 I have spent the past 17 years studying international peacebuilding initiatives, so I've done that mostly in the Democratic Republic of Congo and also in various other African and non-African countries. And during this fieldwork, I constantly witnessed a puzzling pattern, which is that international interveners kept using, reproducing, perpetuating ways of working that they themselves widely viewed as inefficient, ineffective, even counterproductive. And by interveners, I mean expatriates, foreigners who work in peacebuilding, so that includes donors, diplomats, United Nations peacekeepers, other United Nations staff members, and the foreign staff of international and non-governmental organizations. And by peacebuilding, I mean any and all actions that help promote peace during, before, during, and after a conflict. So when I say peacebuilding, I include all of the actions that United Nations officials and United State Department officials would usually categorize as peacemaking, peacekeeping, and long-term peacebuilding. So let me give you a couple of examples of these kind of puzzling patterns that recur. It is now conventional wisdom that local ownership is absolutely essential for successful peacebuilding, but local stakeholders are rarely included in the design of international programs. Scholars and practitioners regularly emphasize that using universal peacebuilding templates is ineffective and that it's very important to adapt the activities to the local context. And yet, interveners often use models that have worked in other conflict zones, but that are not appropriate for the specific local conditions. Local people and interveners themselves deploy the expatriate's tendency to live in a kind of bubble where they interact mostly with other expatriates and where they contact with host populations. And yet, this phenomenon still recurs in virtually all areas of intervention. Why? What I also found striking when I was in the field is that a number of individuals and organizations ignore or even actively challenge the international peacebuilder's dominant practices, and they suggest alternative modes of operation. The existence of these exceptional cases raises two questions for me. First, what can we learn from them in terms of increasing the effectiveness of international peacebuilding? And second, why haven't they managed yet to convince their colleague to adopt the alternative modes of operation that have proved to be more effective? When you look at the dominant explanations for the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of international peacebuilding, you see that they usually focus on vested interest, material constraints, and the imposition of liberal templates and values. Well, what I found in my research and the central message of the book is that the everyday dimensions of international peacebuilding initiatives on the ground also strongly impact the effectiveness of intervention efforts. And by everyday dimensions, they really mean mundane elements, like the expatriate's social habits, their standard security procedures, the habitual approaches to collecting information on violence. I also look a lot at the influence of informal relationships and personal practices on formal professional initiatives. And in my book, Peaceland, I show that these everyday practices shape the overall intervention from the bottom up. They enable, they constitute, they help reproduce the macro level policies, strategies, institutions, and discourses that political scientists usually study. They also explain the existence and the perpetuation of ways of working that interveners themselves widely view as inefficient, ineffective, even counterproductive. And of course, my approach and existing explanations are not mutually exclusive, but rather, they're complementary. So the book studies the, how interveners make sense of their environment, and especially which and whose knowledge matters in peacebuilding. As you know, in the current international system, the most valued expertise is that of intervener's strength in peacebuilding, humanitarian, and development techniques, and with extensive experience in a variety of conflict zones. In contrast, and although there are exceptions, the knowledge of country specialists is usually much less valued. And the knowledge of local people is usually trivialized. So this practice has productive, positive, intended consequences that increase the effectiveness of international efforts, but it also has negative, unintended consequences that decrease international effectiveness and create enormous local resistance. And something that makes things even worse is that on the ground, peacebuilders face multiple obstacles when they try to collect and analyze data on their areas of deployment. And so I trace the key consequences of the resulting lack of understanding of local context. And one of these key consequences is that the lack of understanding of local conditions entices interveners to rely on simple and often overly simplistic narratives to design their intervention strategies, and again that has numerous counter-projective consequences. So the second part of the book studies the everyday routines that make possible the counter-projective practices and narratives that they just told you about. And I look again at the intended consequences of these routines, such as enabling interveners to function in conflict zones and enabling their organizations to help the host contribute peace. And I also look at the unintended consequences, not only the fact that these everyday routines construct and maintain firm boundaries, a firm separation between interveners and local people, and the fact that they perform, they make visible, they perpetuate, and they reinforce an image of the intervener's superiority of our local people, which these people obviously strongly resent, and again that leads to resistance and rejection. So the routines I analyze include, for instance, the intervener's personal and social experience living and working in conflict zones, are the patterns of social relationships among interveners and between them and local populations, the intervener's standard security routines, their advertisement of their actions, their search for neutrality and impartiality, and their focus on quantitative and short-term results. And throughout the book I look at all of the exceptions to the dominant modes of thinking and acting that I describe. And I show that interveners are much more effective, for instance, when they value local knowledge on par with thematic expertise, when they develop personal and social relationships with their local counterparts, and when they forego standard security routines and the requirement to advertise their actions. So overall, I think that we should adopt a new approach to the study of international peacebuilding, an approach focused on the everyday practice of peacebuilding on the ground. This new approach produces findings that are different from those of existing research. Macro-level policies, strategies, institutions, discourses are not the only determinant of peacebuilding effectiveness. The everyday practice of peacebuilding on the ground also matches tremendously. And it is by looking at these everyday practices and habits that we can understand why interveners contribute to perpetuating modes of operation that they know that we all know are inefficient, ineffective, even counter productive. Everyday practices, habits, narratives are perfectly understandable responses to the difficulties of intervening on the ground in conflict zones. They enable interveners to function in the difficult environments that they face, but they also have numerous counterproductive consequences that decrease the effectiveness of international peace efforts. So what do these research findings tell us about what we can do to end ongoing and future wars? Well, we could rebalance the way interveners value local and thematic knowledge by following the models of the exceptional interveners that I mentioned during this talk. So very concretely, that would mean changing recruitment and promotion practices for interveners, relying much more on local employees, and creating tools and structures to gather local input from intended beneficiaries and surrounding local communities. We could also help interveners break the separations, the boundaries between them and interveners, between them and local people by creating structures for better relationships between interveners and local populations, by convincing interveners to socialize more with their local partners, and by also convincing them to forego standard security routines and the requirement to advertise their actions. And local people could further help break this separation by changing the way they routinely interact with foreign peace builders. Thank you.