United Nations peace initiatives 1946-2015: introducing a new dataset

ABSTRACT

The United Nations (UN) has developed a complex and interconnected system of committees, representatives, and missions in support of its peace and security mandate. This article introduces the United Nations Peace Initiatives (UNPI) data set, which provides information on 469 UN initiatives aimed at conflict prevention and crisis management, mediation, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding. The data encompass all initiatives mandated by the UN Security Council, the General Assembly, as well as Secretary General between 1946 and 2015. This includes diplomatic, technocratic, political-development, and peacekeeping missions. UNPI data provide an empirical basis to assess the relative contributions of various UN subsidiary bodies to prevent, manage, and suppress the outbreak and recurrence of conflict. This article discusses the underlying rationale of the data collection, the coding rules, and procedures, and shows how UNPI can be combined with conflict data. Initial analyses show the increased use of different types of UN peace initiatives over time. The UN regularly deploys multiple peace initiatives to a dispute, often with significant periods of overlap. Ongoing hostilities and economic development are found to be key determinants of mission choice. In line with the theme of the Special Issue, the UNPI data set underscores the importance of, and provides a tool through which to examine the, interdependencies between various conflict management efforts.

KEYWORDS:

• United Nations
• peacekeeping
• political missions
• peacemaking
• prevention
• data set

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge invaluable financial support from the Folke Bernadotte Academy. We are also very grateful for fantastic research assistance from Emily Helms, Robert Nagel, Phillip Nelson and Emma Wink.

Notes

¹ In the UNPI data, initiatives refer to the institutions resulting from particular UN decisions rather than the decision itself to establish a committee, mission etc. This somewhat stretches the meaning of an ‘initiative’, but lacking a clear alternative, initiatives adequately describe the broad set of entities which we have coded. It is commonplace to refer to political missions or peacekeeping missions or operations. Here, we follow this convention when the meaning is unambiguous.

² As an alternative that might address some of these points, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has compiled the Multilateral Peace Operations Database, which comprises information on 120 multilateral peace operations (both UN and non-UN) between 2000 and 2010. There seems to be some overlap between their data and ours, but the SIPRI data set has smaller country-year coverage and is currently not publicly available online.

³ More detailed data on peacekeeping missions are publicly available (see., Cilet al. (2020), and the contributions in Clayton et al. (2017)), but with some variation in the set of peacekeeping missions coded. UNPI includes peacekeeping missions alongside political missions, which facilitates merging with other data on peacekeeping.

⁴ More precisely, MILC only codes events during on-going low intensity conflicts as defined by UCDP, while MIC codes for all (UCDP) conflicts in Africa, including three years after their conclusion.

⁵ Peace initiatives launched by the UN Secretary General are nearly always authorized by either the General Assembly or the Security Council, and thus feature in either the Repertoire of the Practices of the Security Council or the Yearly Reports. However, we also conducted a detailed search of the UN website to identify the rare initiatives that are initiated and authorized by the UNSG, separate from the UNSC and UNGA. This led us to add a small number of additional Special Representatives that were missing from the other reports.

⁶ A selection of the key variables included: mission identifier, mission name, mission location, country identifier, conflict link, UCDP conflict code (if any), mission start/end date, mission class, four broad types of UN initiatives, establishing/authorizing institution, and function.

⁷ Missions based at the UN Headquarters, such as the Peacebuilding Commission and the Special Representative on Violence against Children, are identified as being hosted in the United States of America.

⁸ The distinction between political and peacekeeping missions is in line with UN convention. We recognize, however, that peacekeeping missions are also political.

⁹ Since they rely on media reports and code events, the UCDP MI(L)C data include more informal and short-lived interventions, but also these data ultimately rely on publicly available information.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Stiftelsen Folke Bernadottes Minnesfond [dnr 16-00444].