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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Jacob Kathman, Kyle Beardsley, and Govinda Clayton for their comments and suggestions.
Notes
1 For a review of this literature, see Fortna and Howard “Pitfalls and Prospects.”
2 Walter, Committing to Peace.
3 Kathman, “United Nations Peacekeeping Personnel Commitments.”
4 Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, “United Nations Peacekeeping and Civilian Protection”; Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, “Beyond Keeping Peace”; Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, “United Nations Peacekeeping Dynamics”; Kathman and Wood “Stopping the Killing during the ‘Peace’”; and Beardsley and Gleditsch “Peacekeeping as Conflict Containment.”
5 For an example in the context of civil war, see Benson and Kathman, “UN Bias and Force Commitments.”
6 For instance, see Passmore, Shannon, and Hart, “Rallying the Troops.”
7 Some research has begun to address explanations of member state contributions. For examples, see Bove and Elia, “Supplying Peace”; Gaibulloev, Sandler, and Shimizu, “Demands for UN and Non-UN Peacekeeping”; and Uzonyi “Refugee Flows and State Contributions.”
8 Lebovic, “Passing the Burden.”
9 As a step forward in this literature, see the Bove et al. contribution to this forum for a discussion of mission composition as it relates to mission leadership.
10 For examples of such narrow state-centric benefits as deploying blue helmets for the purposes of coup-proofing and preparation for interstate conflict, see Kathman and Melin “Who Keeps the Peace?”
1 This paper focuses exclusively on UN peacekeeping missions and the respective available data.
2 This was the highest number of contributors to any mission in Kathman’s data (Kathman, “United Nations Peacekeeping Personnel Commitments”).
3 Kathman, “United Nations Peacekeeping Personnel Commitments.”
4 Bove and Elia, “Supplying Peace.”
5 Kathman and Melin, “Who Keeps the Peace?”
6 Uzonyi, “Refugee Flows.”
7 Ward and Dorussen, “Standing Alongside Your Friends.”
8 Bellamy and Williams, Providing Peacekeepers.
9 Karim and Beardsley, “Female Peacekeepers”; and Karim and Beardsley, “Ladies Last.”
10 Crawford, Lebovic, and MacDonald, “Explaining the Variation.”
11 Bove and Ruggeri, “Kinds of Blue.”
12 Karim and Beardsley, “Explaining Sexual Exploitation.”
13 See work by Olsson and Möller, “Data on Women’s Participation” for an early assessment of gender-disaggregated data related to the UN, EU and OSCE field missions.
14 See for example, studies by Karim and Beardsley, Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping; Kronsell, Gender, Sex and the Postnational Defense; Duncanson, Forces for Good?; Olsson and Tryggestad, Women and International Peacekeeping; and Olsson and Gizelis, “Advancing Gender and Peacekeeping”. See also the edited volume by Olsson and Gizelis, Gender, Peace and Security.
15 United Nations, Report of the High-level Independent Panel, 80.
16 Kreft, “The Gender Mainstreaming Gap” provides an example of a fruitful study along these lines, as she finds that gender-mainstreamed peacekeeping mandates are more likely in conflicts with high levels of sexual violence.
1 Fortna and Howard. “Pitfalls and Prospects”.
2 Olsson and Gizelis, “Advancing Gender and Peacekeeping”; Gizelis and Olsson. Gender, Peace and Security.
3 United Nations Secretary-General, “The Future of United Nations Peace Operations.”
4 Gizelis and Krause, “Exploring Gender Mainstreaming in Security.”
5 In fact, this question was brought up by already in 2001 by Skjelsbeak, “Sexual Violence in Times of War.” See also Krause “Revisiting Protection from Conflict-related Sexual Violence.”
6 See, for example, Carpenter, “Women, Children and Other Vulnerable Groups.”
7 See, for example, Higate “Peacekeepers, Masculinities, and Sexual Exploitation.”
8 Discussions at the International Studies Association Panel, Atlanta 2016, at the panel TD17: The United Nations (UN) and Peacekeeping.
9 See also Skjelsbeak, “Sexual Violence in Times of War.”
10 Karim and Beardsley, Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping; and Karim and Beardsley “Explaining Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in Peacekeeping Missions.”
11 Nordås and Rustad, “Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Peacekeepers.”
12 See, for example, Cohen, “Explaining Rape During Civil War; and Baaz and Stern, Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War?
13 Olsson, “Same Peace, Different Quality?”
14 See, Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform. United Nations.
15 See, for example, Olsson, “Mainstreaming Gender in Multidimensional Peacekeeping”; and Gizelis and Krause, “Revisiting Protection from Conflict-Related Sexual Violence.”
