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United Nations Peacekeeping and Civilian Protection in Civil War
Abstract
Does United Nations peacekeeping protect civilians in civil war? Civilian protection is a primary purpose of UN peacekeeping, yet there is little systematic evidence for whether peacekeeping prevents civilian deaths. We propose that UN peacekeeping can protect civilians if missions are adequately composed of military troops and police in large numbers. Using unique monthly data on the number and type of UN personnel contributed to peacekeeping operations, along with monthly data on civilian deaths from 1991 to 2008 in armed conflicts in Africa, we find that as the UN commits more military and police forces to a peacekeeping mission, fewer civilians are targeted with violence. The effect is substantial - the analyses show that, on average, deploying several thousand troops and several hundred police dramatically reduces civilian killings. We conclude that although the UN is often criticized for its failures, UN peacekeeping is an effective mechanism of civilian protection.
... Since the end of the Cold War, the United Nations has increasingly utilized peacekeeping operations (PKOs) to aid in the resolution of conflicts between and within states. 1 The mandates of these operations have become more demanding over time, with contemporary missions calling on peacekeeping personnel to separate belligerent actors, enforce ceasefire agreements, and protect the physical security of civilians (Bellamy et al. 2010;Bellamy and Williams 2012;Hultman et al. 2013). 2 The pursuit of these goals presents a unique challenge for the United Nations because, in the absence of an independent standing force, it relies on member states to volunteer personnel for peacekeeping operations. ...
... Building on recent research analyzing how the characteristics of contributing states influence the ability of peacekeepers to protect civilians, we investigate how diverse national contingents can function as a more unified whole (Beardsley et al. 2019;Bellamy et al. 2010;Ruggeri 2015, 2019;Holt et al. 2009;Hultman et al. 2013;Powers et al. 2015;Saideman and Auerswald 2012). ...
... This creates a collective action problem because the UN reimburses states contributing well-trained troops and expensive military equipment fractions of their actual costs, while ill-equipped forces replace their expenditures by several times (Bellamy et al. 2010). 7 Contributing states often advocate conservative standard operating procedures as a means of protecting their personnel which limits the ability of peacekeeping commanders to implement complex or robust operations in the conflict zone (Holt et al. 2009). of civilian populations Ruggeri 2016, 2019;Dworschak and Cil 2022;Haass and Ansorg 2018;Hultman et al. 2013Hultman et al. , 2014. ...
Since the end of the Cold War, the United Nations has increasingly used peacekeeping operations (PKOs) to manage crises between and within states. The mandates of contemporary PKOs are demanding, calling on peacekeeping personnel to separate belligerent parties, enforce ceasefire agreements, and protect the physical security of civilians. The pursuit of these distinct objectives presents a unique challenge for the UN because it relies on member states to volunteer personnel for these missions. Therefore, the achievement of mandated goals depends on the ability of diverse national contingents to overcome coordination problems and function as a cohesive force. Integrating research of PKOs and international military coalitions, we argue that as national contingents share operational experience within a UN mission, they develop common institutional practices, and become more effective at protecting the civilian population. Using monthly data on UN PKOs from 1990 to 2019, we find that increasing operational experience within a peacekeeping coalition reduces civilian fatalities significantly.
... The study of UN peace operations alone-perhaps one of the most visible and prolific lines of research on the topic, mirroring once again the UN's visibility and proliferation in practice-spans at least back to the 1960s, evolving from detailed case histories to more quantitatively oriented analyses at the turn of the twenty-first century. 2 In addition to the diversity of research itself, this has also been reflected in continually evolving data collection efforts, such as fine-grained data on peacekeeper deployments (Cil et al. 2020;Hunnicutt and Nomikos 2020;Kathman 2013;Ruggeri et al. 2018). ...
... To the extent that the factions believe peacekeepers are nonaggressive and impartial, PKOs can shepherd the conflict toward peace by removing arms from the battlefield and returning soldiers home, reintegrating them into normal society. Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR), when effectively undertaken, is a mechanism that directly reduces the killing capacity of the combatant groups (Hultman, Kathman, & Shannon 2013. ...
... Reductions in atrocities committed against civilians is another first-order objective considered by existing scholarship. 5 Research has evaluated the effectiveness of peacekeeping on this dimension and found that peacekeeping can capably protect civilian lives (Hultman, Kathman, & Shannon 2013Fjelde, Hultman, & Nilsson 2019), and this protection carries into post-conflict periods as well (Kathman & Wood 2016). In short, peacekeeping has demonstrated its ability to preserve human life, particularly given its theorized ability to engage in the mechanisms associated with pursuing peace. ...
From its capacity for deploying joint operations in conflict zones to its status as a standard-bearing forum for international behaviour, the United Nations has asserted its relevance in a diverse array of issues and conflicts around the world. Equally as diverse has been the scholarship surrounding the United Nations over the past several decades. This collection of essays provides a snapshot of these diverse lines of scholarship, highlighting existing scholarship on a range of topics, as well as identifying areas of opportunity for future scholarly work on these topics. Taken as a whole, this forum more broadly provides insight into core pillars of the United Nations' mission--including the maintenance of peace and security; fostering friendly relations between nations; promoting human rights and humanitarian goals; and encouraging cooperation and harmonization of interests between nations. Moving forward, it is our hope that this collection will serve as a sprigboard for inspiring future work to both build and expand upon the insights from the past several decades of scholarship on the United Nations.
... Here the challenge is that the government is not a uniquely identified actor, as it fights in multiple conflicts within the same country. To study government violence against civilians in civil wars, some scholars have thus attributed all such killings in the country to each conflict or divided casualty numbers equally between conflicts (e.g., Hultman et al., 2013;Kathman and Wood, 2016). This discards variation in government killings across conflicts and assumes all civilian deaths are war casualties. ...
... To date, quantitative scholars have primarily studied war-related violence in the context of civil wars where attribution to a conflict is comparatively easy. That is the case when violence can be linked to civil wars via the actors involved, for instance, when rebel groups target civilians (Hultman et al., 2013;Kathman and Wood, 2016) or use terrorist tactics (Fortna et al., 2020). Others have leveraged the detailed location coding of violent events to study violence on a sub-national level, for example, comparing regions or grid cells. ...
Civil wars are more than battles between governments and rebels; they involve a multitude of actors who perpetrate different forms of violence linked to the war in some way. However, scholars often study different types of violence perpetrated in wars in isolation rather than in their interrelationship—a compartmentalization that further widens the gap between research and practice. Despite the wide availability of disaggregated data, linking various forms of violence to one another and attributing them to a specific civil war remains a challenge. This article discusses the violence attribution problem and introduces an approach that connects different forms of war-related violence to specific civil wars using data on actors, event locations, and conflict zones. In a practical application of this approach, we introduce an R package that integrates battle and war-related violence data collected by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. The overall aim is to provide a more comprehensive measure of the violence taking place in a particular war and facilitate a better understanding of the dynamics and interrelations of different types of violence within civil wars.
... These peace impacts persist after peacekeepers leave. Many other studies confirm a big statistical contribution of peace operations to building peace (Doyle and Sambanis 2000;Walter 2002;Fortna 2003Fortna , 2004Fortna and Howard 2008;Nilsson 2006;Quinn et al. 2007;Gilligan and Sergenti 2008;Call 2012;Hultman et al. 2013;Riordan 2013). Fortna (2003 also found a large tendency for ceasefires overseen by international peacekeepers to be more effective than those without peacekeepers. ...
... Although military peacekeepers are effective in this mix, mostly unarmed UN police seem more so. In a multivariate and matching analysis by Hultman et al. (2013) across all African armed conflicts between 1991 and 2008, movement from zero to just 200 UN police in a peace operation, conditioned by controls on other variables, was associated with a reduction in the expected number of civilian killings from 96 per month to 14. Given that this is a per month estimate, and the average duration of deployments is 65 months, small contingents of UN police seem to save very large numbers of lives. ...
A sequenced architecture of commitment can be a good way to strengthen peace agreements and confidence-building. Late twentieth-century drivers of declining armed conflict can be reenergized for future declines. Single thin reeds of war prevention snap, yet they work when local and international society invests to bind them together in a fabric of multidimensional peacebuilding. Just as market manipulators have progressively learnt new ways to game markets, over time democracy manipulators learnt how to game democracy. The best way to win elections became to misgovern. Earlier in democracy’s evolution, the best way to win elections was to govern well. Democracy’s virtues can be retrieved by investing in checks and balances that temper domination.
... For a complete description of this variable, see Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2017 by Marshall, Gurr, and Jaggers (2017). Additionally, scholars highlight the role of population size in terms of the scale of observed violence (Hultman et al., 2013;Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, 2019). This outcome was obtained because larger populations, spread over a vast geographic area, are physically difficult to police and monitor (Fearon and Laitin, 2003). ...
... This outcome was obtained because larger populations, spread over a vast geographic area, are physically difficult to police and monitor (Fearon and Laitin, 2003). Thus, larger populations are associated with greater opportunities for violence and human rights abuses (Hultman et al., 2013;Wood, 2013). We log transform this variable due to skew. ...
Commitment problems and information asymmetries represent key impediments to peacekeeping. We posit that mass media—more specifically, United Nations (UN) peacekeeping radio broadcasts—is a cost-effective, easily implemented method of addressing common roadblocks to conflict resolution. We analyze monthly battle-related deaths across 51 UN peacekeeping missions during the years 1992–2014. Using negative binomial models with two-way fixed effects, we find that peaceful UN radio broadcasts are associated with decreased conflict intensity. We argue that radio-based, mass communication is particularly effective owing to the socio-economic conditions within conflict zones; these properties include severe under-development and lack of access to modern technology.
... While much of the extensive body of work on peacekeeping focuses on military-security issues (e.g., Hegre, Hultman, and Nygård. 2019;Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon. 2013;Fortna 2008;Doyle and Sambinis 2006), there is a growing amount of research on the gendered effects of peacekeeping on the host countries. Multiple studies focused on the issue of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA), as well as the role of peacekeepers in such exploitation, including transactional sex and sex trafficking (Smith and Smith ...
