The Lack of Coordination in Diplomatic Peacemaking

The increased number of peacemaking actors during the past twenty years is accompanied by an increased amount of peacemaking, but also a low success rate. This article focuses on recent emerging conflicts. It finds that peacemaking is prevalent, but is often not coordinated with regard to choice of tools (mediation, arbitration, etc.), or the agenda or the issues of the talks. This lack of coordination has for many years been recognized as detrimental and may partly explain the low success rate. The article suggests that policymakers need to have a long-term strategy to address the coordination problem, part of which is to limit the number of peacemakers in a given conflict. In practice this may involve giving a larger role to regional organisations, and considering a pre-determined division of labour. A second implication is not to let initial failures discourage further peacemaking as peacemaking is a process, not an event. However, efforts to improve coordination should not crowd out the fact of the general inaction on the part of the international community in responding to the large majority of emerging conflicts. This may in fact be a bigger problem than the over-attention suffered by a few cases

Domestic elites and external actors in post-conflict democratisation: mapping interactions and their impact

Following the end of the Cold War, post-conflict democratisation has rarely occurred without a significant international involvement. This contribution argues that an explanation of the outcomes of post-conflict democratisation requires more than an examination of external actors, their mission mandates or their capabilities and deficiencies. In addition, there is a need to study domestic elites, their preferences and motivations, as well as their perceptions of and their reactions to external interference. Moreover, the patterns of external–internal interactions may explain the trajectory of state-building and democracy promotion efforts. These issues deserve more attention from both scholars and practitioners in the fields of peace- and state-building, democracy promotion, regime transition and elite research. Analyses of external actors and domestic elites in post-conflict democratisation should therefore address three principal issues: (1) the identification of relevant domestic elites in externally induced or monitored state-building and democratisation processes, (2) the dynamics of external–domestic interactions and (3) the impact of these interactions on the outcomes of post-conflict democratisation

The Lack of Coordination in Diplomatic Peacemaking

The increased number of peacemaking actors during the past twenty years is accompanied by an increased amount of peacemaking, but also a low success rate. This article focuses on recent emerging conflicts. It finds that peacemaking is prevalent, but is often not coordinated with regard to choice of tools (mediation, arbitration, etc.), or the agenda or the issues of the talks. This lack of coordination has for many years been recognized as detrimental and may partly explain the low success rate. The article suggests that policymakers need to have a long-term strategy to address the coordination problem, part of which is to limit the number of peacemakers in a given conflict. In practice this may involve giving a larger role to regional organisations, and considering a pre-determined division of labour. A second implication is not to let initial failures discourage further peacemaking as peacemaking is a process, not an event. However, efforts to improve coordination should not crowd out the fact of the general inaction on the part of the international community in responding to the large majority of emerging conflicts. This may in fact be a bigger problem than the over-attention suffered by a few cases

Do UN Interventions Cause Peace? Using Matching to Improve Causal Inference ∗

Previous statistical studies of the effects of UN peacekeeping have generally suggested that UN interventions have a positive effect on building a sustainable peace after civil war. Recent methodological developments have questioned this result because the cases in which the United Nations intervened were quite different from those in which they did not. Therefore the estimated causal effect may be due to the assumptions of the model that the researchers chose rather than to peacekeeping itself. The root of the problem is that UN missions are not randomly assigned. We argue that standard approaches for dealing with this problem (Heckman regression and instrumental variables) are invalid and impracticable in the context of UN peacekeeping and would lead to estimates of the effects of UN operations that are largely a result of the assumptions of the statistical model rather than the data. We correct for the effects of nonrandom assignment with matching techniques on a sample of UN interventions in post-Cold-War conflicts and find that UN interventions are indeed effective in the sample of post-civil-conflict interventions, but that UN interventions while civil wars are still ongoing have no causal effect. We are indebted to Jas Sekhon for his sage advice on GenMatch and matching generally. Neal Beck and Gary King graciously provided expert methodological advice. We thank Han Doruson