The institutional lives of peace. A historical-institutionalist perspective on the (unintended) political legacies of peacebuilding

Abstract International Relations (IR) scholarship has long debated the design of peacebuilding interventions. Yet institutional design often reveals little about how peace institutions function in practice. Many institutions persist despite failing to meet their intended goals, evolving in unanticipated ways. This article asks why peace institutions endure and what unintended and unforeseen legacies they generate. To centre the political lives of peace institutions, we advance cross-disciplinary dialogue and draw on historical institutionalism. Its core concepts – particularly displacement, layering, drift, and conversion – provide an analytical lens through which we advance a threefold argument: first, peace institutions follow political trajectories through which they assume unforeseen roles and acquire new political significance; second, they persist through change amid failure; and third, institutional change follows patterned trajectories across conflict junctures. We develop this argument through discussions of peace institutions in four contexts: Angola, Colombia, Cyprus, and Sri Lanka. These cases anchor the article’s central contribution: demonstrating the analytical merits of historical institutionalism across diverse peacebuilding settings. Beyond offering a new impetus for theory building, historical institutionalism also provides cautious hope: peace institutions frequently fall short of their grand ambitions to engineer peace, yet their endurance can generate legacies that open space for unexpected political change.