... In the short term, the termination of conflict can reduce the substantial daily stressors associated with the constant threat of harm. To the extent that women (and civilians in general) are less likely to face sexual violence or other threats to physical security due to the protections of the PKO mission (Hultman et al. 2013;Karim and Beardsley 2016;Kirschner and Miller 2019), they feel more secure in actively participating within their societies. Concomitantly, the increased market confidence due to the restoration of peace, as well as the economic stimulus created by the influx of international capital and personnel (Beber et al. 2019;Bove, Salvatore, and Elia. ...
What effect do peacekeeping operations (PKOs) have on women’s empowerment? The gendered consequences of peacekeeping have long been an issue of contention. Stung by multiple cases of peacekeepers directly engaging in sexual exploitation and abuse, the United Nations took measures to mainstream gender equality within PKO goals, ranging from protection from sexual violence to the encouragement of female participation in peacebuilding processes. Yet while a growing body of research has begun to provide insights into the gendered aspects of the PKOs themselves, much less is known about the broader gendered impact of PKOs on the host countries. To better understand these effects, we examine the extent to which PKOs serve to advance female empowerment in terms of women’s participation in official political channels as well as women’s civil liberties and active involvement in civil society participation. Examining these linkages from 1970–2013, we find that multidimensional PKOs are conducive to growing levels of women’s empowerment, though such growth decreases considerably after the conclusion of the PKO.
... 4 Mir 2019. 5 Hultman et al. 2013. 6 Howard 2019. ...
... 11 Paluck and Green 2009. 12 Hultman et al. 2013;Ruggeri et al. 2017;Di Salvatore and Ruggeri 2017. One reason for the extensive use of public information within missions, as argued by Oksamytna, is that "locals' public understanding of the limits of the mandate is essential for civilian protection". ...
... The predominant analytical focus of the literature, however, has been on uniformed personnel. There are findings, for example, regarding the relevance of the size of peacekeeping missions in reducing deaths in battle (Hultman et al., 2014), reducing civilian victimization (Hultman et al., 2013;Kathman and Wood, 2016;Fjelde et al., 2019), ending war (Ruggeri et al., 2017;Kathman and Benson, 2019), and prolonging peace (Hultman et al., 2016), but they are all limited to military and police components, only counting the number of those in uniforms and disregarding civilians. When it comes to the UN peacekeeping, 1988UN peacekeeping, -2018 classifying or distinguishing different components within peacekeeping financial resources. ...
... 7 Using this dataset, I can examine the effect of 6 Conversely, Lake (2017) argued that political elites have an incentive to corrupt the state institutions rebuilt by international stakeholders. 7 Note this design differs from the conventional practice of the existing literature where only war spells and the immediate aftermath are used in examining PKO effectiveness in reducing battle-related deaths (e.g., Hultman et al., 2013). Such a practice often misleads observers to believe that battle-related deaths do not occur during peace spells which are not covered by their analyses. ...
Since the 1990s, United Nations (UN) peacekeepers have been engaged in multidimensional activities in conflict-affected countries. The existing literature, however, focuses predominantly on the effectiveness of military and police peacekeepers involving the threat of force, and does not shed light on the effectiveness of civilian peacekeepers despite the latter's crucial role in rebuilding local livelihoods and restoring state institutions. Civilian participation in peacekeeping increases both the benefits of peaceful life and the costs of combat. Further, civilian activities, by strengthening the rule of law and political accountability mechanism, contribute to encouraging both the rebels and government to disengage from further violence. Using the original dataset of financial resources for UN peacekeeping operations in the world, from 1988 to 2019, I test hypotheses regarding the impact of civilian expenditures on battle-related deaths. Regression analysis shows that spending on the civilian component in UN peacekeeping reduces battle-related deaths on the government side inflicted by insurgents.
... Peacekeepers increase the cost of violence against civilians by signaling their ability to defend civilians ( Bove and Ruggeri 2016 ;Fjelde, Hultman, and Nilsson 2019 ) and by international shaming and prosecution through reporting of perpetrators ( Fjelde, Hultman, and Nilsson 2019 ). To this end, they actively monitor and patrol their deployment locations ( Fjelde, Hultman, and Nilsson 2019 ;Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon 2013 ). Peacekeepers prevent violence between armed actors by mitigating commitment problems and increasing the cost of continued fighting ( Fortna 2008 ;Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon 2014 ). ...
... Improved surveillance capacity can help solve information problems, while reconstruction and mediation efforts can incentivize and persuade armed actors to keep peace and stop fighting each other. One-sided violence, on the other hand, usually takes place outside of the battlefield and is conducted by weaker groups who prefer to avoid direct confrontations ( Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon 2013 ;Wood 2010 ), and can be employed selectively ( Kalyvas 2006 ). The presence of functionally diverse units that are specialized to enhance military operations may not be as relevant under these circumstances. ...
In recent years, researchers have shifted their focus to studying the effects of peacekeeping in a geographically disaggregated manner. One of the factors that is yet to be fully examined is the variation among peacekeeping troops at the local level and its impact on peacekeeping effectiveness. Specifically, peacekeeping troops greatly vary across two dimensions: unit types, e.g., infantry, engineering, aviation, etc., and their country of origin. We argue that mixing different unit types increases peacekeepers’ specialization in skills and equipment, thereby improving their effectiveness. However, this effect is moderated by the diversity of troop contributing countries (TCCs), which exacerbates coordination problems among troops. We explore our mechanisms using evidence from interviews with former and active peacekeepers and test the empirical implications using new subnational data on UN peacekeeping bases. Our results show that diverse unit types from culturally similar TCCs are better at deterring battle-related violence, yet the same conditional effect is not present for deterring one-sided violence. These findings are of major relevance to the ongoing academic debate on peacekeeping composition, as well as to practitioners in international organizations.
... It can include safehavens, military equipment (for example, personnel carriers), logistical equipment (for example, medical supplies), weapons, ammunition, 1 I focus on what Little (1975) describes as "partial" interventions on the side of the rebels. He distinguishes between impartial-those that aim to end fighting without taking sides in the conflict such as UN peacekeeping operations (Fortna, 2004;Hultman, Kathman, & Shannon, 2013)-and partial interventions-where external states form alliances or commitments with actors involved in a civil war in order to increase their chances of victory. Similarly, Regan (2002) refers to "biased" interventions, where an external actor provides resources to shift the balance of power in favour of the preferred conflict actor. ...
... J. Gilligan & Sergenti, 2008;M. Gilligan & Stedman, 2003;Hultman, Kathman, & Shannon, 2013), it has largely been ignored in the study of external support. In order to overcome the selection issue, I employ coarsened exact matching (CEM). ...
Why do states provide different forms of support to rebels fighting in foreign civil wars? How can external support band disparate rebels together in some conflicts but lead to bloody fratricide in others? My thesis aims to answer these questions. To do so, I make a two-step argument. First, I argue that civil wars are opportunities for states to improve their place in the global balance of power, and they provide different forms of support depending on the risk of retaliation from other states. Second, I argue that different forms of support have heterogeneous effects on rebel dynamics. The influx of money and weapons–which are fungible and exchangeable–induces a competitive conflict environment and leads to greater splintering and rebel infighting as groups compete over important resources. Nonfungible support such as troops shifts the balance of power, alleviates the systemic effects of anarchy, causes bandwagoning among and within rebel groups, and leads to more allying and less splintering. This argument provides the first holistic account of how the international system shapes cooperation and competition in rebellions. I test the empirical grounding of the argument as part of a mixed-method nested research design. First, I conduct two large-N analyses: a temporal network analysis to explain how external states support rebels and a matching analysis of rebel group behaviour on how different forms of support affect the propensity that rebels fight, form alliances, and splinter. Second, I conduct a theory-testing case study of the conflict in Northern Ireland (1968-1998) and a cross-case comparative study of Libya (2011-2019) and Syria (2011-2019). Drawing on archival evidence, secondary and grey literature, and micro-level conflict data, I demonstrate the causal mechanisms underpinning the results of the large-N analyses. I find support for key parts of the argument.
... This assertion implies that any member state in need must be helped, in other words (Omede, 1994). According to the constitution, peacekeeping operations are prohibited (Hultman, Kathman, & Shannon 2013). This does not imply that maintaining peace is a bad idea. ...
In order to raise the living standards of its people, maintain and improve economic stability, foster relations among Member States, and contribute to the advancement and development of the African continent, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) was established. Its goal is to promote cooperation and integration that will result in the creation of an economic union in West Africa. According to a set of guiding principles, such as impartiality, the parties' consent, and the non-use of force unless necessary for self-defense, a third party intervention known as "peacekeeping" is conducted. The study examines the role played by ECOWAS in preserving stability and peace on the African continent, focusing in particular on the ECOMOG intervention in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea Bissau. The regional security complex theory was accepted. The research was qualitative, and its historical analysis heavily drew on secondary sources. The essence of the resolutions of the UN Security Council and the ECOWAS Mediation and Security Council, and consequently the legal foundation for peacekeeping and peace enforcement are contained in peace agreements. As a result, peace agreements are essential to the management and resolution of conflicts. However, it is erroneous to assume that the heads of armed factions are sane political actors motivated by genuine grievances and that they will thereby agree to mediated agreements. The offering of carrots (the confidence-building approach) must therefore be combined with strong diplomacy supported by a credible enforcement capacity in order for peace to be successfully implemented in the West African region. The study recommends, among other things, that the framework for the ECOWAS legal system governing peace and security should be the member states. This is because the majority of democracies in the sub-region elect postcolonial states with a predominance of coloniality of power disguising itself as democracy and causing conflicts in the majority of countries within the West African security complex, ECOWAS must exert pressure on its member states to step up their efforts to improve democracy in their respective countries.
... Since the 1990s a broad normative shift, privileging individual rights over those of states and collectives, has been underway, shaping global governance institutions. The UN has approached a human-centered security paradigm, reflected in the 2005 adoption of the "responsibility to protect" and an increasing focus on civilian protection in UN peacekeeping (Hultman et al. 2013;Oksamytna and Lundgren 2020;Tallberg et al. 2020). While these shifts have been lined with contestation and continue to generate debate, such as during the Council's deliberations over Syria in the 2010s, they are likely to have made the Council more sensitive to conflicts that pose grave risk for civilians. ...
