This chapter tests observable implications of localized peace enforcement theory at the individual level using two experiments conducted in Mali. First, the chapter presents the results of a study designed to measure willingness to cooperate using a trust game where participants send money to an anonymous partner from a different ethnic group. A randomly assigned group of participants is told that two patrolling officers (from either the UN or France) will punish any low partner contributions with a fine. While the UN treatment increased participants’ willingness to cooperate, the France treatment had no effect. Follow-up interviews confirmed the importance of perceptions of the UN’s impartiality. Second, the chapter outlines the results of a survey that presents respondents with a vignette describing a communal dispute. Respondents were then randomly assigned to a control, UN, or French treatment group. Assignment to the UN treatment group – but not the French treatment group – reduced the likelihood that respondents said a communal dispute would escalate. To probe the plausibility of localized peace enforcement theory specifically, the chapter concludes with an analysis of specific questions about individuals’ perceptions of peacekeepers from the survey.

This chapter discusses the potential transition from linear to circular economy providing a concise overview of circular economy. It adopts the extended ‘circular city’ concept beyond mere circular economy and proposes to incorporate the staggering amount and variety of city assets and products available in cities. The chapter combines them with various circular actions to determine the enormous potential, which constitutes circular cities. The chapter also illustrates how to generate circular actions in cities by referring to examples and proposes a unified pragmatic stepwise methodology to implement circularity in urban contexts. Four clear steps of the methodology are described for practitioners and a number of non-exhaustive auxiliary means are listed. Examples are provided to demonstrate the use of circularity auxiliary means in practical urban implementations. The proposed methodology aims to prioritise circularity actions towards the achievement of carbon emissions reduction and can be revised over time as the cities progress. Further research areas and the immense potential available to cities for its application are also mentioned which can enhance the application of the proposed methodology. The chapter lists a set of observations as concluding remarks and presents a brief overview of the proposed methodology.

This chapter explores how domestic political factors related to oil and gas resource nationalism and its path-dependency effect influence energy transition capabilities. Methodologically, the chapter adopts a qualitative case study approach in paired oil-rich countries, Kuwait, (UAE), Mexico, and Brazil.

It explores how the origins of each country’s resource nationalism have influenced their abilities to adapt to a post-hydrocarbon economy. Countries that have adopted social-based policies such as Kuwait and Mexico, transition to renewable energy more slowly in comparison with countries that have adopted market-based policies like the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Brazil. Understanding these factors expands the literature on energy-rich countries beyond the concepts of the resource curse and rentier states, allowing academics to propose theories that are better suited to the heterogeneous nature of energy-rich countries.

Chapter 9 concludes the book by highlighting implications that are relevant for academic researchers as well as policymakers. The book’s findings suggest at least three areas for future research. First, a more comprehensive analysis of the sources of perceptions of bias in conflict settings would productively inform scholarship and practice. Second, future work should investigate the conditions under which communal peace aggregates up to the national level. Third, scholars should examine whether governments and their partners succeed in leveraging gains from localized peace enforcement into states with robust institutions. The book also has two important implications for the practice of peacekeeping. First, given the importance of perceptions, policymakers must ensure that peacekeepers remain impartial. International actors perceived by local populations as relatively impartial are much more effective at promoting intergroup cooperation and facilitating the peaceful resolution of communal disputes. Second, given that communal peace in the analysis relies so heavily on the presence of UN peacekeepers, the international community must consider how to design peaceful transitions out of PKOs.

This introductory chapter offers a short overview of carbon neutrality, the great expectations surrounding its primary beneficiaries, and the macro opportunities and implications it will have, political, economic, and social. It then quickly narrows the focus to the emerging economies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, their evolving nature, and the role envisioned for carbon neutrality in their transformation from oil-based to cleaner, knowledge-based economies. Next, the chapter contextualises the challenges facing GCC countries to effectively transition towards carbon neutrality. The gap between the aforementioned interest and potential of carbon neutrality in the region and the scholarly work on the topic is then highlighted, motivating the need for the current volume. The objectives, scope, and expected contributions of the volume are finally presented.

The circular carbon economy (CCE) concept aims to provide a holistic, technology-agnostic, and cost-effective framework for assessing climate change mitigation options and pathways at a global, national, or organisational level with the ultimate goal of full carbon circularity or net zero carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. To help policy discussions around the CCE, we developed the CCE Index, which covers 30 major economies and oil-producing countries on 47 quantitative indicators in its first edition in 2021. Using the 2021 Edition index results, this chapter compares the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to their relevant peers. While GCC countries outperform their non-OECD and African peers, there is still room for improvement compared to high-income countries. Our findings suggest that underutilised technologies, such as renewable energy and nuclear energy, have great potential to improve CCE performance in the region. Increased access to sustainable finance and a more ambitious transition investment agenda can better position the region in accelerating the CCE transition. More broadly, the GCC countries should undertake further efforts to increase emissions circularity if they wish to maintain their competitiveness amidst the global transition to net-zero in many performance and enablers areas of the CCE transition.

