Research

Despite the wealth of academic research on United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations, we know remarkably little about the causes of violence against peacekeepers. The dramatic increase in peacekeeper casualties over the past decade make this omission particularly problematic. This article demonstrates that violence against peacekeepers stems from strategic motivations. Peacekeepers in multidimensional PKOs serve as substitute providers of governance and security, working to bolster perceived state capacity and legitimacy in areas where the government cannot send its own forces. Insurgents target peacekeepers in expectation of a PKO unit's capacity to win over the support of local civilians. We argue that insurgents rely on three primary heuristics to predict the downstream efficacy of peacekeeping forces: personnel composition, peacekeeper nationality, and local levels of insurgent control. We test our theory using an original dataset of geocoded UN multidimensional peacekeeping deployments peacekeeping deployments. Using primary documents sourced directly from the UN covering 10 multidimensional peacekeeping operations from 1999-2018, we present comprehensive time-series data on UN peacekeeper deployment location. We find preliminary evidence that peacekeepers are targeted because of their cultural similarity with noncombatants and, in some cases, because they patrol areas where insurgents have political control.

Research in political science has shown that UN peacekeeping operations are an important tool for ending civil war violence. However, much less is known about how UN peacekeepers affect communal violence at the level of the individual, family, or community. Given that communal disputes over local issues such as land use, cattle herding, or access to resources are the main source of instability in Africa, understanding how international actors can contribute to their resolution is a pressing concern. How does the presence of UN peacekeepers affect communal violence between civilians in conflict settings? We address this question by offering a straightforward empirical test of how UN peacekeeping patrols affect the likelihood that a communal dispute will become violent in an active conflict setting with a multidimensional peacekeeping operations. We build on the literature on communal conflicts to argue that peacekeepers deter violence against violence. To test our argument, we examine the case of Mail, the site of large-scale communal violence managed by UN peacekeepers since 2013. We employ a Geographic Regression Discontinuity Design (GRDD) around the border of Mali and Burkina Faso to estimate the causal effect of deploying peacekeepers to an area with growing communal tensions. We find that the presence of peacekeepers reduces the probability of the onset of communal violence by 17%. Furthermore, we show that the magnitude of this effect increases as the number of peacekeepers deployed to a given area increase. Ultimately, our research provides robust causal evidence that UN peacekeeping works at the local level.

Over the last twenty years, the literature has sought to understand the conditions in which peacekeeping operations (PKOs) take place and the efficacy of their presence. Much of the current work has focused on PKOs' relationship to civilians in the context of civil conflict but less is understood about the quality of the peacekeeping missions themselves. If PKOs commit human rights abuses, how might this behavior be deterred in the domestic context? We theorize the presence of INGOs provide both a monitoring and socializing effect on PKOs. Using the PKAT and TSMO datasets, we analyze all peacekeeping missions from 2007-2013. The findings from this paper describe the function which INGOs serve in relationship to PKOs as they operate together in politically unstable and transitioning regions.

This paper introduces the Robust Africa Deployments of Peacekeeping Operations (RADPKO) dataset, a new dataset of geocoded United Nations peacekeeping deployments. Drawing upon primary documents sourced directly from the UN covering 10 multidimensional peacekeeping operations from 1999 to 2018, RADPKO offers comprehensive monthly time-series data on UN peacekeeper deployment location by type, gender, and nationality. We describe the data collection in detail and discuss the cases and time periods missing from the data. We show that although the UN responds dynamically to conflict events in the field, deployments outside of population centres tend to be fairly homogeneous in regard to both nationality and gender. We use this data to empirically investigate the oft-posited link between deployment of peacekeepers and reductions in violence at the local level. We replicate and extend past studies but find that some previous findings are vulnerable to robustness checks, primarily due to data incompleteness. Our analysis suggests the importance of data collection transparency, management, and description to the quantitative study of peacekeeping. The data, updated annually, provides new opportunities for scholar conducting micro-level research on peacekeeping, conflict, development, governances, and related topics across subfields in Political science.

Despite the abundance of evidence that peacekeeping works, we know little about what actually makes peacekeepers effective. Recent work suggesting that local agendas are central to modern conflicts make this omission particularly problematic. The article demonstrates that the presence of peacekeepers makes individuals more optimistic about the risks of engagement and the likelihood that members of outgroups will reciprocate cooperation. I use data from a lab-in-the-field experiment conducted in Mali, a West African country with an active conflict managed by troops from France and the United Nations (UN), to show that UN peacekeepers increase the willingness of individuals to cooperate relative to control and French enforcers. Moreover, I find that UN peacekeepers are especially effective among those participants who hold other groups and institutions in low esteem as well as those who have more frequent contact with peacekeepers. Follow-up interviews and surveys suggest that perceptions of the UN as unbiased rather than other mechanisms account for its effectiveness.

Why do former belligerents institutionalize power-sharing arrangements after a civil war ends? The choice of power-sharing institutions shapes the nature of governance in many post-conflict settings. A better understanding of how belligerents come to choose institutionalized forms of power-sharing would thus help us explain how belligerents come to make a seemingly simple institutional choice that may have immense consequences. Existing scholarship emphasizes the nature of the conflict preceding negotiations, international actors, or state institutional capacity as critical factors for determining whether former belligerents will agree to share power or not. Yet these accounts overlook the importance of political considerations between and within ethnic groups. This article argues that elites create power-sharing institutions when the most significant threat to their political power comes from an outside group as opposed to from within their own group. That is, forward-looking and power-minded leaders of former belligerents push for the type of power-sharing at the negotiating table that affords them the greatest opportunity to influence country-level politics after the conflict has concluded in full. For elites facing competition from outside, this means securing power-sharing through institutional rules and guidelines in the settlement of the civil war to ensure that they are included in the governance of the state. By contrast, for elites fearing in-group rivals, complex governance institutions are at best unnecessary and, at worst, a significant concession to weaker opponents. I test the argument with a cross-national analysis of an original dataset of 186 power-sharing negotiations from 1945–2011. The empirical analysis suggests that elites are most likely to institutionalize power-sharing when no single ethnic group dominates politics and when most ethnic groups are unified. The quantitative analysis is complemented with illustrative examples from cases of power-sharing negotiations that offer insight into the proposed theoretical mechanisms.

Despite abundant evidence that UN peacekeepers limit armed group violence during and after civil wars, we know relatively little about their ability to contain more localized forms of violence between non-state actors. Given the recent rise in atrocities and mass displacements due to communal violence across the African continent, evaluating the effectiveness of peacekeeping at this level is a pressing concern. This article demonstrates that peacekeeping troops prevent the onset of communal violence. I use data from a survey experiment conducted in Mali to show that the likely explanation for the effectiveness of UN peacekeepers is that locals see them as impartial. I discuss the implications for understanding the effectiveness of UN peacekeepers from different cultural backgrounds. The paper concludes that UN peacekeepers may limit the outbreak of communal violence even in the most challenging settings.

This essay challenges theoretical and empirical arguments about peacebuilding effectiveness that put the state at the center of United Nations peace operations. We argue that state-centric UN peacebuilding operations inadvertently incentivize local-level violence in post-conflict zones. We demonstrate that when the UN supports central governments it unintentionally empowers non-professionalized militaries, paramilitaries, and warlords to settle local scores. Armed violence against civilians in turn triggers a vicious cycle of reprisals and counter-reprisals. As an alternative to state-centric peacebuildingoperations that incentivize local violence, we suggest that the UN should shift strategic resources away from central governments and toward UN policing, support of traditional and religious authorities, and the training of local security institutions.