... The number of civilian victims reducing based on monthly data for a period from 1991 to 2008 in armed conflicts in Africa is analyzed in [40]. The analyses show that the increase in the number of United Nations personnel with several thousand troops and several hundred police in peacekeeping operations leads to dramatically fewer civilian deaths. ...
The occurrence of large-scale crises is a great challenge for people. In such cases, many levels of public life are affected and recovery takes time and considerable resources. Therefore, approaches and tools for predicting and preventing crises, as well as models and methods for crisis management and crisis overcoming, are necessary. In this review, we present approaches, models, and methods that support decision-making in relation to the prevention and resolution of large-scale crises. We divide crises into three types: natural disasters, pandemics, and economic crises. For each type of crisis situation, the types of applied tasks that are solved and the corresponding models and methods that are used to support decision-makers in overcoming the crises are discussed. Conclusions are drawn on the state of the art in this area and some directions for future work are outlined.
... (Di Salvatore and Ruggeri, 2017) -Do pko protect civilians? (Hultman, Kathman and Shannon, 2013) Why does their protection efficiency vary? (Haass and Ansorg, 2018) -Do pko reduce the numbers of soldiers killed in the battlefield? ...
This article presents recent research on the collection and organization of unarmed civilian peacekeeping ( ucp ) data and proposes a pathway to the creation of a rich, regularly updated database on ucp . The article sets out by giving an overview of the wealth of data on conventional (military) peacekeeping and related research, and raises the question about the need for a similar data wealth for ucp . Secondly, it describes the inventory of current ucp data, to highlight advances in knowledge as well as data collection challenges and critical information gaps. In the main part, the article then sets out what a more comprehensive data collection on ucp would need to take into account and what such a dataset could look like. To do so, it also draws on databases regarding nonviolent campaigns and other fields (health, aviation) to demonstrate the potential for future data collection methodologies and research, and to consider safeguarding issues. Finally, this article suggests four strategies to better structure existing ucp data in order to collect missing information on various research themes. The benefits of the resulting rich database, it argues, would be greater visibility of ucp , the production of data useful for various research programs, and insights to improve field practice.
... S ince 2000, United Nations (UN) member states have significantly increased the capacity of UN peace operations (UNPOs) to stop violence and build peace in war-torn countries by giving UN-POs greater peacekeeping and peacebuilding capacity. Existing scholarship has analyzed UNPOs' growing peacekeeping capacity while largely overlooking their new peacebuilding focus (Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon 2013;Ruggeri, Dorussen, and Gizelis 2017). This "peacebuilding turn" is manifest in the 2005 establishment of the UN Peacebuilding Architecture and the increased emphasis of UNPO mandates on peacebuilding, all intended to build inclusive political institutions that prevent post-conflict countries from falling back into war. ...
One of the most consistent findings on UN peace operations (UNPOs) is that they contribute to peace. Existing scholarship argues this is because UNPOs' peacekeeping troops solve the security dilemma that inhibits combatant disarmament and prevents their political leaders from sharing power. We argue that existing scholarship's focus on peacekeeping troops overlooks UNPOs’ role in enabling governments to implement redistributive power‐sharing reforms contained in peace agreements, along with their broader peace processes. While peacekeeping troops can help belligerents refrain from violence, military force alone cannot explain how political elites implement redistributive reforms that threaten their status. We argue that UNPOs that have predominant peacebuilding (as opposed to peacekeeping) mandates help sustain political elites’ commitment to implementing peace agreement reforms and, thus, contribute to inclusive peace (increased political inclusion and reduced violence). We test our argument using a data set on UNPO mandates and original fieldwork on three sequential UNPOs in Burundi.
... As such, rebuilding trust in the police, which has historically been part of the war machine, is no easy task. Various scholars have focused on addressing the role of police in stopping civil wars (Blazak, 2021) and the challenges of police reform after the war is over (Glebbeek, 2009;Hultman et al., 2013). However, less work has been done discussing the impact of civil wars on citizens' trust in the police (Koonings, 1999). ...
We know that civil wars have negative and long-term consequences for public trust in state institutions. However, few studies have examined the post-peace challenges of rebuilding trust in state institutions. In this study, we utilise the case of Colombia to explore the impact of civil wars on the institutional trust of the police. We find that perspectives on abuse, punishment, and corruption are significant predictors of trust in the Colombian police. Further, we find that when we test all three phenomena together, perceptions of police abuse and experience with bribery are the key drivers of trust of police in Colombia.
... However, it is a widely held view that peacekeepers have contributed to "reducing the frequency and lethality of war" in societies (Bellamy, 2010, p. 153). It is thought that peacekeeping missions have promoted peace and security by shortening episodes of conflicts in conflict-prone locations or reducing civilians' killings in wars, for instance (Hultman et al., 2013;Ruggeri et al., 2016). However, peacekeeping is currently facing a wide array of The Journal of Intelligence, Conflict, and Warfare Volume 3, Issue 2 challenges in the COVID-19 era, specifically in Africa. ...
With its seven peacekeeping operations deployed in the African continent, the United Nations peacekeeping seeks to maintain peace and security by helping African states create conditions for sustainable peace. As COVID-19 has exposed the international system’s vulnerability, this analysis seeks to explore what Peacekeeping looks like in the COVID-19 era. By drawing on news articles, reports, and United Nations press releases, this account also examines the challenges faced by peacekeepers in Sub Saharan Africa, a region well known for violent conflicts and warfare. It is interesting to note that peacekeeping in the COVID 19 era appears to have struck a balance between protecting people's health, ensuring civilians protection from threats of physical violence, and taking gender dynamics into account. However, operational changes in peacekeeping missions resulting from COVID-19 seem to have a serious effect on missions and troops and might raise severe implications for the future of peacekeeping in Africa. APA Citation Makosso, A. M. (2020). United Nations peacekeeping operations in the era of COVID-19. The Journal of Intelligence, Conflict, and Warfare, 3(2), 1-17. https://journals.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/jicw/article/view/2378/1812
... Over 90% of the UN's peacekeepers are deployed in missions mandated under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to use 'all necessary means' to protect civilians from direct harm. The protection of civilians (PoC) has emerged as a central mission goal (Bellamy and Hunt 2015) and it is argued that the UN is ultimately judged on its performance in protection (Wills 2009, Hultman et al. 2013. A growing number of studies argue that peacekeeping is successful against its main objectives (for overviews, see Howard et al. 2020;Di Salvatore and Ruggeri 2017). ...
This article examines the contributions of police to the Protection of Civilians (PoC) in United Nations (UN) peace operations. Drawing on field research in four missions where police have had to implement PoC mandates in challenging and unprecedented ways, I identify lessons associated with emerging practice. The article contributes to debates about non-military forms of civilian protection arguing that police – at once uniformed and civilian, coercive but also community-oriented – offer unique contributions to PoC. It also highlights the need for a systematic evaluation of what works and what does not for protection through policing to be harnessed in future missions.
... Today, about 70,000 multinational personnel, the so-called Blue Helmets, are deployed in 12 operations around the world, each with the mandate to keep or enforce peace. Despite a chronic lack of resources and the failure to protect civilians from atrocities in some emblematic cases, large-N studies demonstrate that peacekeeping overall reduces violence in ongoing civil wars and the probability of conflict recurrence, even when deployed in the most challenging contexts (e.g., Beardsley 2011;Bove et al. 2020;Di Salvatore and Ruggeri 2017;Hegre et al. 2019;Hultman et al. 2013;Ruggeri et al. 2017). Peacekeepers also improve households' wellbeing by revitalizing economic exchanges and participation in the labour market and by instilling confidence and trust (Beber et al. 2019;Bove and Elia 2018;Bove et al. 2021;Carnahan et al. 2006;Caruso et al. 2017;Nomikos 2022). 1 ...
A considerable body of empirical evidence indicates that conflict affects reproductive behaviour, often resulting in an increased fertility rate due to higher child mortality and limited access to healthcare services. Yet, we know much less about the effect of peace in a post-conflict setting. This study explores how the external provision of security affects fertility rates by focusing on the UN intervention in Liberia. By combining birth history data from three rounds of the Demographic and Health Survey with information on road distance to UN military compounds, we find that women who live in the proximity of peacekeepers have lower fertility rates in the deployment period. We find that this is due to parents prioritizing quality over quantity as peacekeepers improve maternal and child health and encourages family planning by (i) enabling donors and humanitarian actor to deliver infrastructures and services, and (ii) facilitating citizens’ access to such services.
... Outre l'analyse des caractéristiques juridiques locales des pays, bon nombre de travaux ont tenté d'intégrer une dimension globaleà leur analyse au travers des acteurs internationaux pour tenter de comprendre les dynamiques conflictuelles. Par exemple, les travaux séminaux ont insisté sur le rôle du Conseil de sécurité des Nations Unies (CSNU) dans la résolution des conflits armés (Carment & James, 1998;Thakur, 1993;Väyrynen, 1985) et dans la protection des civils (Hultman et al., 2013). Dans uneétude empirique plus récente, Beardsley et al. (2017) ...
En présence d'un intérêt conflictuel relatif à l'appropriation d'une ressource (territoire, pétrole, etc.) ou de luttes hégémoniques, la résolution des différends interétatiques peut passer par la médiation des organisations internationales qui peuvent jouer le rôle d'arbitre et de plateforme de négociation.En cas d'inefficacité ou d'échec de ces modes pacifiques de règlement des différends, et plutôt que d'engager une confrontation armée directe particulièrement coûteuse et contraignante juridiquement, les pays en conflit peuvent chercher à user de stratégies alternatives telles que les financements des insurrections pour déstabiliser leurs rivaux.Ainsi, les conflits armés se caractérisent par une certaine dynamique dans la mesure où ils prennent des formes variées et incluent une multitude d'acteurs étatiques et non-étatiques au niveau interne, régional et international.Les zones de conflits sont dans ce cas étendues et les possibilités de ciblage des civils plus élevées.L'intérêt de ce travail doctoral qui réunit – dans une perspective théorique et appliquée – l’économie des conflits et le droit international, est d'offrir une analyse variée de l'étude des conflits armés à partir de 4 essais.Le premier chapitre de notre thèse a pour objectif de poser les fondements d'une approche interdisciplinaire dans l'étude des conflits armés.Sur cette base, nous apportons un éclairage quant au rôle des différents instruments juridiques nationaux et internationaux dans l'apparition ou la résolution des conflits armés.Le second chapitre, en s'appuyant sur le cas des « Guerres de la morue », vise à analyser les relations d'influences réciproques existantes entre le droit et le conflit observé sous le prisme de l'économie.Dans un troisième chapitre, nous nous intéressons au phénomène de rivalités interétatiques en tenant compte des réseaux de rivalités indirects.Enfin, dans un dernier chapitre nous cherchons à évaluer l'effet des cadres idéologiques des groupes armés sur la probabilité de ciblage des civils.
