Mateja Peter

Mateja Peter is a post-doctoral fellow in the Transatlantic Post-Doctoral International Relations and Security (TAPIR) program. She comes to USIP from the University of Cambridge, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation on the topic of international administration in Bosnia - Herzegovina. Her research interests lie in peace and state-building, international organizations and politics of the use of force.

Her USIP project is a continuation of her doctoral work and addresses the complexities of international administrations and other sustained third-party engagements in post-conflict areas. It is based on extensive multi-site fieldwork, including ethnographic research at the international administration in Bosnia. Peter provides a critique of existing approaches in the peacebuilding literature, by arguing that these operations are not mere interventions but also encounters that affect all actors involved. She examines these processes in particular through tensions and negotiations between the field and the capitals. Peter argues that complex operations with a long-term and deep presence—such as the ones in the Western Balkans—create the phenomenon of ‘the peacebuilding field.’ Peacebuilders on the ground are shaped by their social interactions in the peacebuilding field and this encounter often puts them at odds with their underwriters. She looks at how this solidarity with the site of intervention influences the ability of the international administration to establish authority on the ground, against domestic and other international actors. This is an aspect of peacebuilding that is substantially under-researched but has important implications on these operations. Her work explores the issues of leadership and highlights the importance of agency in peace operations. By examining the multi-directionality of politics in peace operations, Peter hopes to re-conceptualize our understandings of local–global interactions in these operations.

• “The Metropole–Periphery Power Struggle: Deconstructing the Liberal Peacebuilder in Bosnia and Herzegovina” (paper under review).
• “Enforcer versus Negotiator: The Role of Special Representatives in Peacebuilding Missions.” in Joseph R. Rudolph and William J. Lahneman, eds., From Diplomacy to Nation-Building: Third Party Management of Contemporary Ethnic Conflict (forthcoming).
• “The Politics of Self-Defence: Beyond a Legal Understanding of International Norms,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, vol. 24, no. 2 (2011) 245–64.
• “The Shifting Contours of International State-building Practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina” in Eldar Sarajlic and Davor Marko (eds.) State or Nation Building? Visions, Controversies and Perspectives of Political Transition in Bosnia and Herzegovina, (University of Sarajevo, 2011).