Allard Duursma

ETH Zurich | ETH Zürich · CSS

While United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations are increasingly deployed during ongoing violent conflict, they are also increasingly staffed with civilian personnel tasked with peacebuilding at the local level. How does violent conflict affect civilian peacekeepers’ peacebuilding efforts locally? Shifting the research focus from military to civi...

This article examines how host-state consent affects the implementation of different sets of Protection of Civilians (POC) activities. Given the centrality of POC to UN peacekeeping, it is therefore important to understand the factors impacting its implementation. We argue that effectively conducting POC-activities – including supporting state capa...

Recent years have seen the acceleration of data- and evidence-based approaches in support of peace processes, creating a renewed confidence that conflicts can be predicted, known, and resolved, based on objective information about the world. However, new technologies employed by conflict parties, stakeholders, and those who aim to make or build pea...

This data feature introduces a new dataset to study peace processes to end organized armed violence in Africa: the African Peace Processes (APP) dataset. The APP dataset includes observations on both mediated and unmediated rounds of negotiations in state-based and non-state conflicts in Africa between 1989 and 2019 and builds on conflict data from...

This article contextualises Russia’s involvement in Africa through the lenses of the Soviet past, current rulership architecture in Russia, and its recent operations abroad. Russia deploys normative justifications like anti-colonialism to justify its involvement in Africa. Russian agents in Africa are drawn from vast political-oligarchic patronage...

African states fight each other far more often by simultaneously supporting rebels in each other’s intrastate conflicts than by engaging in direct warfare. While nearly half of these mutual interventions between 1960 and 2010 were resolved via bilateral negotiated settlements, the majority of cases ended due to events in, or actions by, only one of...

While scholars of nonviolent resistance recognize that large-scale campaigns are more likely to be successful campaigns, we currently have little understanding of why some nonviolent protests grow into mass movements while others do not. In this article, we explore campaign size and, in particular, the role of individual and collective motives in f...

There is an academic consensus that addressing the local cleavages that drive armed conflict through local peacemaking is crucial to building peace. However, several studies also suggest that local peacemaking is often unsustainable without the conclusion of a national-level elite pact. This article moves this debate forward by arguing that even if...

Much of the quantitative conflict resolution literature focuses on peacemaking efforts aimed at resolving international conflict or civil wars that involve state forces, while ignoring non-state conflict between communal groups, rebel groups, or militias. This article aims to contribute to filling this gap in research. I first put forward a typolog...

This forum provides an outlet for an assessment of research on the delegation of war to non-state armed groups in civil wars. Given the significant growth of studies concerned with this phenomenon over the last decade, this forum critically engages with the present state of the field. First, we canvass some of the most important theoretical develop...

Past research has found that third party pressure makes the signing of a ceasefire more likely, but also more likely to break down. What explains this variation? I argue that third party pressure is more likely to lead to a durable ceasefire if pressure is applied to persuade the conflict parties to continue to negotiate and produce a detailed ceas...

Global datasets on interstate armed conflict suggest that African states clash with each other rarely and only for short periods. This research note shows that existing datasets paint a misleading picture. In fact, African states fight each other more often and for longer than is commonly thought, but they do so by mutually intervening in each othe...

While peace processes increase the likelihood that a civil war is resolved, they can also complicate peace by increasing the risk of rebel fragmentation. In this article, we argue that negotiations exacerbate pre-existing structural and substantial divisions within rebel organizations, therefore increasing the likelihood of a rebel split. More spec...

Why and how do host-states resist contemporary peacekeeping missions? This article puts forward the argument that host-state resistance against peacekeepers is a strategy to balance challenges to the internal and external faces of a civil war state's sovereignty. Government officials might see an intense counter-insurgency campaign as an effective...

Much of the quantitative conflict resolution literature focuses on mediation between states or on efforts to end a civil war through a comprehensive peace agreement that brings peace to the entire country. This article instead analyses the effectiveness of mediation between a wide range of armed actors on a subnational level. Utilizing unique data...

The current scholarly literature on the international mediation of civil wars draws predominantly on a rationalist-materialist perspective. This perspective suggests that the ticket to mediation success is the material manipulation of the bargaining environment by third parties with a high degree of economic and military resources. I argue that leg...