... Instead, scholars have highlighted "neo-imperialist" practices of international interventions (Cunliffe 2012;Charbonneau 2014). The relevance of norms for peacekeeping has also motivated comparative empirical studies; for example, Gilligan and Stedman (2003) explore whether UN Security Council decisions on the deployment of peacekeeping operations align with normative principles, while Hultman et al. (2013; examine whether peacekeeping operations meet their mandate to protect civilians. ...
... While the literature overwhelmingly agrees that peacekeepers positively impact local security and the rule of law (Di Salvatore 2019; Hultman et al. 2013;Nomikos 2022;Ruggeri et al. 2017), empirical works examining the socioeconomic impact of peacekeepers point to mixed results. Sambanis (2008) and Collier et al. (2008) do not find a long-term economic impact of peacekeeping operations, with effects most substantial only in the first few years. ...
... To handle operations in the field, it relies on the UN Security Council's (UNSC) legal and political authority, the member states' resources and financial commitments, as well as the assistance of the host country or area. This alliance ensures the legitimacy, long-term viability, and global reach of UN peacekeeping (Hultman, L., Kathman, J., & Shannon, M. 2013). ...
Peacekeeping missions from the post-World War II era have played an important role in maintaining global peace and resolving conflicts in ambiguous regions and states. These missions are supported by contributions from various United Nations members, including Pakistan. The primary goal of this research is to investigate Pakistan's commitments and involvement in UN peacekeeping missions. This study seeks to explain Pakistan's involvement in UNPKOs and the accomplishments Pakistan has made in these operations. Maintaining world peace and security is one of Pakistan's primary foreign policy objectives. As a result, it has been actively taking part in United Nations peacekeeping missions ever since it was founded. Pakistan has participated in a total of 46 missions in 28 countries and regions, which were crucial in maintaining international peace and security. Pakistani peacekeepers have completed numerous successful missions, won the hearts and minds of the local populace, and received a great deal of international acclaim thanks to their patient demeanors and high level of professionalism. 157 Pakistanis have also lost their lives in this worthy purpose to date. The qualitative research methodology has been applied on following article.
... To handle operations in the field, it relies on the UN Security Council's (UNSC) legal and political authority, the member states' resources and financial commitments, as well as the assistance of the host country or area. This alliance ensures the legitimacy, long-term viability, and global reach of UN peacekeeping (Hultman, L., Kathman, J., & Shannon, M. 2013). ...
Peacekeeping missions from the post-World War II era have played an important role in maintaining global peace and resolving conflicts in ambiguous regions and states. These missions are supported by contributions from various United Nations members, including Pakistan. The primary goal of this research is to investigate Pakistan's commitments and involvement in UN peacekeeping missions. This study seeks to explain Pakistan's involvement in UNPKOs and the accomplishments Pakistan has made in these operations. Maintaining world peace and security is one of Pakistan's primary foreign policy objectives. As a result, it has been actively taking part in United Nations peacekeeping missions ever since it was founded. Pakistan has participated in a total of 46 missions in 28 countries and regions, which were crucial in maintaining international peace and security. Pakistani peacekeepers have completed numerous successful missions, won the hearts and minds of the local populace, and received a great deal of international acclaim thanks to their patient demeanors and high level of professionalism. 157 Pakistanis have also lost their lives in this worthy purpose to date. The qualitative research methodology has been applied on following article.
... In the last two decades, studies have consistently shown that the presence of peacekeepers is strongly associated with lower fatalities (Walter, Howard, and Fortna 2021). Several studies at the state level, for example, conclusively show that more peacekeepers lead to less violence and that civil wars with peacekeepers present have fewer deaths than those that do not (Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon 2013;Bara and Hultman 2020). The effectiveness of peacekeepers is all the more impresive given the fact that they consistently deploy to the hardest cases (Ruggeri, Dorussen, and Gizelis 2017). ...
Previous research has shown that peacekeeping operations (PKOs) reduce the intensity of conflict. However, scholars have yet to examine whether this effect persists long-term. Do PKOs durably reduce violence even after they are withdrawn, or do they merely pause violent conflict? This paper uses fine-grained geolocated data on both PKO deployment and violence across all of Africa from 1999 through 2021 to answer this question. By leveraging a difference-indifferences approach, we are able to causally identify the effect of PKOs on local violent incidents. We find that while PKOs do reduce violence in the areas in which they are stationed, once they move on, violence recurs. Further, we demonstrate that violence increases in areas near to those in which PKOs arrive, suggesting that PKOs may not even pause violence but rather temporarily displace it. Taken together, our results suggest that scholars and policymakers should reconsider how and when PKOs can effectively protect civilians from violence.
... A combination of operational, logistical and ethical challenges has been put forward in the literature to explain troop reticence. Scholars argue that troop size, mission diversity, and the quality of troops -well-trained with advanced military hardware can enhance civilian protection capabilities relative to illequipped troops (Hultman et al. 2013, Bove and Ruggeri 2016, Haass and Ansorg 2018, Fjelde et al. 2019, Bove et al. 2020. It is a well-accepted fact that some UN missions are resource scarce, as the UN routinely faces troop and equipment shortfalls that affect mission effectiveness (Passmore et al. 2018, p. 366-67). ...
Combining empirical examples from domestic counterinsurgency operations, with historical and primary field data in longitudinal cases of peacekeeping participation by the Indian troops, we develop a preliminary theory of troop reticence. We find that while there is significant learning around civilian protection on the part of Indian troops from internal counterinsurgency operations, there are also important operational differences. Problems with insubordination to international command, gaps in intelligence analysis, and ambiguity over the rules of engagement amidst host-state directed armed attacks on civilians, can make troops hesitant to execute the protection of civilians (PoC) mandate more robustly.
... Since the 1990s a broad normative shift, privileging individual rights over those of states and collectives, has been underway, shaping global governance institutions. The UN has approached a human-centered security paradigm, reflected in the 2005 adoption of the "responsibility to protect" and an increasing focus on civilian protection in UN peacekeeping (Hultman et al. 2013;Oksamytna and Lundgren 2020;Tallberg et al. 2020). While these shifts have been lined with contestation and continue to generate debate, such as during the Council's deliberations over Syria in the 2010s, they are likely to have made the Council more sensitive to conflicts that pose grave risk for civilians. ...
What explains why United Nations Security Council (UNSC) meets and deliberates on some armed conflicts but not others? We advance a theoretical argument centered on the role of conflict externalities, state interests, and interest heterogeneity. We investigate data on the Council's deliberation on armed conflicts in the 1989-2019 period and make three key findings: (1) Conflicts that generate substantive military or civilian deaths are more likely to attract the Council's attention; (2) Permanent members are varyingly likely to involve the Council when their interests are at stake; and (3) In contrast to the conventional wisdom, conflicts over which members have divergent interests are more likely to enter the agenda than other conflicts. The findings have important implications for debates about the Council's attention, responsiveness to problems, and role in world politics.
While the UN secretary-general maintains in the 2023 New Agenda for Peace that the impartiality of the United Nations is its strongest asset, the UN is increasingly becoming partial on the ground. The trend that started with the inclusion of the Force Intervention Brigade in the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2013 is accelerating and taking on new forms. The UN has been supporting the African Union Mission in Somalia and providing logistical support to the Group of Five for the Sahel Joint Force in Mali. In December 2023, the UN Security Council agreed on a resolution that should enable the predictability and sustainability of assessed contributions to African-led counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations, on certain conditions. The normative consequences of increased support to African-led interventions are significant and little explored. The UN system, including humanitarian and human rights components, will no longer be able to claim impartiality in countries where the UN is financing African-led interventions that are propping up fledgling regimes against opposition and terrorist groups. This essay will unpack and examine these developments and their consequences for UN peacekeeping and the larger UN system.
Civil protection, due to its origin in security, defense and the national guard, has been associated with the army. In this sense, the literature review indicates the unavoidable influence of law, order and security institutions on civil protection. Therefore, the objective of this work was to observe this line of inheritance in a public university under the assumption that the community surveyed would have an expectation oriented towards science and technology. An exploratory, transversal and correlational work was carried out with a sample of 100 students selected for their affiliation to the internship and social service system in national security and law enforcement institutions. The results show that risk perception is oriented to the incommensurability of exposure to internal and external conflicts (35% of the total variance explained). In relation to the reviewed literature, it is recommended to reject the hypothesis related to the significant differences between the dimensions reported and the factors observed in the present work. Introduction:
This book discusses the legal responsibility of UN peacekeepers for the protection of civilians under international legal regimes, particularly international human rights law, international humanitarian law, international refugee law, and occupation law. It considers both negative and positive obligations, that is, a duty to respect or not violate a particular right directly and a duty to take positive action to secure or protect a particular right, respectively. In addition, it describes the standards and methods, as well as their strengths and weaknesses, by which actors in UN peacekeeping operations, including the UN, troop contributing countries, and individual peacekeepers, can be held accountable for third-party claims and allegations of criminal misconduct against UN peacekeepers for violations of responsibility in peacekeeping operations. The work will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers, and policy-makers working in the areas of International Law, International Humanitarian Law, International Human Rights Law, and International Relations.
