Multiple Peacekeeping Missions: Analysing Interdependence

ABSTRACT

Peace operations now conduct a wide range of different missions, but much of the scholarship has focused only on one mission at a time, and most often this is the task of monitoring cease-fires. This article draws attention to the phenomena of multiple missions within peace operations, and discusses some of the hurdles to understanding how such missions influence one another. We begin by providing a descriptive analysis of 11 different peace missions carried out by UN operations over the 1948–2015 period. Following a review of multiple-mission studies to date, we call attention to several problems with approaches taken for understanding peacekeeping outcomes. We then elucidate seven considerations or challenges in understanding how missions interact with one another and influence each other’s success, providing guidelines for how to analyse them.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Yahve Gallegos and Jacqueline Doan for their assistance in data collection and coding as well as two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Paul F. Diehl is associate provost and Ashbel Smith professor of Political Science at the University of Texas-Dallas.

Daniel Druckman is Professor Emeritus of Public and International Affairs at George Mason's Schar School of Policy and Government (Fairfax VA), an Honorary Professor at Macquarie University's Department of Modern History, Politics, and International Relations (Sydney, Australia), and an Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland's School of Political Science and International Affairs (Brisbane, Australia).

Notes

1 Bellamy and Williams, “Local Politics,” 281.

2 See http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/operations/ (accessed December 29, 2016).

3 Many of the definitions and descriptions of the missions are derived from Diehl and Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations. We have chosen to focus on the specific missions they are asked to perform rather than a taxonomy based on the general purpose of the operation as reflected in, for example, Bellamy, Williams, and Griffin, Understanding Peacekeeping.

4 United Nations Peacekeeping.

5 For example, the chapters in Koops, MacQueen, Tardy, and Williams, Oxford Handbook.

6 Franke and Warnecke, “Building Peace.”

7 Mullenbach, “Third Party Peacekeeping.” This source has a limited conceptualization of missions by including only six categories – law and order, humanitarian assistance, DDR (disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration), providing security, maintaining a buffer zone, and cease-fire monitoring. It is not clear that some of these categories are conceptually and empirically distinct from one another.

8 Uppsala Conflict Data Program, UCDP Conflict Encyclopedia, www.ucdp.uu.se, Uppsala University (accessed December 29, 2016).

9 Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, “United Nations Peacekeeping” and Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, “Beyond Keeping Peace.”

10 International Peace Institute, Providing for Peacekeeping and United Nations, United Nations Peacekeeping. As troop size and configuration varied over time, we took the maximum of troops deployed at any time during the operations and included associated police forces as well.

11 As the distribution of troop data is skewed, we reran the analysis with the log of troop size, but the correlation was only slightly greater (r = .44).

12 This finding corresponds with the distinctions between Core Peacekeeping Goals and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding made by Diehl and Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations.

13 For example, the study by Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work?

14 Diehl and Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations.

15 Ibid.

16 Whalan, “Evaluating Peace Operations.”

17 Bellamy and Williams, “Local Politics.”

18 Or simply one among several categorical variables, as in Fortna, “Inside and Out.”

19 Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, “United Nations Peacekeeping” and Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, “Beyond Keeping Peace.”

20 Diehl and Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations, chap. 7.

21 Doyle and Sambanis, Making War.

22 Paris, At War’s End.

23 Braithwaite, “Evaluating the Timor-Leste.”

24 Farrall, “Recurring Dilemmas.”

25 Diehl, Druckman, and Wall, “International Peacekeeping.”

26 This index penalizes an operation for incompatibility, subtracting from positive scores for compatibility. As an alternative, one could simply take the percentage of compatible missions as the indicator. The example above also treats compatibility as binary (yes/no), but one could calculate interval measures of distance between pairs of missions in the two-dimensional space to account for missions that are mixed in terms of falling along one or more of the dimensions; humanitarian assistance is an example. Further work on scaling properties of the index is suggested.

27 Paris, At War’s End; also Jarstad, “Dilemmas of War.”

28 An example is Braithwaite, “Evaluating the Timor-Leste.”

29 Some of this is discussed in Guenhenno, Fog of Peace.

30 Howard, UN Peacekeeping.

31 See, for example, Heckman, “Sample Selection Bias.”

32 Bennett and George, Case Studies.

33 For an overview, see Tetlock and Belkin, Thought Experiments.

34 For some further discussion and applications, see Lebow, “What’s So Different” and Harvey, Explaining the Iraq War.

35 Balas, “It Takes Two.”

36 For example, Maoz, Networks of Nations.

37 See Chapter 2 of Diehl and Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations.

38 Druckman and Wagner, “Negotiating Peace.”

39 See Druckman and Stern, “The Forum,” for a debate on this issue.

40 http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/unifil/mandate.shtml (accessed December 31, 2016).

41 See Alger, “There Are Peacebuilding.”

42 Johansen, “Commentary.”

43 For example, Gilligan and Stedman, “Where Do the Peacekeepers Go?”

44 Diehl and Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations.