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How does the deployment and withdrawal of UN peacekeepers affect local economic development in civil war countries? This study provides a large-N subnational analysis across UN peacekeeping operations that assesses their impact on the local economy both during deployment and after their withdrawal. We expect a positive association between UN peacekeeping and economic development. Besides providing a sizeable cash injection into the economy, peacekeepers can safeguard both the resumption of everyday economic exchanges at the grassroots level and the influx of aid and development projects. To test this, we combine subnational data on peacekeeping deployments with high-resolution data on nightlight emissions. Results from two-way fixed effects models, using matching, show that a more sizable peacekeeping presence can help boost economic activity in their area of operation. Importantly, we identify a slow but positive economic development in areas of deployment after peacekeepers withdraw, which is confirmed in a DiD estimation approach.

United Nations peacekeeping is an important instrument for maintaining international peace, but the mandates that peacekeeping operations are expected to implement are increasingly complex. This trend has consequences. We argue that certain member states are incentivized by the benefits of partaking in complex missions. These include ‘process’ benefits such as reimbursement payments, training, and reputation building. Specifically, non-democratic states are more likely to make greater contributions to missions with complex mandates than democratic states. In a global analysis of UN member peacekeeping contributions from 1990 to 2022, we show that as mandate complexity increases, non-democracies make larger contributions relative to democracies. While democracies do not shy away from supporting peacekeeping, they resist substantial contributions to the ambitiously mandated missions that they have often themselves promoted. These findings contribute to ongoing academic discussions about the challenge of recruiting sufficient resources to pursue peacekeeping while insisting on a liberal global order.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) was founded to end impunity for war crimes, such as violence against civilians, but its legitimacy as an impartial institution is often questioned. Previous research has suggested that even though the ICC gets involved in the worst atrocities, investigations and prosecutions are influenced by political interests. We show that member state interests are critical already at the selection stage of initiating preliminary examinations. We theorize that incentives and drivers of ICC involvement move through two pathways. On the one hand, the Prosecutor seeks to maintain public legitimacy through performance; it does so by getting involved in the worst situations and thereby meeting the expectations on the Court as outlined in the Rome Statute. On the other hand, states can refer situations to the ICC as a way of managing their own domestic military challengers; the Prosecutor seeks to maintain cooperation from member states by examining such situations, even if the crimes are less severe. These pathways to examinations matter because state-referrals are more likely to move to investigations. We examine this argument through a global analysis, covering the period 2002–2019, using a multinomial regression model for the two pathways. Our findings support these claims. We also provide additional qualitative descriptions of how domestic challenges have clearly preceded self-referrals by governments in all cases but one. By differentiating the two pathways, we accommodate conflicting claims about the politicization of ICC involvement versus attention to the most severe situations.

Even as the protection of civilians becomes a widely held norm, there is substantial variation in public support for humanitarian policy efforts. We use a survey experiment in Sweden to gain insights into this puzzle. Our survey confirms that citizens generally support military, but particularly non-military, means of civilian protection. Yet, we also find that support is partly particularized. Specifying that civilians may have ties to extremist groups (as victims or supporters) reduces support for proposals to provide humanitarian aid, contribute to UN observer missions and accept refugees. We trace this reduced support to lower moral obligation and higher threat perceptions. In contrast to expectations, respondents do not prioritize the protection of co-nationals, or women and children. Manipulation checks suggest the explanation that perceptions of who constitutes a civilian are subjective. Our findings provide insights into the domestic political determinants of atrocity prevention abroad.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of what the UN itself understands to be its first peacekeeping operation. It is therefore an appropriate time to reflect on the track record of UN peacekeeping in its efforts to try to maintain and realize peace and security. Moreover, this milestone invites us to ponder what lies ahead in the realm of peacekeeping. For this reason, this forum article brings together both academics and UN officials to assess the achievements and challenges of UN peacekeeping over the past 75 years. Through a dialogue among peacekeeping scholars and practitioners, we hope to identify current trends and developments in UN peacekeeping, as well as explore priorities for the future to improve the effectiveness of peacekeeping operations in terms of achieving their mandate objectives, such as maintaining peace, protecting civilians, promoting human rights, and facilitating reconciliation. This forum article is structured into six thematic sections, each shedding light on various aspects of UN peacekeeping: (1) foundational principles of UN peacekeeping - namely, consent, impartiality, and the (non-)use of force; (2) protection of civilians; (3) the primacy of politics; (4) early warning; (5) cooperation with regional organizations; and (6) the changing geopolitical landscape in which UN peacekeeping operates.