UN peace missions are constantly evolving. Yet, we lack a detailed understanding of the shifting types and objectives of peace missions beyond broad categorizations that distinguish for instance between observer, traditional, multidimensional, and peace enforcement missions. To address this gap, we present the UN Peace Mission Mandates (UNPMM) dataset. With global coverage, 30 years of data between 1991 and 2020, a broad scope that includes peacekeeping and political missions, and information on 41 mandate tasks, the UNPMM represents one of the most detailed and up-to-date datasets on UN peace mission mandates. We use it to highlight how mission types, objectives, and specific tasks have changed since the end of the Cold War, and to analyze what factors influence the kind of missions the UN is willing to authorize. The descriptive statistics and empirical analysis reaffirm the need for a greater disaggregation of data on UN peace missions and their mandates.
While significant advancements have been made in recent years on the African continent in tackling security threats, there are needed improvements to capacities among other challenges. In spite of unprecedented growth and efforts towards establishing peace, the devastating impact caused by previous and ongoing unrest serves as a catalyst for chronic instability. Several African countries have seen an upsurge in political violence and polarization, while others are in a state of limbo. Violent extremism has also increased. By creating conditions to formalize collaboration between innovators, peace scholars, and other stakeholders, a peace innovation (PI) approach and agenda can provide new solutions to complex conflict problems that are user- and needs-driven, ethically reasoned, and that fundamentally understand and respond to a deep consideration of local dynamics to ensure social and economic impact. There is also a strong need for a greater emphasis on the inclusion of civil society, especially youth and women, in order to have a comprehensive approach. Linking these groups is the essence of PI best practice, re-conceptualizing what constitutes the limits of innovation research, re-examining research networks by merging scholarly, economic, and social value, and signalling globally that innovation actors and scholars can be peace builders. Such concerns tie into larger tensions between universality and particularity, and between self and other, that cannot be avoided by those who seek a less violent, more just world. Scholars need to provide methodological, theoretical, and practical guidance to innovators as they operationalize their products.
Why do mass-killing episodes end? Most attention is paid to international tools for ending atrocities. Instead, we consider how domestic politics alter the duration of killing by focusing on how divisions within the regime may lead to coups during the violence. Coups help shift regime preferences and undermine capacity to continue killings. We find support for this argument by statistically analyzing the relationship between coups and the end of each mass-killing episode from 1946 to 2013. We explore each mechanism quantitatively, and buttress these results with a series of examples illustrating the mechanisms at work.
How does the phased withdrawal of United Nations peacekeeping operations (PKOs) influence electoral violence? Many PKOs recently ended and peacekeeping personnel numbers are decreasing. Yet, research on peacekeepers' exit remains in its infancy. We help fill this lacuna and examine how peacekeepers' withdrawal affects violence during electoral periods. We focus on electoral periods because elections are both often-desired intervention endpoints and violence-prone moments in postwar trajectories. We argue that electoral violence increases shortly after a reduction in PKO troops because shortfalls in external oversight and security assistance reduce costs for organizing violence and open opportunities for pursuing a coercive electoral strategy. However, violence-inducing exit effects are likely short-lived due to adaptation by domestic security forces or peacekeepers who remain in the host country. We examine our argument across electoral periods and first-order administrative units of all African countries hosting a PKO (2001-2017). Controlling for violence trends prior to peacekeepers' exit, two-way fixed effects models suggest that a local reduction in PKO troops is not associated with subsequent increases in electoral violence. However, withdrawal incidents lead to spikes in political violence more broadly defined. Our results confirm worries that downsizing during election times may endanger security gains in postwar countries.
How do United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions influence the use of conflict related sexual violence (CRSV) by armed non-state actors? This study argues efficacy is influenced by conditions that precede deployment and the composition of UN forces. Poor intragroup cohesion within rebel ranks incentivizes CRSV, putting peacekeepers in a precarious position upon deployment. UN police improve law enforcement capabilities, build relationships with local communities, and promote information diffusion mechanisms. As a result, UN police are associated with a decrease in CRSV, even in the most difficult environments.
International institutions are essential for tackling many of the most urgent challenges facing the world, from pandemics to humanitarian crises, yet we know little about when they succeed, when they fail, and why. This book proposes a new theory of institutional performance and tests it using a diverse array of sources, including the most comprehensive dataset on the topic. Challenging popular characterizations of international institutions as 'runaway bureaucracies,' Ranjit Lall argues that the most serious threat to performance comes from the pursuit of narrow political interests by states – paradoxically, the same actors who create and give purpose to institutions. The discreet operational processes through which international bureaucrats cultivate and sustain autonomy vis-à-vis governments, he contends, are critical to making institutions 'work.' The findings enhance our understanding of international cooperation, public goods, and organizational behavior while offering practical lessons to policymakers, NGOs, businesses, and citizens interested in improving institutional effectiveness.
Since the 2013 outbreak of civil war in South Sudan, the conflict has produced orgies of casualties and displacement of millions necessitating a series of mandates of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS). Yet, humanitarian crises and civilian protection challenges have not been reversed. To address these deficiencies, this article examined methods of the unarmed civilian peacekeeping as local peace formation and infrastructure involving the non-use of weapons for civilian protection as practiced by the Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP). Adopting ethnographic strands of Critical Peace Studies and utilisation of participant observations in humanitarian accounts with the NP between 2015 and 2019, our in-depth qualitative fieldwork indicates a potentially effective approach to unarmed civilian protection in the country. Our findings illuminate the limited viability of the UN civilian appointed personnel, while making an argument for the compelling efficacy of unarmed civilian peacekeepers in which those affected by the conflict are themselves empowered in their physical protection, the study further recommends the integration of the NP strategies into the current state of peace operation disarray so the current self-fulfilling prophecy of failed peace in South Sudan can be overturned.
Token forces – tiny national troop contributions in much larger coalitions – have become ubiquitous in UN peacekeeping. This Element examines how and why this contribution type has become the most common form of participation in UN peace operations despite its limited relevance for missions' operational success. It conceptualizes token forces as a path-dependent unintended consequence of the norm of multilateralism in international uses of military force. The norm extends states' participation options by giving coalition builders an incentive to accept token forces; UN-specific types of token forces emerged as states learned about this option and secretariat officials adapted to state demand for it. The Element documents the growing incidence of token forces in UN peacekeeping, identifies the factors disposing states to contribute token forces, and discusses how UN officials channel token participation. The Element contributes to the literatures on UN peacekeeping, military coalitions, and the impacts of norms in international organizations.
When should peacekeepers partially or fully withdraw from a country or region in which they are operating? This important question has received little scholarly attention. However, it has profound implications. If peacekeepers depart prematurely, as happened in Rwanda in 1994, the consequences can be disastrous with the potential to lead to widespread preventable deaths and human suffering. If they overstay, peacekeepers risk alienating the population they are seeking to protect and undercutting popular sovereignty at significant economic costs. Striking a balance, we propose a framework for just withdrawal that is both normatively compelling and empirically sound. It focuses on three aspects that are vital for understanding when peacekeepers can depart in an ethically justified manner: just cause, effectiveness, and legitimacy. By considering a number of objections, we also address critics who challenge the overarching premise of peacekeeping or might prefer different standards by which to suggest peacekeepers should stay or depart. Finally, we illustrate our argument with theoretical and empirical examples and a discussion of UN peacekeeping in East Timor.
This research note extends the Bara and Hultman (2020 Bara, Corinne, and Lisa Hultman. “Just Different Hats? Comparing UN and Non-UN Peacekeeping.” International Peacekeeping 27, no. 3 (2020): 341–68.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) study on the effectiveness of non-UN peacekeeping missions in terms of curbing one-sided violence (OSV) against civilians. In particular, we employ two novel instruments to address the two-way causality between the number of non-UN peacekeepers and OSV measures. For each panel year, our instruments involve the interaction between the sum of various designated peacekeepers contributed and the inverse distance between the capitals of contributor and conflict countries. As required, the instrument satisfies the necessary inclusion and exclusion (exogeneity) requirements. The instrument-based results establish a robust reduction in government OSV stemming from the number of non-UN peacekeepers deployed. That reduction also holds for propensity-score matching and the inclusion of UN peacekeepers in the same regression. Non-UN peacekeepers did not have a robust influence on rebel OSV.
This chapter tests the hypotheses laid out in the previous chapter. It draws upon a new dataset of interorganizational networks in peace operations from 1991 to 2013. This dataset includes peacekeeping networks in 22 intrastate conflicts. This chapter introduces the research design, provides a discussion on the outcome and explanatory variables, and presents statistical evidence consistent with the argument that both the structure and composition of inter-IGO networks account for the effectiveness of such networks and, therefore, the performance of peace operations.
This chapter lays out a theoretical framework of interorganizational networking and examines potential mechanisms that affect peacekeeping performance. Reflecting on the insights from the literature on organizational studies, interorganizational networks, and network theory, the chapter offers an argument that the structure and composition of inter-IGO peacekeeping networks are highly significant to the performance of peace operations in intrastate conflicts.
Scholars have long debated whether international organizations (IO) matter in international politics. Skeptics argue that power politics determine outcomes while champions see IOs as important, independently shaping outcomes and reshaping the structure of politics. Between these extremes, scholars have made numerous theoretical and empirical contributions to understanding under what conditions IOs make a difference. Yet, the fundamental question remains: when IOs identify a significant problem, can they solve it? We identify an underutilized analytical approach to understanding this broad debate. Specifically, we suggest scholars analyze this question by focusing on an IOs response to given crises to provide internal validity to claims throughout this debate. Furthermore, we encourage scholars to move beyond the oft-cited global or European cases to better incorporate insights from IOs in various parts of the world. Here, we explore the Southern African Development Community's attempt to coordinate member states’ maritime strategy to solve the emergent piracy problem caused by the Somali civil war. In identifying these new directions for research, we demonstrate that IOs, even under difficult circumstances, are effective actors in international politics.
Research has begun to examine the relationship between changes in the conflict environment and levels of civilian victimization. We extend this work by examining the effect of external armed intervention on the decisions of governments and insurgent organizations to victimize civilians during civil wars. We theorize that changes in the balance of power in an intrastate conflict influence combatant strategies of violence. As a conflict actor weakens relative to its adversary, it employs increasingly violent tactics toward the civilian population as a means of reshaping the strategic landscape to its benefit. The reason for this is twofold. First, declining capabilities increase resource needs at the moment that extractive capacity is in decline. Second, declining capabilities inhibit control and policing, making less violent means of defection deterrence more difficult. As both resource extraction difficulties and internal threats increase, actors’ incentives for violence against the population increase. To the extent that biased military interventions shift the balance of power between conflict actors, we argue that they alter actor incentives to victimize civilians. Specifically, intervention should reduce the level of violence employed by the supported faction and increase the level employed by the opposed faction. We test these arguments using data on civilian casualties and armed intervention in intrastate conflicts from 1989 to 2005. Our results support our expectations, suggesting that interventions shift the power balance and affect the levels of violence employed by combatants.
