External Involvement in Peace Agreements

Providing Physical Security or Facilitating Governance?

In this open-access article, Dawn Walsh and I start by noting that that powersharing peace agreements are said to require extensive and prolonged external involvement to facilitate shared governance. However, no comprehensive comparison exists of the roles provided for external actors in powersharing and non-powersharing agreements to evidence this claim. Nor do we understand fully the motivations behind, and effects of, such external involvement. In order to begin filling this gap, we examine the provisions for external actors’ involvement in 286 powersharing and non-powersharing agreements concluded between 1989 and 2016, finding that external involvement is indeed more common in ­powersharing agreements. We then turn to a more granular examination of the case of Northern Ireland through which we can establish that external interventions primarily aimed at providing physical security are critical also for enabling ontological security for both individuals and communities and ultimately facilitate and sustain powersharing governance over time and despite political crises that, occasionally, disrupt processes and institutions of governance.

The Political Studies Association of Ireland awarded the first iteration of the paper that eventually became this article the 2025 Elizabeth Meehan Prize for the best paper presented at the 2024 PSAI Annual Conference.