The Known Unknowns of UN Peacekeeping and Post-conflict Governance

• In Event: Conflict Management Institutions in Post-Conflict Governance

Abstract

There is debate whether introducing electoral processes and democratization can facilitate the sustainability of peace or lead to recurring violence. Aggregate evidence, and country specific cases like Sierra Leone and Liberia, suggest that African countries can successfully implement electoral institutions that lead to sustainable post-conflict peace. We argue that peace processes create different types of commitment problems that impact the effectiveness of UN PKOs to facilitate the implementation of peace agreements. We primarily focus on involuntary defections that occur in highly polarized societies and impact the implementation of peace agreements. Some of these processes are easily identifiable, e.g. influence of military over civilian government, others like social and electoral polarization can evolve through out the implementation process without ex ante full information on their effects. We posit that such ‘unknown’ processes impact the ability of UN missions to support peace implementation. We use data on missions from International Peace Institute Peacekeeping Database and Field Mission Mandate Table by UN Security Council Affairs Division on all conflicts from 1990-2016 that had comprehensive peace accords to evaluate the mechanism.

Authors

• Baris Ari, Durham University

• Wakako Maekawa, University of California, San Diego

• Ismene Gizelis, University of Essex