Much of the quantitative conflict resolution literature focuses on mediation between states or on efforts to end a civil war through a comprehensive peace agreement that brings peace to the entire country. This article instead analyses the effectiveness of mediation between a wide range of armed actors on a subnational level. Utilizing unique data...

The question of how International Criminal Court (ICC) involvement affects civil war peace processes has attracted considerable debate. Systematic assessments of the impact of ICC arrest warrants have begun to emerge, but the evidence is mixed. Based on data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) on intrastate conflicts between 2002 and 2018...

This paper discusses the principal findings of a new integrated dataset of transnational armed conflict in Africa. Existing Africa conflict datasets have systematically under-represented the extent of cross-border state support to belligerent parties in internal armed conflicts as well as the number of incidents of covert cross-border armed interve...

Most armed conflicts in Africa have a significant transnational element. This key research finding inverts the standard trope that the vast majority of African conflicts are internal and not inter-state. Country specialists focusing on individual conflicts have made this observation for years: what is new is that the Transnational Conflict in Afric...

The impact of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on peace processes has received much scholarly attention. We argue, based on the ICC arrest warrant against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, that ICC indictments against government officials not only can be detrimental to the prospects for peace, but can also negatively affect everyday practice...

In spite of a strong preference for African solutions to African conflicts within the African system of states, non-African third parties are frequently involved in mediation in Africa, most frequently in cooperation with African third parties. Yet, the factors that explain the outcomes of non-African involvement remain largely understudied. This a...

Previous research has suggested that leaders of democratic regimes are particularly willing to contribute troops to United Nations peacekeeping operations because backing ‘liberal’ peacekeeping allows them to support the diffusion of liberal institutions. However, evidence used to sustain this argument is based on contribution patterns during the d...

The UN is becoming increasingly data-driven. Until recently, data-driven initiatives have mainly been led by individual UN field missions, but with António Guterres, the new Secretary-General, a more centralized approach is being embarked on. With a trend towards the use of data to support the work of UN staff, the UN is likely to soon rely on syst...

This article draws on the concept of “identity interests” to explain why commitment to the territorial integrity norm in the context of African peace processes has persisted over such a long period of time, even as continental and international contexts have changed. One major implication of this commitment to the territorial integrity norm is that...

While recent research focuses on why conflict parties attack peacekeepers, little attention has been given to other types of resistance against peacekeeping missions, such as intimidation and obstruction. It is argued in this article that one reason why peacekeepers are obstructed and intimidated is that armed actors that target civilians want to m...

Information analysts are often hindered by uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and equivocality when trying to support peacekeeping operations. This article puts forward a conceptual framework that explains what each of these information challenges entails and how uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and equivocality hamper peacekeeping efforts. To...

This chapter provides an overview of how globalization has changed what security is and how security can be achieved most effectively. The first section provides a brief overview of the literature on globalization and security, highlighting a disconnect between the state-centric security literature and the focus on transnational linkages within the...

This article assesses the Joint Mission Analysis Centre's (JMAC) field information and analysis capacity through systematically comparing JMAC's data collection in Darfur to an event-level conflict dataset based on open-source information. This comparison shows that JMAC's data collection in Darfur over the studied period is much more comprehensive...

This article explores the potential and limitations of epidemiological analyses of violence. We draw on an 18-month sample of Joint Mission Analysis Centres data to identify clusters of armed violence in Darfur and model the risk of armed clashes in space and time. We illustrate the merit of using methods from both descriptive epidemiology and anal...

This article systematically examines the varying effectiveness of African and non-African third parties in mediating civil wars in Africa. Drawing on data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, supplemented with unique data on mediation efforts, which together cover all mediation efforts in civil wars in Africa between 1960 and 2012, this article...

This article puts forward a theory of smart pressure, which emphasises that third-party pressure only works if the conflict parties under pressure can agree with the endpoint of this pressure. Hence, a potential mutually acceptable agreement needs to be formulated before a mediator starts to apply pressure. To this argument, this article employs tw...

Why do some peace agreements end armed conflicts whereas others do not? Previous studies have primarily focused on the relation between warring parties and the provisions included in peace agreements. Prominent mediators, however, have emphasised the importance of stakeholders at various levels for the outcome of peace agreements. To match the expe...

Purpose – A rapidly expanding body of literature on international mediation, as well as the central role international mediation plays in modern-day conflict resolution, make it necessary to review and analyze this vastly evolving field of study. This study seeks to review the most significant trends and debates in the literature on international m...