The aim of this book is to unpack local ownership of United Nations peacekeeping operations and to explain why they have continued to fail to effectively operationalize the idea (p. 7). The interest and importance in understanding the dynamics of local ownership are clear: it has “emerged as one of the leading principles shaping peacekeeping operations” (p. 2), with a long history in development (see Chapter 3) but remains remarkably understudied. The UN faces a fundamental challenge when it comes to peacekeeping operations: They intervene in order to ensure international peace and security, but this comes at the cost of one of their fundamental normative principles, national self-determination. In order to reconcile the normative obligation with the operational principle, local ownership is advocated as a “solution.” Through local ownership, the affront to self-determination is mitigated, and the peacekeeping operation becomes more legitimate and sustainable.

According to Sarah von Billerbeck this is where the trouble starts, however. First, the UN discourse on local ownership is restricted to the constraints of liberal peacebuilding, and fails to include an adequate conceptualization that is tied to the national understanding of the idea, linked to communitarian peacebuilding (p. 48). Second, the discourse stands in contrast to the practice of ownership, which limits both the actors who are included and the scope of what they can address (p. 119). Here, von Billerbeck further differentiates between divergent practices among UN peacekeepers, namely, liberal ownership (where many local actors—with liberal ideals—are consulted, albeit with limited impact due to their low capacity) and elite ownership (where a handful of elites are given more responsibility, albeit at the risk of being seen as biased). Fundamentally, because local ownership is operationalized in an ad hoc and inconsistent manner and constrains local agency, the opposite effect occurs (p. 79). Nationals do not see any real ownership, which means that any legitimacy gains are lost (p. 84). Worse, for elite ownership approaches, the UN actually loses its leverage among national elites, which can lead to increased personalization of politics for individuals, at times in direct contrast to the liberal goals of peacekeeping missions (p. 141). Third, therefore, at best the UN uses local ownership as a discursive tool for self-legitimation.

In Whose Peace? these rather damning findings are laid out in a series of chapters focusing on the normative and discursive background of ownership (Chapter 2–4), the operationalization in terms of practices and actors (Chapter 5 and 6, respectively), the repercussions for legitimacy (Chapter 7), the operational liberalization goals of contemporary peacekeeping operations (Chapter 8), and some final thoughts on the broader debate (Chapter 9).

The reader should not be misled by this rather slim book: In just over 150 pages (plus appendices) the author makes several sophisticated arguments that help the reader navigate the dizzying contribution (or lack thereof) and influence of local ownership in the last decade of peacebuilding. Von Billerbeck, in fact, provides the reader with a thorough conceptual history of numerous ideas—not just local ownership but also self-determination, liberal versus communitarian peacebuilding, and legitimacy. In particular, her discussion of legitimacy and the necessity of looking at the audience of legitimacy is excellent, addressing an area often overlooked.

The author could nonetheless advance her work by further strengthening parts of the argument and discussing future research more thoroughly. First, the arguments in the book are overlapping and sometimes difficult to disentangle: She argues that local actors are given too little agency at some points (Chapter 5) but also given too much agency at others (Chapter 6). Further, the author argues that local ownership is used to redress the balance between the UN’s normative and operation goals, but that ownership is also curtailed in order to achieve the latter. She concludes that the discursive approach only self-legitimizes the UN and that the practices negate any exogenous legitimacy to local actors. These arguments are not contradictory per se, but highly complex.

At certain points, von Billerbeck could have fleshed out her ideas to help the reader in the process. For example, she makes a strong case for the UN assumption that local actors do not have sufficient capacity to carry out peacebuilding tasks, but less so for the idea that local actors are “undemocratic and illiberal” (p. 85) or that “indigenous forms of governance are inadequate to maintain peace” (p. 71). By noting the unease of UN staff with intervention elsewhere (p. 121), she makes a rather strong accusation. In any case, advocates of liberal ownership would restrict themselves to working with “liberal-minded” actors only, and those seeking out elite ownership explicitly ignore such reservations. One approach that would have strengthened this claim is to give more room to explaining the book’s methodology. The author obviously has an excellent knowledge of the main case study—the Democratic Republic of Congo—and there are nearly a hundred interviews to support her work. But what kind of questions did she ask? How did she approach the topic of local ownership without asserting her own preconceptions? Who were the national Congolese actors she talked to? In one note (20, p. 57) von Billerbeck mentions that local ownership was frequently translated into French as “appropriation”; this is fascinating and leaves the reader wanting to know more about the methodology applied.

Although von Billerbeck engages with a variety of scholarly debates, she completely sidelines the literature on power sharing, for example, despite the obvious repercussions that this has for local ownership, and especially elite ownership. That Western support of powersharing agreements incentivizes rebels to fight their way to power, for example (see Denis Tull and Andreas Mehler, “The Hidden Costs of Power-Sharing,” African Affairs, 104(416), 2005: 375–398), mirrors her arguments concerning elite owners co-opting the UN’s discursive emphasis on local ownership for their own benefit (e.g., p. 132). Similarly, the author mentions the actual peacebuilding practitioners on several occasions, including their contentious relationship with the local populations (p. 46), and that staff and missions engage with various methods of implementation at different times (pp. 79–80). Yet she does not engage with the seminal work of Séverine Autesserre, Peaceland (2014) on this subject, though many of Autesserre’s findings would back up her own.

Time and time again von Billerbeck returns to the contradiction between the norm of self-determination and the practice of peacekeeping. The reader is left wondering: if by continuously showing that the operational objectives of peacekeeping are prioritized over the norm of self-determination (e.g. p. 76), is there perhaps a norm of liberal peacebuilding? Moreover, apart from pointing out the irreconcilable nature between theory and practice (p. 152), where do we go next? Does the UN need to drop its discourse of local ownership because of the harmful effects this has on legitimacy (e.g. p. 132)? Or does it merely need to be introduced later on, when the first operational gains in peacekeeping have succeeded? Alternatively, does the UN need to rethink the conceptualization and operationalization of local ownership, which are only possible if the liberal peacebuilding framework is dropped? Is liberal peacebuilding even the right approach for the UN, considering that most UN member states are not even liberal democracies (see note 30, p. 50)? Something needs to change. After all, von Billerbeck has convincingly shown that peace does not belong to national actors, which has detrimental effects on the legitimacy and effectiveness of the liberal peacebuilding model.