Nationality, Gender, and Deployments at the Local Level: Introducing the RADPKO Dataset

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces the Robust Africa Deployments of Peacekeeping Operations (RADPKO) dataset, a new dataset of geocoded United Nations peacekeeping deployments. Drawing upon primary documents sourced directly from the UN covering 10 multidimensional peacekeeping operations from 1999 to 2018, RADPKO offers comprehensive monthly time-series data on UN peacekeeper deployment location by type, gender, and nationality. We describe the data collection in detail and discuss the cases and time periods missing from the data. We show that although the UN responds dynamically to conflict events in the field, deployments outside of population centres tend to be fairly homogeneous in regard to both nationality and gender. We use this data to empirically investigate the oft-posited link between deployment of peacekeepers and reductions in violence at the local level. We replicate and extend past studies but find that some previous findings are vulnerable to robustness checks, primarily due to data incompleteness. Our analysis suggests the importance of data collection transparency, management, and description to the quantitative study of peacekeeping. The data, updated annually, provides new opportunities for scholar conducting micro-level research on peacekeeping, conflict, development, governances, and related topics across subfields in Political science.

KEYWORDS:

• Peacekeeping
• peacebuilding
• local level
• gender and peacekeeping
• diversity and peacekeeping

Acknowledgements

We thank Kyle Beardsley, Allard Duursma, Han Dorussen, Neil Narang, Desireé Nilsson, Lisa Hultman, and the participants of the Folke Bernadotte Academy research working group, especially Andrea Ruggeri, Mimmi Söderberg Kovacs, Linnéa Gelot, and Sophia Wrede, who organised a conference on the state of the art in peacekeeping data in Genoa, Italy where we presented our dataset. A previous version of this article was presented at the 2019 meetings of the International Studies Association. For superb research assistance, we thank Claudia Alegre, Grace Burgess, Hongyu Ge, Ryan Hironaka, Aleeza Malik, Kayden Mansfield, Sean Smith, Karen Trinh. We are also grateful for the excellent feedback provided by two reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

About the Authors

Patrick Hunnicutt is a Ph.D. candidate in the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the intersection of questions about service provision, international aid, natural resource management, and governance in countries emerging from civil conflict.

William G. Nomikos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on identity and conflict, particularly as applied to peacekeeping operations and national security policy. He is currently working on a book project about local-level peacekeeping.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Doyle and Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace.

2 Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work?

3 Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, “United Nations Peacekeeping.”

4 Autesserre, Peaceland; Costalli, “Does Peacekeeping Work?”; and Mvukiyehe and Samii, “Subtle Micro-Effects of Peacekeeping.”

5 Howard, Power in Peacekeeping.

6 Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work?; Gilligan and Sergenti, “Do UN Interventions Cause Peace?”; and Ruggeri, Dorussen, and Gizelis, “On the Frontline Every Day?”

7 Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, “United Nations Peacekeeping.”

8 Fortna and Howard, “Pitfalls and Prospects”; Diehl, “Behavioural Studies of Peacekeeping”; Autesserre, “Going Micro”; and Di Salvatore and Ruggeri, “Effectiveness of Peacekeeping Operations.” For a comprehensive review, see ongoing work by Kroeker, Meiske, and Ruggeri, “State of Art UN Peace Operations.”

9 Autesserre, The Trouble with the Congo; and Autesserre, Peaceland.

10 Ruggeri, Dorussen, and Gizelis, “Winning the Peace Locally”; and Fjelde, Hultman, and Nilsson, “Protection Through Presence.”

11 Gordon and Young, “Cooperation, Information, and Peace”; and Duursma, “Information Processing Challenges.”

12 Hunnicutt and Nomikos, “UN Peacekeeping at the Local-Level”; and Duursma, “Obstruction and Intimidation.”

13 Blair, “International Intervention.”

14 Stollenwerk and Nomikos, “More Security, More Legitimacy?”

15 Nomikos, “Peacekeeping and Enforcement.”

16 Clayton et al., “Known Knowns and Known Unknowns.”

17 Dorussen and Ruggeri, “Peacekeeping Event Data.”

18 Ruggeri, Dorussen, and Gizelis, “Winning the Peace Locally.”

19 Fjelde, Hultman, and Nilsson, “Protection Through Presence.”

20 Cil et al., “Mapping Blue Helmets.”

21 More information on our data collection process, including two additional case studies and an in-depth discussion of the assumption we make in distributing personnel across units, can be found in the Online Appendix.

22 Ruggeri, Dorussen, and Gizelis, “Winning the Peace Locally”; Fjelde, Hultman, and Nilsson, “Protection Through Presence”; and Cil et al., “Mapping Blue Helmets.”

23 A summary of this missingness can be found in the Online Appendix.

24 Cil et al., “Mapping Blue Helmets.”

25 Ruggeri, Dorussen, and Gizelis, “Winning the Peace Locally”; and Fjelde, Hultman, and Nilsson, “Protection Through Presence.”

26 Tollefsen, Strand, and Buhaug, “PRIO-GRID.”

27 Salehyan et al., “Social Conflict in Africa.”

28 Goodman et al., “Geoquery: Integrating HPC Systems.”

29 Walsh et al., “Funding Rebellion.”

30 Ruggeri, Dorussen, and Gizelis, “On the Frontline Every Day?”

31 Brahimi, Report of the Panel.

32 Bellamy, Williams, and Griffin, Understanding Peacekeeping.

33 Our overall count of deployed PKO personnel is updated monthly because we use mass deployment reports from DPO.

34 At the time of publication, other efforts to collect data on the subnational deployment of peacekeepers have, to the best of our knowledge, extended their samples through 2014.

35 Ruggeri, Dorussen, and Gizelis, “On the Frontline Every Day?”

36 United Nations Security Council, Report of the Secretary-General.

37 Ibid.

38 Nomikos, “Do Residents of Conflict Settings.”

39 Karim and Beardsley, Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping.

40 Ruggeri, Dorussen, and Gizelis, “Winning the Peace Locally”; and Fjelde, Hultman, and Nilsson, “Protection Through Presence.”

41 Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, “United Nations Peacekeeping.”

42 Iacus, King, and Porro, “Causal Inference without Balance Checking.”

43 Fjelde, Hultman, and Nilsson, “Protection Through Presence.”

44 Harbom, Melander, and Wallensteen, “Dyadic Dimensions of Armed Conflict.”

45 Raleigh et al., “Introducing ACLED.”

46 Eck, “In Data We Trust?”

47 Fjelde, Hultman, and Nilsson, “Protection Through Presence.”

48 Ibid.

49 In the gridded version of the dataset, CEM reduces the number of observations in our data from 298,104 to 51,856. In the ADM2 version of the dataset, CEM reduces the number of observations in our data from 31,393 to 29,042. When using the ADM2-version of RADPKO with ACLED data, CEM improves the multivariate L1 from 0.806 to 0.372. When using the ADM2-version of RADPKO with UCDP data, CEM improves the multivariate L1 from 0.807 to 0.373. When using the GRID-version of RADPKO with ACLED data, CEM improves the multivariate L1 from 0.952 to 0.297. When using the ADM2-version of RADPKO with ACLED data, CEM improves the multivariate L1 from 0.950 to 0.286.

50 Fjelde, Hultman, and Nilsson, “Protection Through Presence.”

51 Ibid.

52 One should be mindful of the recommendations of Eck (2012) here – it might be the case, for instance, that ACLED is not a perfect fit for this analysis.

53 Karim and Beardsley, Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping.

54 Bove and Ruggeri, “Kinds of Blue.”

55 Haass and Ansor, “Better Peacekeepers, Better Protection?”