This chapter examines four cases of collapsed states from the Middle East and North Africa – Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. State collapse was marked by the breakdown of national institutions and the effective loss of a functioning central government. Different governance arrangements appeared across the territory of the country. This chapter discusses the nature of state collapse and its bearing on constitution-making processes and constitutional design. International actors may be drawn in as partisans of different factions or as potential mediators and facilitators of conflict resolution and state reconstruction. Peace-making requires the main factions to accept that the costs of fighting outweigh any benefits and to agree on structured negotiations. Sustainable peace requires agreements on governance, including potentially interim power-sharing, a constitution-making process, transitional security arrangements, and some guiding principles for a reconstructed state. While a federal or devolved governance arrangement may seem logical, the factional elites may prefer power-sharing at the center. If they do opt for a federal or devolved structure, they face vexing issues in defining the constituent units, the allocation of powers, and the nature of central institutions, which may result in an extended period of muddled governance and power politics with no constitutional clarity.

Government lawyers should ensure that public officials act lawfully and in the public interest. Where the lawyers fail to fulfil this gatekeeper role, they can enable state engagement in illegality, authoritarianism, corruption, and human rights abuses. This chapter draws on sixteen interviews with current and former state lawyers in our case study sites. It situates their narratives within literature on government lawyers in democracies, legal ethics, authoritarian bureaucracy, and organisational culture to explore when they adhere to professional legal ethical standards, where they act outside those standards to resist wrongdoing, or become complicit. Factors explored include the significance of lawyers’ political and personal identities, beliefs, and relationships; the organisational structures in which they work; and their perceptions of what constitutes credible, ethical, and professional practice. We find that government lawyers in impaired rule of law settings have capacity to hold the line on ethics and legality, and at times are willing to use their discretion to resist policies that they view as illegal or contrary to the public interest.

The conclusion examines my argument’s implications for both scholarship and policy. For scholars, the evidence I offer here challenges the strict geographic and chronological separation between time periods and peacekeeping missions that some studies take as given. For policymakers, the arguments and evidence I advance contribute to ongoing debates about the future of peace operations.Peacekeeping today is turning increasingly towards a more military posture—but key among my argument’s implications is the idea that if the reconstruction, investment, and refugee resettlement services the international community can provide are more important than security protection to some combatants, then tying negotiation, peacekeeping, and intervention more tightly to the UN’s aid and humanitarian agencies may represent another, better direction for the UN.

The United Nation’s 1990s peacekeeping and peacemaking provoked introspection at the UN, but did not doom the UN’s peacekeeping or peacemaking enterprises. Why does UN peacekeeping remain a desirable part of peace processes despite its reputation as an ineffective measure of protection for civilian populations and warring parties alike?  This book investigates why peacekeeping survived its early catastrophes and how this survival should lead us to reconsider how peacekeeping works. I advance two key claims: first, I argue the UN’s central role in peacemaking and peacekeeping worldwide means peace operations have structural consequences: what the UN does in one place can shift strategies, outcomes, and options available to parties to conflict in other places. Second, drawing peace processes in Rwanda and Guatemala, I argue combatants turn to the UN because its presence enables unique tactical, symbolic, and post-conflict reconstruction outcomes that have little to do with the end of fighting. Combatants who negotiate with the UN’s assistance after peacekeeping failures may do so because negotiation affords them benefits even when they are neither invested in peace nor convinced the UN can help them achieve it. The introduction outlines the problem, situates the answer, and summarizes each chapter of the book.

Chapter 2 lays out the book’s theory, presenting the two hypotheses that guide the rest of the analysis: a distributional theory, where combatants where combatants are motivated by many different goals to seek out UN involvement in peacemaking and peacekeeping; and a credible commitment theory, where combatants are primarily motivated by security concerns. I begin by articulating the structural nature of peace operations, demonstrate how we can observe the social connection between peace operations by examining the high politics of the UN Security Council, and note multiple intellectual traditions anticipate this social connection. I then argue parties to conflict seek the UN’s involvement in negotiation and settlement because they are interested in the distributive and symbolic benefits of intervention— not just international actors’ abilities to manage mistrust between warring parties and resolve credible commitment problems, but what intervention can give them, and what international actors can bring to the post-conflict state.We may be better poised to understand why parties to a conflict seek out UN peacekeeping if we reframe it as a potential solution to a range of security, tactical, material, and symbolic problems. The chapter concludes with observable implications for both hypotheses.

The chapter engages with the practice and potential legal requirement of including various relevant actors and groups in peace processes, with a special focus on women due to the policy focus at the UN and the increased gravity of excluding half the population for reason of gender. The chapter looks at the practical and theoretical reasons for including different actors in peace processes and the risks that come with this. It also explores the source of a potential legal obligation (or justification) for inclusion and what the content of that obligation is. The chapter finishes by addressing whether a gradual broadening of inclusion could be seen as an acceptable compromise to lower the risks of inclusion, while trying to maximise the benefits.

The increasing participation of armed groups in peace agreements, coupled with the relatively uncertain status of non-state actors under international law, raises a number of important but as yet unsettled questions. This chapter addresses three key issues. The first is the legal status of armed groups under international law. This has direct consequences with respect to the status of peace agreements, and whether they may be regarded as establishing binding international legal obligations or as mere political declarations of intent. The second is the designation of certain groups as ‘terrorist’, and the implications on their participation in peace processes. The third is the role of customary international law vis-à-vis the regulation of peace agreements. The focus of this component is on the potential role of non-state armed groups in the process of creating customary law. Of particular interest is the emergence of customary law regarding the inclusion of human rights considerations in peace agreements.