How many peacekeepers are needed to keep the peace? Under what conditions are local governments and rebel forces more willing to cooperate with an intervention force? From a theoretical perspective in which the main role of peacekeepers is to assist local actors in overcoming their commitment problems and mistrust toward each other, it follows that sufficiently robust missions should positively affect levels of cooperation. Furthermore, any effect should be conditional on the local balance of power, that is, the military leverage between government and rebel forces. Relatively weak rebel groups—facing a stronger government—should be more willing to cooperate with larger missions. In the empirical analysis, using newly collected event data on United Nation (UN) peacekeeping operations from 1989 to 2005 in African civil wars, the authors find support for conditional effect of robust peacekeeping: there is more cooperation with UN peacekeepers when the rebels are weak.
Previous statistical studies of the effects of UN peacekeeping have generally sug- gested that UN interventions have a positive effect on building a sustainable peace after civil war. Recent methodological developments have questioned this result because the cases in which the United Nations intervened were quite different from those in which they did not. Therefore the estimated causal effect may be due to the assumptions of the model that the researchers chose rather than to peacekeeping itself. The root of the problem is that UN missions are not randomly assigned. We argue that standard approaches for dealing with this problem (Heckman regression and instrumental variables) are invalid and impracticable in the context of UN peacekeeping and would lead to estimates of the effects of UN operations that are largely a result of the assumptions of the statistical model rather than the data. We correct for the effects of nonrandom assignment with matching techniques on a sample of UN interventions in post-Cold-War conflicts and find that UN inter- ventions are indeed effective in the sample of post-civil-conflict interventions, but that UN interventions while civil wars are still ongoing have no causal effect.
Theory: Regimes respond to domestic threats with political repression. The precise nature of the domestic threat itself, however, is subject to discussion. Hypothesis: State repression is a function of either a unidimensional conception of domestic threats (i.e., where there is one attribute of political conflict considered by the regime) or one that is multidimensional in character (i.e., where there are several attributes considered), conditioned by certain political-economic characteristics: democracy, economic development, coercive capacity, dependency and lagged repression. Methods: A pooled cross-sectional time series analysis of 53 countries from 1948 to 1982. Results: Three different aspects of political conflict (conflict frequency, strategic variety, and deviance from cultural norm) are statistically significant in their relationship to repression, supporting the multidimensional conception of domestic threats. Additionally,,the degree to which the government is democratic significantly alters the pattern of relationships between political conflict and repressive behavior.
In the period 1946-2001, there were 225 armed conflicts and 34 of them were active in all of or part of 2001. Armed conflict remains a serious problem in the post-Cold War period. For three decades, the Correlates of War project has served as the main supplier of reliable data used in longitudinal studies of external and internal armed conflict. The COW datasets on war use the relatively high threshold of 1,000 battle-deaths. The Uppsala dataset on armed conflict has a lower threshold, 25 annual battle-deaths, but has so far been available for only the post-Cold War period. This dataset has now been backdated to the end of World War II. This article presents a report on armed conflict based on this backdate as well as another annual update. It presents the procedures for the backdating, as well as trends over time and breakdowns for the type of conflict. It assesses the criteria for measuring armed conflict and discusses some directions for future data collection in this area.
This article examines the effect of interstate signals on the probability of civil war onset. Using a bargaining framework, the author argues that costly signals should have no effect on the likelihood that a civil war begins because they allow the government and opposition to peacefully adjust their bargaining positions to avoid the costs of fighting. In contrast, cheap signals can disrupt intrastate negotiations, which makes conflict more likely by increasing the likelihood that one of the competing parties will make excessive demands. This argument is tested using measures for sanctions, troop mobilization, alliances, and trade ties as indicators for costly signals, as well as events data as measures for cheap signals. Results demonstrate that cheap signals strongly affect the probability of civil war onset, while costly signals do not. Cheap signals hostile to the government increase the likelihood of civil war onset, while cheap supportive signals have a pacifying effect.
Theories of conflict emphasize dyadic interaction, yet existing empirical studies of civil war focus largely on state attributes and pay little attention to nonstate antagonists. We recast civil war in a dyadic perspective, and consider how nonstate actor attributes and their relationship to the state influence conflict dynamics. We argue that strong rebels, who pose a military challenge to the government, are likely to lead to short wars and concessions. Conflicts where rebels seem weak can become prolonged if rebels can operate in the periphery so as to defy a government victory yet are not strong enough to extract concessions. Conflicts should be shorter when potential insurgents can rely on alternative political means to violence. We examine these hypotheses in a dyadic analysis of civil war duration and outcomes, using new data on nonstate actors and conflict attributes, finding support for many of our conjectures.
This article explores the strategic motivations for insurgent violence against civilians. It argues that violence is a function of insurgent capacity and views violence and security as selective benefits that insurgents manipulate to encourage support. Weak insurgent groups facing collective action problems have an incentive to target civilians because they lack the capacity to provide sufficient benefits to entice loyalty. By contrast, stronger rebels can more easily offer a mix of selective incentives and selective repression to compel support. This relationship is conditioned by the counterinsurgency strategies employed by the government. Indiscriminate regime violence can effectively reduce the level of selective incentives necessary for insurgents to recruit support, thus reducing their reliance on violence as a mobilization tool. However, this relationship only holds when rebels are sufficiently capable of credibly providing security and other incentives to civilian supporters. These hypotheses are tested using data on one-sided violence from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. The statistical analysis supports the hypothesis that comparatively capable insurgents kill fewer civilians than their weaker counterparts. The results also suggest a complex interaction between insurgent capability and government strategies in shaping insurgent violence. While weaker insurgents sharply escalate violence in the face of indiscriminate regime counterinsurgency tactics, stronger groups employ comparatively less violence against civilians as regime violence escalates.
How do third-party interventions affect the severity of mass killings? The authors theorize that episodes of mass killing are the consequence of two factors: (1) the threat perceptions of the perpetrators and (2) the cost of implementing genocidal policies relative to other alternatives. To reduce genocidal hostilities, interveners must address these factors. Doing so requires that interveners alter the genocidaire's expectation of a successful extermination policy, which in turn requires a demonstration of the third party's resolve. This cannot be achieved immediately upon intervention, and, given the perpetrator's strategic response to third-party involvement, the authors expect intervention to increase hostilities in the short term. With time, however, the authors contend that the characteristics of impartial interventions offer the greatest opportunity for reducing the violence in the long term. A statistical analysis of the 1955-2005 period supports the theoretical expectations.
Dennis Jett examines why peacekeeping operations fail by comparing the unsuccessful attempt at peacekeeping in Angola with the successful effort in Mozambique, alongside a wide range of other peacekeeping experiences. The book argues that while the causes of past peacekeeping failures can be identified, the chances for success will be difficult to improve because of the way such operations are initiated and conducted and the way the United Nations operates as an organization. Jett reviews the history of peacekeeping and the evolution in the number, size, scope and cost of peacekeeping missions. He also explains why peacekeeping has become more necessary, possible and desired and yet, at the same time, more complex, more difficult and less frequently used. The book takes a hard look at the UN7;s actions and provides useful information for understanding current conflicts.
With enactment of the FY2014 Consolidated Appropriations Act on January 1, 2014 (H.R. 3547/P.L. 113-73), Congress has approved appropriations for the past 13 years of war that total $1.6 trillion for military operations, base support, weapons maintenance, training of Afghan and Iraq security forces, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans' health care for the war operations initiated since the 9/11 attacks.
This book examines the obligations of peacekeepers and other multi-national forces to prevent serious abuses of human rights towards civilians under international humanitarian law and international human rights law. It does so by analysing the meaning and practical consequences for troops of the Article 1 duty to respect and ensure respect for the Geneva Conventions, of the duty to secure human rights found in most international human rights treaties, and of the duty to restore law and order in an occupation. There are more troops engaged in peacekeeping activities now than in any other time in history. Increasingly peacekeepers are in theory deployed to protect civilians from harm, but in practice the situations they find themselves in are often less than clear-cut. There are many instances in recent memory where troops failed to save the very civilians they were meant to protect. Peacekeepers may lack the mandate or resources to protect civilians from human rights abuses, or they may even themselves violate civilians' rights. This book analyses the duty to intervene to stop the commission of serious abuses of human rights. It examines the extent of troops' obligations to provide protection in light of various different operational and legal contexts. It also explores the 'grey areas' not adequately covered by international law. It discusses whether new approaches are needed, for example where operations are undertaken explicitly to protect people from serious violations of their human rights, and concludes by offering some guidelines for troops faced with such violations.
In the last fifteen years, the number, size, and scope of peacekeeping missions deployed in the aftermath of civil wars have increased exponentially. From Croatia and Cambodia, to Nicaragua and Namibia, international personnel have been sent to maintain peace around the world. But does peacekeeping work? And if so, how? In Does Peacekeeping Work? Virginia Page Fortna answers these questions through the systematic analysis of civil wars that have taken place since the end of the Cold War. She compares peacekeeping and nonpeacekeeping cases, and she investigates where peacekeepers go, showing that their missions are crucial to the most severe internal conflicts in countries and regions where peace is otherwise likely to falter. Fortna demonstrates that peacekeeping is an extremely effective policy tool, dramatically reducing the risk that war will resume. Moreover, she explains that relatively small and militarily weak consent-based peacekeeping operations are often just as effective as larger, more robust enforcement missions. Fortna examines the causal mechanisms of peacekeeping, paying particular attention to the perspective of the peacekept--the belligerents themselves--on whose decisions the stability of peace depends. Based on interviews with government and rebel leaders in Sierra Leone, Mozambique, and the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, Does Peacekeeping Work? demonstrates specific ways in which peacekeepers alter incentives, alleviate fear and mistrust, prevent accidental escalation to war, and shape political procedures to stabilize peace.
