A Perpetual (Liberal) Peace? An Empirical Assessment of an Enduring Peacebuilding Model

How has the local turn approach been translated within peacebuilding mission mandates? Novelties introduced by International and Regional Organizations' strategic documents shape a new approach termed 'local turn' (LT) in the literature, which envisages a more context-sensitive peacebuilding focused on resilience and local ownership. While finding significant potential, academic debate describes LT as a strategic adaptation of the liberal peace paradigm, functional to the provision of means for a pragmatic retreat from (over)ambitious goals. The study builds on this by focusing on a rather unexplored type of primary source: mission mandates. Through automated text analysis, we trace the consistency of liberal peace and local turn features in the United Nations and European Union peacebuilding mandates over the past two decades. The results confirm a detachment between policy orientations versus goals and instruments already at the level of mandates and highlight traits of systematicity in the utilitarian use of LT as an exit strategy. This study enriches the literature on UN and EU peacebuilding and paves the way for further research on policy change in post-conflict reconstruction.