16 Gizelis and Cao, Peacekeeping and Post-conflict Maternal Health.
1 In our project and this paper, the term “leadership” refers specifically to UN peace missions’ leadership – that is, the Special Representative or Force Commander – rather than to the UN leadership at the New York headquarters or commanders and senior staff in the mission generally.
2 See for instance see Chopra, “The UN’s Kingdom,” 28; Fearon and Laitin, “Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States,” 26–8; and De Coning, “Mediation and Peacebuilding.”
3 See the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations. http://www.un.org/sg/pdf/HIPPO_Report_1_June_2015.pdf.
4 Bove and Ruggeri, “Kinds of Blue.”
5 Thanks to the financial support of the Folke Bernadotte Academy.
6 We are only aware of one attempt to collect information on UN SRSGs, Fröhlich, “The John Holmes Memorial Lecture.” Yet, his data focuses on the nature of their work (which human security dimensions) and is not about PKOs specifically but about SRSGs more broadly (most of whom do not serve as heads of PKO missions).
7 Ruggeri, Gizelis, and Dorussen, “Managing Mistrust”; and Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, “Beyond Keeping Peace.”
8 We use “his” because female FCs are quite rare; gender will be a further focus of our research. On the issue of gender see also Beardsley and Gizelis and Olsson, this issue.
9 Schori, “Leadership on the Line,” 28.
10 Autesserre, Peaceland.
11 Goldstone, “UNTAET with Hindsight,” 85.
12 Berdal, “ONUMOZ,” 426.
13 See, for example, Guyot and Vines, “UNAVEM II and III,” 346.
14 Yabi, “Côte d’Ivoire,” 94.
15 Dandeker and Gow, “Military Culture and Strategic Peacekeeping.”
16 Elron, Shamir, and Ben-Ari, “Why Don’t they Fight Each Other?”
1 SIPRI applies a relatively broad definition of peace operations, they must have the stated intention of: (a) serving as an instrument to facilitate the implementation of peace agreements already in place; (b) supporting a peace process; or (c) assisting conflict prevention or peacebuilding efforts. Good offices, fact-finding or electoral assistance missions, and missions comprising non-resident individuals or teams of negotiators are not included.
2 SIPRI’s Multilateral Peace Operations Database is available at http://www.sipri.org/databases/pko.
3 For example, Daniel, Taft, and Wiharta, Peace Operations; Diehl and Balas, Peace Operations, 2nd ed.; and Weiss and Welz, “Military Twists and Turns in World Politics.”
4 Annual data on peace operations in the period 1993–99 can be found in the 1994–2000 editions of the SIPRI Yearbook.
5 The data SIPRI has obtained from UN DPKO covers all fatalities among UN peace operation personnel between 1948 and 2015 at the mission-year level, and is broken down by personnel category and cause of death.
6 In fact, SIPRI’s 1990–2015 time series shows that the majority of peace operations (140 out of 215) and mission-year entries (866 out of 1373) pertain non-UN missions.
7 For example, Williams, “How Many Fatalities Has the African Union Mission in Somalia Suffered?”
8 For example, Van der Lijn and Smit, “Peace Operations and Conflict Management”; Van der Lijn and Smit, “Peacekeepers under Threat?”; Ismail and Sköns, Security Activities of External Actors in Africa; and Van der Lijn and Dundon, “Peacekeepers at Risk.”
9 See also Beardsley, “Advances in the Analysis of Contributor-level Peacekeeping Data” in this issue.
10 See also Gizelis and Olsson, “Toward an Equal Peace or Stuck in the Twilight Zone?” in this issue.
1 Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, “United Nations Peacekeeping”; Bove and Ruggeri, “Different Kinds of Blue.”
2 Holt and Taylor, Protecting Civilians.
3 Diehl and Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations.
4 See Dorussen and Ruggeri, “Peacekeeping Events,” in this issue.
5 Dorussen and Gizelis, “Into the Lion’s Den.”
6 Smidt, “What Do Peacekeepers Do.”
7 Lindberg Bromley, “Introducing the UCDP Peacemakers at Risk.”
8 A special thanks to Sayra van den Berg for her valuable research assistance.
9 Hunt and Bellamy, “Mainstreaming the Responsibility to Protect.”
10 Bove and Ruggeri, “What Do we Know.”
11 For a good analysis of problems of coding peacekeeping events data, see Ruggeri, Gizelis, and Dorussen, “Events Data.”
1 Autesserre, “Going Micro.”
2 Dorussen and Ruggeri, “Introducing PKOLED.”
3 Ruggeri, Dorussen, and Gizelis, “On the Frontline Every Day?”
4 Dorussen and Gizelis, “Into the Lion’s Den.”
5 Abbott, “Of Time and Space,” 1152.
6 Logan, “Making a Place for Space,” 508.
7 Cederman, Gleditsch, and Buhaug, Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War.
8 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence.
9 Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work?