Making War and Building Peace examines how well United Nations peacekeeping missions work after civil war. Statistically analyzing all civil wars since 1945, the book compares peace processes that had UN involvement to those that didn't. Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis argue that each mission must be designed to fit the conflict, with the right authority and adequate resources. UN missions can be effective by supporting new actors committed to the peace, building governing institutions, and monitoring and policing implementation of peace settlements. But the UN is not good at intervening in ongoing wars. If the conflict is controlled by spoilers or if the parties are not ready to make peace, the UN cannot play an effective enforcement role. It can, however, offer its technical expertise in multidimensional peacekeeping operations that follow enforcement missions undertaken by states or regional organizations such as NATO. Finding that UN missions are most effective in the first few years after the end of war, and that economic development is the best way to decrease the risk of new fighting in the long run, the authors also argue that the UN's role in launching development projects after civil war should be expanded.
This paper presents new data on personnel commitments to United Nations peacekeeping operations from 1990 to 2011. For every operation during this period, data on the number of deployed troops, police and military observers are coded at the monthly level. Additionally, the number of each personnel type contributed by every UN member state is recorded. These data offer opportunities for testing theories of peacekeeping and conflict processes and present research avenues for which data have hitherto not existed. Herein, I introduce the data and coding processes, present trends, illustrate prospects for research that could benefit from these data and provide an empirical application.
This book considers why peacekeeping worked in Mozambique at the same time it was failing in Angola in the early 1990s, It also looks at how peacekeeping as evolved and how it might be improved.
This article presents the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (UCDP GED). The UCDP GED is an event dataset that disaggregates three types of organized violence (state-based conflict, non-state conflict, and one-sided violence) both spatially and temporally. Each event – defined as an instance of organized violence with at least one fatality – comes with date, geographical location, and identifiers that allow the dataset to be linked to and merged with other UCDP datasets. The first version of the dataset covers events of fatal violence on the African continent between 1989 and 2010. This article, firstly, introduces the rationale for the new dataset, and explains the basic coding procedures as well as the quality controls. Secondly, we discuss some of the data’s potential weaknesses in representing the universe of organized violence, as well as some potential biases induced by the operationalizations. Thirdly, we provide an example of how the data can be used, by illustrating the association between cities and organized violence, taking population density into account. The UCDP GED is a useful resource for conflict analyses below the state and country-year levels, and can provide us with new insights into the geographical determinants and temporal sequencing of warfare and violence.
Protection of civilians is now at the forefront of the responsibilities of the international community. There is a strong international norm that civilian populations should be protected from violence. But how committed is the United Nations to acting in line with this norm? I argue that the UN Security Council (UNSC) has an interest in demonstrating that it takes violence against civilians seriously. Through a broadened security agenda including human security, the legitimacy and the credibility of the UNSC hinges on its ability to act as a guarantor of civilian protection. As a consequence, the UN is more likely to deploy peace operations in conflicts where the warring parties target the civilian population. The argument is supported by a statistical examination of all internal armed conflicts in 1989–2006. The results show that the likelihood of a UN peace operation is higher in conflicts with high levels of violence against civilians, but this effect is mainly visible after 1999. This year marked a shift in the global security agenda and it was also when the UNSC first issued an explicit mandate to protect civilians. Conflicts with high levels of violence against civilians are also more likely to get operations with robust mandates. This suggests that the UNSC is not just paying lip service to the protection norm, but that it actually acts to implement it.
dqThis book presents a theory that accounts for the different strategies pursued by rebel groups in civil war, explaining why patterns of insurgent violence vary so much across conflicts. It does so by examining the membership, structure, and behavior of four insurgent movements in Uganda, Mozambique, and Peru. Drawing on interviews with nearly two hundred combatants and civilians who experienced violence firsthand, it shows that rebels' strategies depend in important ways on how difficult it is to launch a rebellion. The book thus demonstrates how characteristics of the environment in which rebellions emerge constrain rebel organization and shape the patterns of violence that civilians experience.dq--BOOK JACKET.
Why do some UN peacekeeping missions succeed and others fail? Why did the mission in Sierra Leone produce peace and that in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has not? These two UN missions have had unambiguously divergent outcomes, with violence ending in Sierra Leone and the DRC being “the killing fields of our times.” This paper seeks to explain the factors that contribute to these starkly different outcomes, with an eye towards understanding the conditions under which force is likely to be effective in the peace enforcement setting. Comparing the cases of the DRC and Sierra Leone produces two-related insights on peacekeeping. First, the presence of too few, poorly equipped, and too constrained peacekeepers will cast doubt on the likely success of a particular peacekeeping force. Second, an overly ambitious or ambiguous political objective — one that hopes peacekeepers can make peace amidst spoilers outside the peace process — also creates an environment ripe for failure. Both speak to the utility of force and its interplay with the political process.
Never again! the world has vowed time and again since the Holocaust. Yet genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other mass atrocity crimes continue to shock our consciences --from the killing fields of Cambodia to the machetes of Rwanda to the agony of Darfur. Gareth Evans has grappled with these issues firsthand. As Australian foreign minister, he was a key broker of the United Nations peace plan for Cambodia. As president of the International Crisis Group, he now works on the prevention and resolution of scores of conflicts and crises worldwide. The primary architect of and leading authority on the Responsibility to Protect (""R2P""), he shows here how this new international norm can once and for all prevent a return to the killing fields. The Responsibility to Protect captures a simple and powerful idea. The primary responsibility for protecting its own people from mass atrocity crimes lies with the state itself. State sovereignty implies responsibility, not a license to kill. But when a state is unwilling or unable to halt or avert such crimes, the wider international community then has a collective responsibility to take whatever action is necessary. R2P emphasizes preventive action above all. That includes assistance for states struggling to contain potential crises and for effective rebuilding after a crisis or conflict to tackle its underlying causes. R2P's primary tools are persuasion and support, not military or other coercion. But sometimes it is right to fight: faced with another Rwanda, the world cannot just stand by. R2P was unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit. But many misunderstandings persist about its scope and limits. And much remains to be done to solidify political support and to build institutional capacity. Evans shows, compellingly, how big a break R2P represents from the past, and how, with its acceptance in principle and effective application in practice, the promise of "Never again!" can at last become a reality.
This article presents new data on the direct and deliberate killings of civilians, called one-sided violence, in intrastate armed conflicts, 1989—2004. These data contribute to the present state of quantitative research on violence against civilians in three important respects: the data provide actual estimates of civilians killed, the data are collected annually and the data are provided for both governments and rebel groups. Using these data, general trends and patterns are presented, showing that the post-Cold War era is characterized by periods of fairly low-scale violence punctuated by occasional sharp increases in violence against civilians. Furthermore, rebels tend to be more violent on the whole, while governments commit relatively little violence except in those few years which see mass killings. The article then examines some factors that have been found to predict genocide and evaluates how they correlate with one-sided violence as conceptualized here. A U-shaped correlation between regime type and one-sided violence is identified: while autocratic governments undertake higher levels of one-sided violence than other regime types, rebels are more violent in democratic countries.
In many armed conflicts, rebel groups deliberately target civilians. This article examines whether such violence is related to the performance of the rebels on the battlefield. It is proposed that rebel groups who are losing battles target civilians in order to impose extra costs on the government. When rebels attack civilians, the government may incur both political and military costs. Violence against civilians is thus used as an alternative conflict strategy aimed at pressuring the government into concessions. The argument is evaluated by using monthly data for rebel groups involved in armed conflict from January 2002 to December 2004.
I use a rationalist framework to explore an issue typically framed and understood as irrational: large-scale violence against civilians in the context of civil wars. More specifically, I focus on the massacres of civilians in Algeria and seek to uncover the logic that drives such actions. The main thesis is that these massacres are not irrational instances of random violence motivated by extremist Islamist ideology, as they are typically described in the media; they can be understood instead as part of a rational strategy initiated by the Islamist rebels aiming to maximize civilian support under a particular set of con- straints. Mass, yet mostly targeted and selective, terror is used to punish and deter defection by civilians in the context of a particular strategic conjuncture characterized by (a) fragmented and unstable rule, (b) mass civilian defections toward the incumbents and (c) escalation of viol- ence. I check this thesis against the available evidence, address puzzles such as the identity of the victims and the behavior of the army, extend it to similar massacres in other countries, draw a number of implica- tions and discuss a research agenda. KEY WORDSpolitical violencecivil warcivilian massacres • insurgencyAlgeria
This study examines the preventive effect of peacekeeping on mass killings of civilians in intrastate conflicts. Peacekeepers may be sent to the most difficult conflicts. Control variables might capture the difficultness, for example, measures of the intensity of fighting.This is insufficient if there are factors that are difficult to pinpoint and measure that affect both the likelihood that peacekeepers are sent in and the risk of mass killings. Such unmeasured explanatory factors may bias our results.This paper applies a statistical technique, seemingly unrelated probit, that corrects for this problem and reveals a previously undetectable benign effect of peace keeping.
This crossnational study seeks to explain variations in governmental repression of human rights to personal integrity (state terrorism) in a 153-country sample during the eighties. We outline theoretical perspectives on this topic and subject them to empirical tests using a technique appropriate for our pooled cross-sectional time-series design, namely, ordinary least squares with robust standard errors and a lagged dependent variable. We find democracy and participation in civil or international war to have substantively important and statistically significant effects on repression. The effects of economic development and population size are more modest. The hypothesis linking leftist regime types to abuse of personal integrity rights receives some support. We find no reliable evidence that population growth, British cultural influence, military control, or economic growth affect levels of repression. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for scholars and practitioners concerned with the prevention of personal integrity abuse.
Social Scientists rarely take full advantage of the information available in their statistical results. As a consequence, they miss opportunities to present quantities that are of greatest substantive interest for their research and express the appropriate degree of certainty about these quantities. In this article, we offer an approach, built on the technique of statistical simulation, to extract the currently overlooked information from any statistical method and to interpret and present it in a reader-friendly manner. Using this technique requires some expertise, which we try to provide herein, but its application should make the results of quantitative articles more informative and transparent. To illustrate our recommendations, we replicate the results of several published works, showing in each case how the authors' own conclusions can be expressed more sharply and informatively, and, without changing any data or statistical assumptions, how our approach reveals important new information about the research questions at hand. We also offer very easy-to-use Clarify software that implements our suggestions.
