Comparing how peace operations enable or restrict the influence of national staff: Contestation from within?

A large share of civilian staff working in international peace operations are nationals of the host state. Academic research has not yet investigated the effect of these locally recruited bureaucrats on peacebuilding. Theoretically, it is argued that to accomplish their missions in complex environments, peace operations require crucial knowledge about local perceptions, politics, and customs. Local staff can have a positive performance impact by soliciting such knowledge. But information advantages create new principal-agent problems. Peace operations have a hard time scrutinizing their employees’ allegiances, and they risk sabotage from within. Empirically, it is shown that peace operations conducted by the United Nations (UN), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and the European Union (EU) differ significantly in how they navigate the ensuing tension by enabling or restricting the influence of their local staff. A new data set on the staffing of 52 peace operations as well as analysis of internal staff policies yields significant variance in the potential of local staff to influence peacebuilding policy implementation, which is most extensive in the OSCE, followed by the UN and the EU. This finding warrants more attention on the role of local staff as information gatekeepers who could be at the center of potential frictions between international and local norms and knowledge.