How Peacekeeping Spreads Peace: Spatial Effects of Peacekeeping on Violence

• In Event: Peacekeeping Effectiveness

Abstract

How do locally-deployed peacekeepers reduce the level of violence at the regional or national level? Recently a growing number of researchers have started to explore how peacekeepers make peace locally using disaggregated data on peacekeeping and civil war. The exclusive focus on local effects of peacekeeping, however, would miss a comprehensive picture of how locally-deployed peacekeepers make peace at geographically larger levels. Peacekeeping cannot go to all areas experiencing high levels of violence. Thus, if peacekeeping is effective only in the areas where peacekeepers are deployed, its role in contributing to peace at the national level would be somewhat limited. At the same time, peacekeeping might decrease violence in the deployment areas, while it might spur violence in the neighboring locations of the deployment area, or vice-versa. Examining exclusively the local effects of peacekeeping thus would prevent us from understanding how local peacekeeping affects the aggregated level of violence observed within civil war countries. To precisely capture how locally-deployed peacekeeping makes peace at the national level, as well as to better connect the findings of cross-national and subnational quantitative studies on peacekeeping efficacy, we simultaneously analyze how the local presence of peacekeepers affects the intensity of violence in the neighborhoods of areas where peacekeepers are stationed, as well as violence observed within the deployment areas. We test our theoretical implications by using the disaggregated subnational data on peacekeeping and violence in sub-Saharan Africa. The empirical analysis utilizes reweighting techniques and an ensemble of grid-cells to address the concern of the nonrandom treatment assignment and the modifiable aerial unit problem (MAUP). Our results show that though peacekeeping does not make peace in the deployment areas, peacekeeping is effective in reducing the level of violence in neighboring areas of the peacekeeping deployment areas. The analysis also demonstrates that the selection of grid resolutions only modestly affects the treatment effect estimates. These findings imply that the most critical mechanisms underlying the effectiveness of peacekeeping lie in deterrence and containment.

Authors

• Gaku Ito, Hiroshima University

• Jun Koga Sudduth, University of Strathclyde