt and Israel fought wars, but the Camp David Accords (1978) and the peace treaty (1979) that fundamentally changed and stabilized the strategic relations between the two countries came through a diplomatic process. A second example, Israel and Syria, shows that force alone is not enough to produce peace. Their negotiations failed, and they remain adversaries to this day.

Feminist institutionalism aims to understand and explain how power is distributed within institutions. As a political project, feminist institutionalism (FI) seeks to disrupt existing power settlements within institutions and facilitate change by identifying and challenging institutional barriers that sustain gender inequalities and other forms of discrimination. This chapter explores how FI contributes to explaining how peacekeeping is a gendered enterprise in the context of the global racialised and classed power relations that underscore the contemporary international security system. The chapter first discusses the key assumptions of FI and considers how the theory can help explain why contemporary peace operations take the shape that they do. Applying an FI approach to the study of institutional change and institutional reproduction, the chapter then examines how the implementation of gender equality initiatives in the Ghana Armed Forces impact on the way in which female military peacekeepers from Ghana are deployed to UN peace operations. Two institutional barriers that are known to prevent women’s meaningful participation in peace operations are examined: recruitment processes and deployment criteria.

Although UN peacekeeping fits the definition of an ‘international institution’, liberal institutionalism has not been the dominant theory in the literature. However, several aspects of UN peacekeeping – coalition-building in the UN Security Council, domestic pressures for intervention, and troop contributions – have been studied by drawing on liberal institutionalist concepts and insights. A particular difficulty is presented by the consensual and secretive nature of Security Council negotiations, which makes its voting record less informative than in other international organisations and requires other sources of data, such as on the sponsorship of peacekeeping resolutions. The analysis of sponsorship behaviour reveals that the dominant coalition consisting of the US and European states has drafted the majority of peacekeeping resolutions. The coalition has been quite successful at ensuring the smooth adoption of the resolutions. Yet recently, more states – including Russia and China – have abstained on peacekeeping resolutions, suggesting a weakening of the dominant coalition’s position. As new sources of data emerge (for example, on the content of peacekeeping resolutions), we can expect further applications of liberal institutionalism.

Although the literature on UN peacekeeping has been growing steadily in the last three decades, the engagement with International Relations theory has been slow. However, in the last few years, the scholarly attention to UN peacekeeping from a range of theoretical starting points has been burgeoning. The chapter first discusses this development, provides a brief overview of the history of peacekeeping, and outlines how peacekeeping is governed. It then summarises the main strands in the literature on peacekeeping and the accompanying methodological development of peacekeeping scholarship. Finally, the chapter provides a brief introduction to each of the chapters of the book.

This chapter applies a sociological institutionalist frame to UN peacekeeping and explains the role of norms, rules, and culture in shaping the behaviour of peacekeeping actors. More specifically, sociological institutionalism focuses on actors as social agents whose behaviour is culturally specific and constructed around ideas of appropriateness; we can thus better understand not only why UN peacekeeping takes the form that it does but also how and why it changes over time through an examination of the internal institutional environment of the UN and the self-images and values of UN staff. These dynamics are illustrated empirically with a discussion of local ownership in UN peacekeeping that demonstrates how UN staff engage in inefficient or contradictory behaviours because of their need to perceive that their actions are appropriate and legitimate and to remain aligned with their own institutional standards.

This chapter aims at assessing the place of the UN Charter in ‘action movies’, i.e. movies representing the use of armed force in international relations. After spending several hundreds of hours in watching films and series of this kind, a clear conclusion can be drawn: the UN Charter rules are, in most cases, not cited or even evoked as such. The legal debate often appears unnecessary, inappropriate or absurd. To the viewer, it is rather the emergency of the situation and the necessity of action that prevails. In the rare cases where a legal rule is at stake, it is either interpreted broadly to justify military action, or rejected as a formalistic and unrealistic constraint. All in all, action movies generally represent the UN Charter rule on the use of force as inefficient, illegitimate or even ludicrous. Those characteristics can sometimes be explained by certain links between Hollywood and the Pentagon. But, in most cases, the image of a UN Charter with limited scope and effects appears as a cultural representation shared by many directors and filmmakers without any political interference.

