Impartiality among UN Peacekeepers is key to ending communal violence in sub-Saharan Africa

Communal disputes over local issues such as land use, cattle herding, and access to scarce resources are a leading cause of conflict around the world. Despite abundant evidence that peacekeepers limit large-scale fighting between armed groups, we know little about their ability to prevent more localised forms of violence. William G. Nomikos explains the conditions under which UN peacekeeping operations promote peaceful interactions between civilian communities in fragile settings

Does UN Peacekeeping Prevent Communal Violence? Evidence from Disputes in Burkina Faso and Mali

Research in political science has shown that UN peacekeeping operations are an important tool for ending civil war violence. However, much less is known about how UN peacekeepers affect communal violence at the level of the individual, family, or community. Given that communal disputes over local issues such as land use, cattle herding, or access to resources are the main source of instability in Africa, understanding how international actors can contribute to their resolution is a pressing concern. How does the presence of UN peacekeepers affect communal violence between civilians in conflict settings? We address this question by offering a straightforward empirical test of how UN peacekeeping patrols affect the likelihood that a communal dispute will become violent in an active conflict setting with a multidimensional peacekeeping operations. We build on the literature on communal conflicts to argue that peacekeepers deter violence against violence. To test our argument, we examine the case of Mail, the site of large-scale communal violence managed by UN peacekeepers since 2013. We employ a Geographic Regression Discontinuity Design (GRDD) around the border of Mali and Burkina Faso to estimate the causal effect of deploying peacekeepers to an area with growing communal tensions. We find that the presence of peacekeepers reduces the probability of the onset of communal violence by 17%. Furthermore, we show that the magnitude of this effect increases as the number of peacekeepers deployed to a given area increase. Ultimately, our research provides robust causal evidence that UN peacekeeping works at the local level

Unintended Consequences: Reconsidering the Effects of UN Peacekeeping on State-sponsored Violence

This essay challenges theoretical and empirical arguments about peacebuilding effectiveness that put the state at the center of United Nations peace operations. We argue that state-centric UN peacebuilding operations inadvertently incentivize local-level violence in post-conflict zones. We demonstrate that when the UN supports central governments it unintentionally empowers non-professionalized militaries, paramilitaries, and warlords to settle local scores. Armed violence against civilians in turn triggers a vicious cycle of reprisals and counter-reprisals. As an alternative to state-centric peacebuilding operations that incentivize local violence, we suggest that the UN should shift strategic resources away from central governments and toward UN policing, support of traditional and religious authorities, and the training of local security institutions

Local Peace, International Builders: How UN Peacekeeping Builds Peace from the Bottom Up

Communal disputes over local issues such as land use, cattle herding, and access to scarce resources are a leading cause of conflict all over the world. In the coming decades, climate change, forced migration, and violent extremism will exacerbate such disputes in places that are ill equipped to handle them. Despite abundant evidence that international peacekeepers limit armed group violence, we know little about their ability to contain more localized forms of violence. Local Peace, International Builders explains the conditions under which international peacekeeping operations promote peaceful interactions between civilian communities in fragile settings. Its central theoretical insight is that civilian perceptions of peacekeepers' impartiality shape their ability to manage local disputes. My argument draws on georeferenced data on the deployment of more than 100,000 peacekeepers to localities across Africa from 1999 to 2019 as well as a multimethod study of peacekeeping in Mali, a West African country with widespread violence managed by peacekeepers. This data includes nearly 50 interviews with local political, religious, and traditional leaders; behavioral games with more than 500 Malians from 14 ethnicities; and surveys of 1,400 civilians. The book highlights a critical pathway through which UN peacekeeping may successfully maintain order in the international system. The findings have clear implications for how we think about foreign interventions---and how they can be better designed in the future to prevent violence in conflict and post-conflict settings

How Foreign Policy Crisis Shapes Public Opinion on Social Media: An Investigation of Twitter Discourse during the U.S.Withdrawal from Afghanistan

Political scientists have long debated whether and how foreign policy shapes public opinion in democracies. Although some scholars suggest that domestic politics does not affect how leaders in democracies conduct foreign policy at all, an emerging consensus has in recent years documented the fundamental interplay between international politics and public opinion. According to this line of thinking, domestic audiences use foreign policy, leaders' decision-making during international crises, and the consequences of those decisions to evaluate leaders. These evaluations, in turn, constrain the behavior of leaders on the international stage since they wish to remain in office. While it is clear that foreign policy impacts the public opinion toward the political leadership making those decisions, the mechanisms specifying how remain subject to debate. Moreover, the growing importance of social media in electoral politics remains largely unaccounted for in this literature. This article begins to fill this gap by providing a theory and evidence from social media data that explains how social media conditions the effect of foreign policy on public opinion. To test our argument, we examine social media responses toward the U.S. decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan in August 2021. The withdrawal is a salient policy event with important implications for studying the role of international politics in shaping public opinion over time. We use a dataset of 7 million tweets to measure the public opinion toward the withdrawal. Instead of relying on a specified group of users, we collect all tweets in the United States sent between August and September of 2021 that mention a list of keywords related to the Afghan withdrawal. This approach allows us to collect the most comprehensive corpus of tweets related to the Afghan withdrawal

Unintended Consequences: Reconsidering the Effects of UN Peacekeeping on State-sponsored Violence

This essay challenges theoretical and empirical arguments about peacebuilding effectiveness that put the state at the center of United Nations peace operations. We suggest that state-centric UN peacebuilding operations might inadvertently incentivize local-level violence in post-conflict settings. When the UN supports central governments it may unintentionally empower non-professionalized militaries, paramilitaries, and warlords to settle local scores. Armed violence against civilians in turn triggers a vicious cycle of reprisals and counter-reprisals. As an alternative to state-centric peacebuilding operations that carry the risk of enflaming local tensions, we suggest that the UN would benefit from shifting strategic resources away from central governments and toward UN policing, support of traditional and religious authorities, and the training of local security institutions

More Security, More Trust? Security Perceptions as a Source of Government Trust in Post-Conflict Settings

How can governments gain the trust of their citizens after civil war? Although previous work has thoroughly considered the drivers of governmental trust, we know relatively little about the role of security perceptions in post-conflict settings. Drawing on data from an original survey fielded with 2,000 respondents from Liberia, we show that citizens' security perceptions shape their trust in government. We also demonstrate that explicit attribution of security to specific institutions is key for linking more effective security governance with more trust. Our findings have significant implications for the design of security institutions and statebuilding in post-conflict settings

New Methods and Procedures for Measuring Public Opinion with Social Media Data

The study of public opinion has always been central to political science. Traditionally, publics expressed themselves through the written word, phone, or on the internet. In recent years, citizens around the world have taken to social media to express their political opinions. At the same time, political scientists have increasingly begun to apply computational science methods to study political phenomena, including public opinion. Yet none of these methods are explictly designed or tailored for use with social media data, presenting serious obstacles for researchers interested in their use. In this paper, we review current practices for measuring public opinion using social media data and show that existing practices rely on the researcher to provide substantial information about a social media user base, which they may not have access to. To supplement current practices, we refine existing procedures for collecting short-text data and go on to create new procedures for measuring latent public opinion using social media data provided by the researcher. We illustrate our method with an analysis of Twitter posts by Americans in response to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. We provide software and guidance for researchers wishing to use social media data to analyze public opinion for their own work