Research Findings on the Evolution of Peacekeeping

Peacekeeping has evolved both in its focus and in setting increasingly ambitious goals. In effect, the referent object of peacekeeping—what and whose peace is to be kept—has changed. The peace that is to be kept has evolved from a negative conception of peace to encompassing an increasingly positive understanding of peace. Similarly, the object of the peace has shifted from the global to the national, and ultimately to the local. In effect, this has raised the bar for peacekeeping. Peacekeeping research has mirrored these changes in the expectations and practice of peacekeeping, where the (in)effectiveness of peacekeeping has remained a constant concern. The evaluation has shifted from the authorization and organization of peacekeeping missions to the impact of peacekeepers in avoiding the recurrence of conflict, to ultimately the ability of peacekeepers to change the situation on the ground as well as the interaction between peacekeepers and the local population. Research on peacekeeping has become increasingly methodologically sophisticated. Originally, qualitative case studies provided a largely critical evaluation of the effect of peacekeeping. Large-n quantitative studies have reassessed where peacekeepers are deployed and who provides peacekeepers. Controlling for selection bias and possible endogeneity, quantitative research finds that peacekeeping makes the recurrence of conflict less likely. Disaggregate data on peacekeeping confirm that peacekeeping contains local conflict and protects local civilian populations. At the same time, peacekeepers have had only limited success in positively affecting conflict societies by means of security sector reform and building state capacity. There is little evidence that peacekeeping is able to support democratization and economic development.</p

Militarization and Women’s Empowerment in Post-Conflict Societies

Militarization often precipitates violent armed conflict but may also continue well after a conflict has ended. Heightened militarized processes in response to internal and external perceived threats entrench gender roles and enhance gender hierarchies. Militarization often shifts resources away from policy areas such as education and health that are especially important to girls and women. As a result, female empowerment is impeded or recedes when both society and policy focus on a militarized path. Some post-conflict countries see improved female empowerment after the end of conflict. However, emerging threats might lead to militarization, which could undermine the initial gender empowerment gains post-conflict. This research paper examines under what circumstances post-conflict societies can avoid renewed militarization and potentially increase female empowerment and posits that the presence of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations (PKOs) can allow for decreased military spending due to its ability to mitigate violence in both conflict and post-conflict situations. It is expected that states with a UN presence should be more easily able to reduce their militarization levels than civil conflict states without UN peacekeeping. It is further posited that peacekeeping should facilitate a policy shift that allows for greater female empowerment. In short, peacekeeping should both indirectly increase empowerment by decreasing militarization levels and directly by leading to decreased violence and higher levels of political and social stabilit

Power of Rules and Rule of Power

The 2018 Presidential Theme for the International Studies Association’s Annual Conference was “Power of Rules and Rule of Power.” The theme underlines the importance of recognizing the relative and relational influence of power and rules in international politics. To do so, research should examine official rules but also probe what role informal rules play in shaping formal regulations of international interactions and power dynamics. The nexus of actors, issues, and interactions define international relations as a research field but also impact international studies as a profession. The articles included in this special issue and the forum expand, question, and problematize such interactions

A Security Dividend Peacekeeping and Maternal Health Outcomes and Access

UNSCR 1325 highlights the distinct needs of women in security and access to health and education. Few studies explore how peacekeeping affects women’s access to health and education. We argue that PKOs have both a direct and an important indirect impact on maternal health and women’s well-being. First, peacekeeping can have a direct effect by providing medical and training facilities. Second, peacekeeping has an indirect effect as improvements in the overall level of security facilitates women’s access to medical services and education. We examine the peacekeeping’s impact on outcomes at both the country-level, using a sample of 45 African countries, as well as in within country, grid-cell level, using geo-coded data UN deployment and information from the Demographic and Health Surveys in three sub-Saharan countries. We find strong empirical support for a positive relationship between peacekeeping presence and maternal health outcomes and access to services

How Epidemics affect Marginalized Communities in War-Torn Countries: Ebola, Securitization, and Public Opinion about the Security Forces in Liberia

Epidemics that overwhelm health and national institutions tend to disproportionately affect individuals from marginalized communities. The securitization of epidemics further exacerbates feelings of alienation and victimization by security forces among those in such communities. Focusing on this population, our study explores how experiences with securitization during the 2014 Ebola Virus epidemic in Liberia affected perceptions of the security forces. We leverage two, unique surveys conducted before and after the Ebola Virus Disease epidemic in two of Monrovia’s informal communities with histories of internally displaced persons and ex-combatants in Monrovia, Liberia–West Point and Peace Island. Our analysis allows us to assess differences in public opinion before and after the Ebola Virus Disease. We find that perceptions of police discrimination and disrespect increased in both communities and that demand for police services declined in both communities. With respect to the Armed Forces, direct contact with soldiers enhanced feelings of safety, but only among those who did not witness them engaging in abuse. Our findings suggest that securitization of epidemics could exacerbate trust in the state, thereby weakening its legitimacy