In the Arab–Israeli conflict, the dominant idea has been that force is the best way to achieve state aims while negotiations and concessions are a poor choice. What makes that idea hard to change? Three factors reinforce a commitment to military force as the dominant means: the realist structure of global politics; the multi-actor, non-unitary nature of global politics; and the impact that fear has in reinforcing the idea that force and sometimes violence are the best approach for achieving one’s national objectives or advancing one’s national security. At the same time, sometimes a secondary idea, that negotiations and concessions are the best available means and military force is counterproductive, has prevailed in this conflict. What leads to a change in the ideas? They include leadership from within the warring parties that embraces the idea of negotiations as a more effective policy tool, external mediation, an unexpected event or technological change, tit-for-tat interactions that build toward talking or even a mutually agreeable outcome, and changing threat environments. Both the 1970s and 1990s (with the Oslo process) witnessed some shifting in the dominant idea as Arabs and Israelis negotiated.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has inspired an abundant filmography, which traces the main events and addresses many aspects of the conflict. Based on a material composed of about eighty feature films and television series, the chapter studies the way international law with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is represented on screen. Three major themes emerged in this regard, which are analysed successively: the creation of the State of Israel and its consequences on the Palestinian people; the Israeli occupation; the peace process in the Middle East and the ways to achieve it. The chapter concludes with a broader reflection on the place occupied by cinema in the conflict, as a means of struggle, as the object of controversy or as a symbol.

On Earth, interspecies relationships are mainly based on one rule: the fittest species (the human being) has the right to exploit other species at its own discretion. It can hunt, imprison, enslave and kill them. This is at the core of international trade law, which considers non-human animals as mere products destined to fulfil human needs. While dominant, this model of interspecies relationships is not exclusive. Other regimes provide for obligations either to protect certain weaker species from extinction or to foster their general well-being. Currently, however, these models are underrepresented. This chapter aims to understand if and to what extent science fiction movies convey a representation of interspecies relationships similar to the one embodied by current international law. Relying on non-existent models of alterity these movies often question the relations the fittest species should entertain with the weaker one. Based on the study of various mainstream science fiction movies, this chapter concludes that they often offer an alternative vision of interspecies relationships, based on an obligation of coexistence and respect. The chapter provides some insights as to the factors that could explain the difference between the existing legal models of interspecies relationships and the fantasized version offered cinematic productions.

This chapter takes a rational-choice institutionalist approach to UN peacekeeping and shows that the principal-agent model can offer valuable heuristic insights for analysing the most pressing challenges to date. It highlights the importance of studying preference heterogeneities among UN Security Council (UNSC) members, information asymmetries between the UNSC, the UN Secretariat and troops in the field, and the capacity and willingness of the involved principals to install credible and effective monitoring mechanisms. The chapter particularly focuses on the value of conceptualising so-called chains of delegation to get grip on the politics of control in the increasingly complex web of agents in UN peacekeeping. In doing so, it focuses on two challenges in particular: first, information flows between the UN headquarters in New York and the missions in-theatre; and, second, the difficulty that comes with the increased involvement of regional organisations in peace operations.

The chapter discusses how practice theories have informed analyses of peacekeeping. Following a brief overview of practice theories, a theoretical agenda that has started with relying on the works of Pierre Bourdieu but has since diversified, the chapter argues that such approaches lend themselves particularly well to integrating practitioner perspectives into academic writing on peacekeeping. The chapter also surveys how practice theoretical approaches have benefited from close conversations with constructivism and examines this by summarising research making understandable considerable differences in implementing the protection of civilians. It closes by arguing that practice theories promise innovative and often micro-level accounts of peacekeeping dynamics just as peacekeeping operations become increasingly varied and experimental.