New Directions in the Study of UN Peacekeeping

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

How do UN peacekeeping operations shape the political, economic, and social fabric of the countries in which they intervene? As UN missions have grown in scope and complexity, they have adopted a diverse repertoire of activities aimed at achieving an ambitious range of goals, from increasing the effectiveness of domestic police forces to stimulating economic growth to improving the health of local populations. Yet with few exceptions, recent quantitative research on UN peacekeeping tends to focus on a relatively narrow set of outcomes, most of them related to violence in one form or another (e.g. violence against civilians, battles between governments and rebel groups, and, of course, the recurrence of civil war). The papers on this panel help advance the existing literature by assessing UN peacekeepers’ impact on the wide spectrum of outcomes they are now mandated to pursue. The papers combine both within-country and cross-country evidence, and assess the effects of UN presence in both the short and long term, including after the UN withdraws. They also explore the causes of the oft-noted divergence between the tasks UN peacekeepers are mandated to pursue and those they actually undertake in the field. To test their theories, the papers use multiple new data sources ranging from original surveys of local populations to administrative data gleaned from previously untapped resources within the UN’s archives.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 21: Conflict Processes

Chair

• Robert A. Blair Brown University

Discussant

• Stephen Edward Moncrief Yale University

Individual Presentations

• After UN Peace Operations Exit - Andrea Ruggeri, University of Oxford

• Short- and Long-term Effects of UN Reform Initiatives in Haiti - Gabriella Lloyd, University of Maryland, College Park

• UN Peacekeeping Operations: From Mandate to Practices on the Ground and Back - Robert A. Blair, Brown University; Jessica Di Salvatore, University of Warwick; Hannah Smidt, German Institute of Global and Area Studies

• The Civilian Side of Peacekeeping: UN Civilian Personnel and Human Rights - Sabine Otto, Uppsala University