Uneven Burden of Peacekeeping: Assessing Risk-Taking Propensity Across TCCs

• In Event: Peacekeeping

Abstract

UN peacekeeping missions increasingly seek to protect civilians from harm in post-conflict environments. Indeed, new missions regularly assume civilian protection responsibilities and mandates. But, priorities of troop contributing countries (TCCs) do not always coincide seamlessly with UN goals. While financial incentives may motivate TCCs to contribute, they likely see risk differently from those at the UN headquarters, since domestic publics may punish TCC leaders for peacekeeper casualties. Extant research explores supply-side determinants of peacekeeping deployments at the country level and suggests that peacekeeping forces generally respond to civilian violence. But we still do not know how TCCs fare in managing the risk of deploying troops. For instance, some countries might be better than others at bargaining their deployment areas during the pre-deployment phase. In this study, we ask two questions. First, are TCCs with certain characteristics more likely than others to deploy to more risky post-conflict environments? Second, irrespective of where they deploy, are some more effective than others in reducing one-sided civilian violence at local level? We look at TCC attributes such as GDP, military expenditures, and combat experience to assess decision-making and effectiveness of peacekeepers in responding to and lowering local level civilian violence. We build a geo-coded deployment database of peacekeeping units in Africa to answer the postulated questions.

Authors

• Anup Phayal, University of North Carolina Wilmington

• Brandon C. Prins, University of Tennessee