Maternal Health Care in the Time of Ebola: A Mixed-Method Exploration of the Impact of the Epidemic on Delivery Services in Monrovia

Public health emergencies like major epidemics in countries with already poor health infrastructure have the potential to set back efforts to reduce maternal deaths globally. The 2014 Ebola crisis in Liberia is claimed to have caused major disruptions to a health system not fully recovered after the country’s civil war, and is an important and relevant case for studying the resilience of health systems during crises. We use data on the utilization of maternal health care services from two representative surveys, one conducted before the outbreak of Ebola, the 2013 Liberian DHS, and another, smaller survey conducted in Monrovia in December 2014, during the height of the epidemic. We focus exclusively on data for women aged 18–49 residing in urban Monrovia, restricting our samples to 1,073 and 763 respondents from the two surveys respectively. We employ a mixed methods approach, combining a multinomial logit model with in-depth semi-structured interviews. Our regression analyses indicate that deliveries in public facilities declined whereas they increased for private facilities. Furthermore, overall facility delivery rates remained stable through the Ebola epidemic: the proportion of home births did not increase. Drawing on insights from extensive qualitative interviews with medical personnel and focus groups with community members conducted in Monrovia in August–September 2015 we attribute these survey findings to a supply side “substitution effect” whereby private clinics provided an important cushion to the shock leading to lower supply of government services. Furthermore, our interviews suggest that government health care workers continued to work in private facilities in their local communities when public facilities were closed. Our findings indicate that resources to shore up healthcare institutions should be directed toward interventions that support private facilities and health personnel working privately in communities during times of crisis so that these facilities are safe alternatives for women during crisis

Winning the Peace Locally: UN Peacekeeping and Local Conflict

It remains contested whether peacekeeping works. The impact of peacekeepers? actions at the local (or subnational) level for overall mission success has lately received critical attention. Local peacekeeping is expected to matter because it re-assures local actors, deters resumption of armed hostilities, coerces parties to halt fighting, and makes commitment to agreements credible. Thus peacekeepers affect the relations between central and local elites and avoid the emergence of local power vacuums and areas of lawlessness. This study uses new subnational data on the deployment of United Nations peacekeepers. It uses matching and recursive bivariate probit models with exogenous variables for temporal and spatial variation to deal with possible non-random assignment of the treatment. It is demonstrated that conflict episodes last shorter when peacekeepers are deployed to conflict-prone locations inside a country, even with comparatively modest deployment. The effect of peacekeeping on the onset of local conflict is, however, less clear-cut

Advancing the Frontier of Peacekeeping Research

The impact of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping on conflict has received a sustained amount of attention in the empirical literature. The advent of new data on UN peacekeeping and new temporal units of analysis have enabled researchers to expand the frontiers of peacekeeping research and undertake a more nuanced examination of peacekeeping effectiveness. In this special section, a series of articles examine how UN peacekeeping affects different types of violence within conflicts and leads to different types of peaceful outcomes. Factors such as the cultural affinity between peacekeepers and local communities, the size of peacekeeping operations and the specific composition of UN forces are shown to be important variables associated with lower levels of casualties and violence and also a higher likelihood of mediation and timely peaceful settlements in civil wars. In the aggregate, these articles suggest that robust peacekeeping is associated with better outcomes in many stages of conflict

On the Frontline Every Day? Subnational Deployment of United Nations Peacekeepers

United Nations (UN) peacekeepers tend to be deployed to ‘hard-to-resolve’ civil wars. Much less is known about where peacekeepers are deployed within a country. However, to assess peacekeepers’ contribution to peace, it matters whether they are deployed to conflict or relatively safe areas. This article examines subnational UN peacekeeping deployment, contrasting an ‘instrumental’ logic of deployment versus a logic of ‘convenience’. These logics are evaluated using geographically and temporally disaggregated data on UN peacekeepers’ deployment in eight African countries between 1989 and 2006. The analysis demonstrates that peacekeepers are deployed on the frontline: they go where conflict occurs, but there is a notable delay in their deployment. Furthermore, peacekeepers tend to be deployed near major urban areas