Peacebuilding has become a central activity to the international community's pursuit of sustainable peace. The rising number of violent conflicts over the last decades and the increasing complexity of conflict scenarios have contributed to this development (Strand, Rustad, Urdal & Nygård, 2019). With conflict centres remaining in many parts of the world, such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen or South Sudan, it is likely that the urge for the international community to engage in peacebuilding activities will not end any time soon. Given the weakening of a shared understanding over the right tools to address conflicts and a diversification of actors, we can thereby see an increasing contestation over the norms guiding peacebuilding endeavours. One of these contested norms is the norm of local ownership, i.e. the importance to include the 'local' into peacebuilding processes to achieve sustainable peace. The European Union has enthusiastically embraced this norm but has been challenged by other countries and the literature in regard to its inability to successfully implement it (Bojicic-Dzelilovic & Martin, 2018; Dursun-Ozkanca & Vandemoortele, 2012; Ejdus, 2017; Mac Ginty, 2018). The 'new' actors on the scene such as the BRICS and other countries from the global south have argued that the European Union and other traditional donors are not moving beyond their liberal peacebuilding approaches, which are often tied to a heavy external intervention in the sovereignty of the host state and hence in their eyes fail to ensure local participation (De Carvalho & De Coning, 2013). At the same time, these new donors have claimed for themselves that their southsouth partnerships are more successful in engaging the local population on a horizontal level (Brasilia Declaration, 2010; United Nations, 2018a). India has been The original version of this chapter was revised: It has been changed to open access under a CC BY 4.

Why have the EU and India been unable to explore the common potential of their partnership in peacekeeping training? Drawing upon the literature of practice theories and the concept of community of practices, as well as semi-structured interviews with policy-makers and peacekeeping trainers from India and the EU, policy documents and participant observation, the article explores the complementarity of structures of the EU's and India's training communities and discusses the implicit knowledge which is guiding the practices of actors. Thereby, the article moves away from offering structural explanations, such as diverging strategic interests, which have dominated the literature on the EU's external relations with Asia. Comparing the practice communities, the article finds substantial divergence in the material and ideational structure of training institutes. Moreover, the article illustrates that the disposition of actors in the Indian training community is characterized by the unspoken understanding that India's training philosophy is more compatible with other countries from the Global South. While both structures, as well as dispositions of actors are unfavourable vis-à-vis an EU-India partnership in peacekeeping training, the article concludes that by addressing familiarity gaps among training communities, divergences in structures and dispositions can be overcome.

The Indian government has presented itself as a champion of gender mainstreaming in UN peacekeeping. At the same time, the domestic security sector in India continues to create a gender-segregated environment and experiences of uniformed women in the field show remaining barriers for gender equity. Given this contradiction, the article examines the ambivalence inherent to Indian gender mainstreaming of peacekeeping units. We argue that transnational norms, such as gender mainstreaming, are embedded in larger norm bundles, and we combine the literature of norm localization and norm contestation in our conceptual framework to illustrate how India localizes parts of the gender mainstreaming norm bundle whilst contesting others. We find that India's localization of the gender mainstreaming norm has meant to pursue an asymmetric gender-parity approach between different branches of the Indian security forces and that it has fomented a division of labour within the police corps. Moreover, we illustrate how India contests the idea of placing women in security-sensitive areas, in combat roles, and gender-integrated police units.