By analytically decoupling war and violence, this book explores the causes and dynamics of violence in civil war. Against the prevailing view that such violence is an instance of impenetrable madness, the book demonstrates that there is logic to it and that it has much less to do with collective emotions, ideologies, and cultures than currently believed. Kalyvas specifies a novel theory of selective violence: it is jointly produced by political actors seeking information and individual civilians trying to avoid the worst but also grabbing what opportunities their predicament affords them. Violence, he finds, is never a simple reflection of the optimal strategy of its users; its profoundly interactive character defeats simple maximization logics while producing surprising outcomes, such as relative nonviolence in the 'frontlines' of civil war.
Why do some wars result in the intentional killing of large numbers
of civilians? In this article we examine the incidence of mass killing
in all wars from 1945 to 2000. In the statistical analysis of our data
set of 147 wars, we find strong evidence supporting our hypothesis that
mass killing is often a calculated military strategy used by regimes
attempting to defeat major guerrilla insurgencies. Unlike conventional
military forces, guerrilla armies often rely directly on the local
civilian population for logistical support. Because guerrilla forces
are difficult to defeat directly, governments facing major guerrilla
insurgencies have strong incentives to target the guerrillas'
civilian base of support. We find that mass killing is significantly
more likely during guerrilla wars than during other kinds of wars. In
addition, we find that the likelihood of mass killing among guerrilla
conflicts is greatly increased when the guerrillas receive high levels
of active support from the local population or when the insurgency
poses a major military threat to the regime. a
b
The toll of civil conflict is largely borne by civilian populations, as warring factions target non-combatants through campaigns of violence. But significant variation exists in the extent to which warring groups abuse the civilian population: across conflicts, across groups, and within countries geographically and over time. Using a new dataset on fighting groups in Sierra Leone, this article analyzes the determinants of the tactics, strategies, and behaviors that warring factions employ in their relationships with noncombatants. We first describe a simple logic of extraction which we use to generate hypotheses about variation in levels of abuse across fighting units. We then show that the most important determinants of civilian abuse are internal to the structure of the faction. High levels of abuse are exhibited by warring factions that are unable to police the behavior of their members because they are more ethnically fragmented, rely on material incentives to recruit participants, and lack mechanisms for punishing indiscipline. Explanations that emphasize the importance of local community ties and contestation do not find strong support in the data.
That rebels face a collective action problem is one of the most widely shared assumptions in the literature on civil wars. The authors argue that the collective action paradigm can be both descriptively inaccurate and analytically misleading when it comes to civil wars. They question both pillars of the paradigm as applied to the study of civil wars, namely, the free-riding incentive generated by the public goods dimension of insurgency and the risks of individual participation in insurgent collective action. The authors argue, instead, that although insurgent collective action may entail the expectation of future collective benefits, public (rather than just private) costs tend to predominate in the short term. Moreover, the costs of nonparticipation and free riding may equal or even exceed those of participation. The authors support these claims by triangulating three types of evidence: historical evidence from counterinsurgency operations in several civil wars; data from the Vietnam War's Phoenix Program; and regional evidence from the Greek Civil War. They conclude by drawing implications for the study of civil wars.
International peacebuilding can improve the prospects that a civil war will be resolved. Although peacebuilding strategies must be designed to address particular conflicts, broad parameters that fit most conflicts can be identified. Strategies should address the local roots of hostility; the local capacities for change; and the (net) specific degree of international commitment available to assist change. One can conceive of these as the three dimensions of a triangle, whose area is the "political space"—or effective capacity—for building peace. We test these propositions with an extensive data set of 124 post-World War Two civil wars and find that multilateral, United Nations peace operations make a positive difference. UN peacekeeping is positively correlated with democratization processes after civil war and multilateral enforcement operations are usually successful in ending the violence. Our study provides broad guidelines to design the appropriate peacebuilding strategy, given the mix of hostility, local capacities, and international capacities.
Does the presence of a peacekeeping force reduce violence against civilians during or after civil war? Does it matter whether that peacekeeping force acts under the auspices of the United Nations (UN) or a regional security organization? Are observer, traditional peacekeeping, multidimensional, and enforcement missions equally effective or does mandate affect levels of violence? Much ink has been spilled on related questions in the peacekeeping literature, but almost all existing research has focused on whether peacekeeping operations (PKOs) help maintain peace after civil wars, concentrated on the resumption of civil war between factions, and either focused entirely on UN PKOs or conflated UN with non-UN-led operations.
Recent research on violence against civilians during wars has emphasized war-related factors (such as territorial control or the characteristics of armed groups) over political ones (such as ideological polarization or prewar political competition). Having distinguished between irregular and conventional civil wars and between direct and indirect violence, I theorize on the determinants of direct violence in conventional civil wars. I introduce a new data set of all 1,062 municipalities of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and I show that the degree of direct violence against civilians at the municipal level goes up where prewar electoral competition between rival political factions approaches parity. I also show that, following the first round of violence, war-related factors gain explanatory relevance. In particular, there is a clear endogenous trend whereby subsequent levels of violence are highly correlated with initial levels of violence. In short, the paper demonstrates that an understanding of the determinants of violence requires a theory combining the effect of political cleavages and wartime dynamics.
This article explores a perverse consequence of the emerging norm of humanitarian intervention, or “Responsibility to Protect,” contrary to its intent of protecting civilians from genocide and ethnic cleansing. The root of the problem is that such genocidal violence often represents state retaliation against a substate group for rebellion (such as an armed secession) by some of its members. The emerging norm, by raising expectations of diplomatic and military intervention to protect these groups, unintentionally fosters rebellion by lowering its expected cost and increasing its likelihood of success. In practice, intervention does sometimes help rebels attain their political goals, but usually it is too late or inadequate to avert retaliation against civilians. Thus, the emerging norm resembles an imperfect insurance policy against genocidal violence. It creates moral hazard that encourages the excessively risky or fraudulent behavior of rebellion by members of groups that are vulnerable to genocidal retaliation, but it cannot fully protect against the backlash. The emerging norm thereby causes some genocidal violence that otherwise would not occur. Bosnia and Kosovo illustrate that in at least two recent cases the moral-hazard hypothesis explains why members of a vulnerable group rebelled and thereby triggered genocidal retaliation. The article concludes by exploring whether potential interveners could mitigate genocidal violence by modifying their intervention policies to reduce moral hazard.
Inferences about counterfactuals are essential for prediction, answering “what if” questions, and estimating causal effects. However, when the counterfactuals posed are too far from the data at hand, conclusions drawn from well-specified statistical analyses become based on speculation and convenient but indefensible model assumptions rather than empirical evidence. Unfortunately, standard statistical approaches assume the veracity of the model rather than revealing the degree of model-dependence, so this problem can be hard to detect. We develop easy-to-apply methods to evaluate counterfactuals that do not require sensitivity testing over specified classes of models. If an analysis fails the tests we offer, then we know that substantive results are sensitive to at least some modeling choices that are not based on empirical evidence. We use these methods to evaluate the extensive scholarly literatures on the effects of changes in the degree of democracy in a country (on any dependent variable) and separate analyses of the effects of UN peacebuilding efforts. We find evidence that many scholars are inadvertently drawing conclusions based more on modeling hypotheses than on evidence in the data. For some research questions, history contains insufficient information to be our guide. Free software that accompanies this paper implements all our suggestions.
What determines where and when the United Nations (UN) sends peacekeepers in civil wars? This is an important topic for at least two normative reasons. First, it is a necessary prerequisite for judging the extent to which the organization lives up to its aspirations for being a truly global body, capable of working to preserve international security and relieve suffering without preference to a state's choice of government, location, resources, or historical connection to the great powers. Second, given various attempts to suggest criteria or benchmarks for humanitarian intervention, it is important to know which cases are selected for intervention in the absence of such criteria.
The procedures and standards of the UN provide little guidance as to the actual decisions of the Security Council regarding when and where peacekeepers will be deployed. Peacekeepers are deployed with reference to Chapters 6 or 7 of the UN Charter. Although these chapters differ with regard to the use of force or pacific means to resolve disputes, they agree that the prerequisite for their enactment is a threat to or an endangerment of “the maintenance of international peace and security.” The question remains, why does the Security Council consider some civil wars threats to international security? The charter is silent on what constitutes a threat to international security, and the Security Council has shown enormous flexibility in invoking the language of threat to justify the deployment of peacekeepers. If previous deployments provide any indication, then one must wrestle with why civil wars in Mozambique, Somalia, Guatemala, and Sierra Leone were deemed essential for the promotion of international security, whereas civil wars in Kashmir, Sudan, Chechnya, and Algeria were judged as peripheral to security.
This article distinguishes between “direct” and “indirect” violence during civil wars. These two types differ in their forms of production: while indirect violence is unilaterally perpetrated by an armed group, direct violence is jointly produced by an armed group and civilians, and it hinges on local collaboration. These differences have consequences for the spatial variation of each of these types: in conventional civil wars, indirect violence is hypothesized to be positively associated with levels of prewar support for the enemy group; in contrast, direct violence is hypothesized to increase with the level of political parity between factions in a locality. The predictions are tested with a novel dataset of 1,710 municipalities in Catalonia and Aragon during the Spanish civil war (1936-1939).
This study examines the effectiveness of overt military intervention in slowing or stopping the killing during ongoing instances of genocide or politicide. Six alternative hypotheses regarding the potential effects of intervention on genocide/politicide severity are tested in a cross-national longitudinal analysis of all ongoing genodices or politicides from 1995 to 1997. The results suggest that interventions that directly challenge the perpetrator or aid the target of the brutal policy are the only effective type of military responses, increasing the probability that the magnitude of the slaughter can be slowed or stopped. Impartial interventions seem to be ineffective at reducing severity, and interventions to challenge the perpetrator do not make matters worse for the targets of genocide or politicide. The findings are consistent with recent arguments that attempts to prevent or alleviate mass killings should focus on opposing, restraining, or disarming perpetrators and/or removing them from power.