Book excerpt: When powerful states and international organizations decide to respond to violent conflict around the world, their preferred policy instrument is to deploy peace operations -- institutions that must serve both the international politics of their creation as well as the fractured local societies they aim to transform. But while their international face has been widely analysed, we know less about how peace operations function 'on the ground.' In How Peace Operations Work, Jeni Whalan addresses this critical dimension of peacekeeping. She analyses the effectiveness of peace operations through a local lens, asking new questions about how they work, and generating new insights about how they might be made to work better. What emerges is the overriding importance of local legitimacy -- the perception among local actors that a peace operation, its personnel, and its objectives are right, fair, and appropriate. How Peace Operations Work demonstrates that when local actors perceive a peace operation to be legitimate, they are more likely to help the operation achieve its goals. This book combines novel theoretical progress with rich empirical work, drawing on in-depth case studies of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) to propose a new approach to studying the effectiveness of peace operations, and a set of practical recommendations that challenge key elements of prevailing peace operations policy.