This chapter applies localized peace enforcement theory to a subnational analysis of patterns of dispute escalation in Mali. In order to investigate whether the previous chapters’ experimental findings generalize to real-world operations, the chapter presents the results of two analyses of UN peacekeeping efforts to prevent the onset of communal violence in the central Malian region of Mopti. The first study leverages a geographic regression discontinuity design to compare dispute escalation on either side of the Burkina Faso–Mali border. The border splits similar areas into those “treated” with UN peacekeeping patrols (on the Mali side) and “control” areas without peacekeeping (on the Burkina Faso side). The findings indicate that peacekeeping reduces the likelihood of communal violence. The second study delves deeper into the data with an analysis of UN peacekeepers from different countries deployed to the same regions of Mali and uncovers further evidence in line with the predictions of the theory. Rather than comparing UN peacekeeping in countries with against those without a peacekeeping operation, the study compares UN peacekeepers from different contributing countries – Togo and Senegal – deployed to the same area.

This introductory chapter explains the book’s motivating puzzles and outlines its theoretical and empirical strategies. The book focuses on local-level peacekeeping operations designed explicitly to prevent communal violence. It argues that deploying UN peacekeepers to fragile settings fundamentally changes the structural incentives facing communities in conflict. Scholars typically pinpoint the UN’s success at the negotiating table: peacekeepers help armed group leaders make lasting agreements that stabilize conflict settings from the top down. Yet such negotiations seem unable to prevent communal violence in places as diverse as South Sudan in East Africa, Mali in West Africa, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa. This book shifts the analytical lens to the local level to investigate the conditions under which peacekeepers successfully build peace from the bottom up. The book’s main argument is that UN peacekeepers succeed when local populations perceive them to be relatively impartial enforcers who are unconnected to the country of deployment, the conflict, and the parties to the dispute. Impartial peacekeepers convince all parties that they will punish those who escalate communal disputes regardless of their identity, which increases communities’ willingness to cooperate without the fear of violence.

This chapter begins the second part of the book, which tests the main empirical implications of localized peace enforcement theory using data from Mali, a land-locked country in West Africa. Though Mali experienced three coups, a separatist civil war, and an Islamist extremist insurgency from 2012 to 2024, no source of conflict has been more fatal or detrimental to Malian society than communal violence. The chapter starts by providing a very brief history of identity-based conflict in the country. It also places Mali within a broader historical context and demonstrates that its experience of interethnic tensions is representative of countries with colonial legacies. The chapter then draws on detailed interviews with forty-eight local leaders to describe what communal violence and peacekeeping look like in Mali from the residents’ perspective. Given the theoretical importance domestic perceptions of peacekeepers, these interviews offer crucial insights into the plausibility of localized peace enforcement theory. There are distinct advantages of studying the Malian case, which the chapter describes in a brief overview of international interventions by the UN and France from 2012 to 2024.

This chapter examines the implications of Saudi Arabia’s net zero by 2060 goal for domestic politics and on the kingdom’s stature in the international community. The gargantuan task of decarbonizing Saudi Arabia is evident in its disproportionate oil use: The kingdom is the world’s No. 4 consumer of oil, despite overseeing the world’s 20th biggest economy and its 41st largest population. There are legitimate doubts about the credibility of Saudi commitment to net zero, given the regime’s track record of noncompliance with prior clean energy goals. A realistic net-zero undertaking would require an overhaul of a fossil fuel-driven society and economy in less than four decades. Sweeping changes would affect the consumption of energies and services, resulting in enormous shifts in ingrained behaviour and in consuming technologies. Difficulties aside, Saudi Arabia holds major advantages in decarbonization. These include unused land with copious solar radiation, as well as geological storage near carbon emissions clusters. Since the global transition could not happen without the kingdom’s cooperation, a documented achievement of decarbonization milestones would increase global goodwill and provide added credibility required to shape the energy transition in ways that could ensure long-term roles for hydrocarbons.

This chapter explains how UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs) have changed over time, paying particular attention to how UN PKO mandates have evolved to address communal disputes. It begins with a general overview of UN PKOs over time. The chapter then briefly reviews the academic research on international interventions, which offers robust evidence that peacekeepers bolster peace and stability after conflict. However, this scholarship has not sufficiently examined whether (or how) UN PKOs limit communal violence. Communal disputes are a critical source of instability, violence, and disorder around the world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Conflict from such disputes has killed nearly 250,000 people in the region since the turn of the century, more than violence from governments or rebel groups. And the problem is getting worse. Given that climate change, global migration patterns, and the growth of violent extremism will likely exacerbate communal disputes in the coming years, it is vital to understand how UN peacekeepers can help resolve them. The chapter discusses what distinguishes communal violence from other forms of intrastate violence before concluding with a summary of local-level UN PKOs designed to address communal disputes.