One way of improving forecasts is through better data. We explore how much we can improve predictions of conflict violence by introducing data reflecting third-party efforts to manage violence. By leveraging new sub-national data on all UN peacekeeping deployments in Africa, 1994–2020, from the Geocoded Peacekeeping (Geo-PKO) dataset, we predict changes in violence at the local level. The advantage of data on peacekeeping deployments is that these vary over time and space, as opposed to many structural variables commonly used. We present two peacekeeping models that contain several local peacekeeping features, each with a separate set of additional variables that form the respective benchmark. The mean errors of our predictions only improve marginally. However, comparing observed and predicted changes in violence, the peacekeeping features improve our ability to identify the correct sign of the change. These results are particularly strong when we limit the sample to countries that have seen peacekeeping deployments. For an ambitious forecasting project, like ViEWS, it may thus be highly relevant to incorporate fine-grained and frequently updated data on peacekeeping troops.

In the past two decades, regional organizations and coalitions of states have deployed more peace operations than the UN. Yet most quantitative studies of peacekeeping effectiveness focus on UN peacekeeping exclusively, a decision owed to data availability more than to theories about the differential impact of UN and non-UN missions. As a result, we know little about the effectiveness of non-UN peacekeeping in mitigating violence. In this paper, we introduce and analyse monthly data on the approximate number of troops, police, and observers in both UN and non-UN peacekeeping operations between 1993 and 2016. Using these data, we show that when accounting for mission size and composition, UN and regional peacekeeping operations are equally effective in mitigating violence against civilians by governments, but only UN troops and police curb civilian targeting by non-state actors. We offer some theoretical reflections on these findings, but the main contribution of the article is the novel dataset on non-UN peacekeeping strength and personnel composition to overcome the near-exclusive focus on UN missions in the scholarship on peacekeeping effectiveness.

In this article, we introduce the Geocoded Peacekeeping Operations (Geo-PKO) dataset, which presents new data on subnational peacekeeping deployment for all UN missions to Africa, 1994–2014. The Geo-PKO dataset is the most comprehensive dataset of its kind and enables scholars to address new questions about peacekeeping operations and their effects by exploring variations in peacekeeping at the subnational level. The dataset offers information on several key features of peacekeeping deployment at the local level, such as data on the size of deployments and how these vary over time, as well as information on the location of mission headquarters, the type of peacekeepers deployed, and which troop-contributing countries deploy to each location. This article describes the data collection process and illustrates some of the many utilities of this dataset for the scholarly community. For example, we show that peacekeeping troops are able to reduce battle-related violence in areas with high road density, suggesting that peacekeepers’ ability to project their power is stronger when they can increase their reach and more easily patrol larger territories. Hence, our data can fruitfully be combined with information such as socio-economic, geographical or demographic characteristics, to further explore how peacekeeping operations can contribute to peace and security in the areas where they operate. By providing fine-grained data on the location of peacekeepers across time and space, the Geo-PKO dataset should help facilitate important inquires that can push the research agenda on peacekeeping forward.

The article “Violence reduction or relocation? Effects of United Nations troops presence on local levels of violence” by Laura Peitz and Gregor Reisch is one of several recent articles that explore the local effects of peacekeeping deployments. We provide an overview of accumulated knowledge and conflicting findings, and identify a few remaining gaps in the literature. The finding that more peacekeepers are better at reducing violence has been replicated by several studies, although a few studies have identified conditional effects. Taken together, studies find that peacekeepers can reduce both violence between armed actors and violence against civilians. While Peitz and Reisch do not make a distinction between different perpetrators, previous work suggest that peacekeepers are better at reducing violence against civilians by non-state actors. Peitz and Reisch are thus far one of the few studies that explores the impact of the type of peacekeepers – although the findings are ambiguous. Lastly, there is a tension in the literature between Peitz and Reisch, who claim that peacekeepers diffuse violence to nearby location, and other studies that find no such relocation effect, or even the opposite. Future work should continue to explore the local effects of peacekeeping, directing attention to questions about types of peacekeepers, local conditions as enabling factors, the role of military capabilities (as opposed to capacity), and actions taken on the ground.