10 See Doyle and Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace; Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work?
11 See Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, “United Nations Peacekeeping”; Hultman, Kathman and Shannon, “Beyond Keeping Peace.”
12 Bove and Ruggeri, “Kinds of Blue.”
13 PKOLED covers all UN mission after 1989 until 2006.
14 PKOLED includes further variables identifying different typologies of actions as well as coding precision in terms of temporal and geographical information.
15 Dorussen and Gizelis, “Into the Lion’s Den.”
16 Ruggeri, Gizelis, and Dorussen, “Managing Mistrust.”
17 Ruggeri, Dorussen, and Gizelis, “On the Frontline Every Day?”
18 Rugerri, Dorussen, and Gizelis, “Winning the Peace Locally.”
19 See in this issue van der Lijn and Smit. They highlight the problems associated with collection of non-UN PKO data.
20 Ruggeri, Gizelis, and Dorussen, “Events Data.”
21 Tollefsen, Strand, and Bugaug, “PRIO-GRID.”
22 Based on the PKOLED codebook, we were able to identify ‘verbs’ to build dictionaries to recover the aggregate categories in automated text-coding with a reasonable (70–80 per cent) precision.
1 See Diehl, “Behavioral Studies.”
2 This is discussed in Fetherston, Toward a Theory and Paris, “Broadening the Study.”
3 For example, Mason and others, “When Civil Wars Recur.”
4 For example, Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work?
5 For example, Greig and Diehl, “The Peacekeeping–Peacemaking Dilemma.”
6 For an alternative view, see Clarke, “More Phantom than Menace.”
7 For example, Shimizu and Sandler, “Peacekeeping and Burden Sharing.”
8 For example, Wright and Greig, “Staying the Course.”
9 Correlates of War (COW) Project, http://www.correlatesofwar.org/, specifically the data sets on interstate and civil wars.
10 Uppsala Conflict Data Project (UCDP), http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/UCDP/, specifically the armed conflict data sets.
11 COW and Ibid.
12 In the interests of full disclosure, the author served as Director of the COW Project for seven years.
13 For example, Salverda, “Blue Helmets as Targets.”
14 For example, see Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, “United Nations Peacekeeping.”
15 See Uppsala Conflict Data Project, UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/datasets/ucdp_ged/ and UCDP One-sided Violence Dataset. http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/datasets/ucdp_one-sided_violence_dataset/.
16 See Kathman above for discussion on variation in force size across missions, and Bove, Ruggeri,and Zwetsloot on variation on mission leadership.
17 For a discussion of the importance of baselines, see Diehl and Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations.
18 In particular, see the PKOLED data and Dorussen, “Introducing PKOLED”.
19 Powers, Reeder, and Townsen, “Hot Spot Peacekeeping.”
20 Costalli, “Does Peacekeeping Work?”
21 Note that with a liberal definition of what constitutes a peace operation, Diehl and Balas, Peace Operations, count 188 such operations in the period 1948–2012.
22 Aoi, de Coning, and Thakur, Unintended Consequences of Peacekeeping.
23 For example, see Fortna and Huang, “Democratization after Civil War.”
24 Most post-cold war operations are relatively short, see Wright and Greig, “Staying the Course.”
1 Kathman, “UN Peacekeeping Personnel Commitments”; Perry and Smith, “Trends in Uniformed Contributions”; Lindberg, “Peacemakers at Risk.”
2 For example, Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, “Beyond Keeping Peace”; Bellamy and Williams, Providing Peacekeepers; Bove and Ruggeri, “Kinds of Blue”; and Benson and Kathman “UN Bias and Force Commitments.”
3 Shimizu and Sandler, “Peacekeeping and Burden-Sharing”; Gaibulloev, Sandler, and Shimizu, “Demands for UN and Non-UN Peacekeeping”; and Coleman, “Political Economy of UN Peacekeeping.”
4 For example, military observers cost $38,933 (on average) in UNAMID versus nearly twice that ($63,696) in MONUSCO, in 2012–13. Coleman, “Political Economy of UN Peacekeeping,” 8.
5 UNGA Fifth Committee, “Approved Resources.”
6 The percentage of mission budgets consumed by operational costs might serve as a proxy for operational difficulty. Tracking a mission’s budget changes over time might capture increasing economies of scale.
7 Mikulaschek and Perry, “When Do Civil War Parties Heed the UN?”; Benson and Kathman, “UN Bias and Force Commitments”; Allen and Yuen, “UNSC Oversight”; and Benson and Gizelis, “UN SCRs and Sexual Violence.”
8 The data can be found at: jacobkathman.weebly.com/research.html.
9 Benson and Gizelis, “UN SCRs and Sexual Violence.”
10 Cockayne, Mikulaschek, and Perry, “UNSC and Civil War”; Mikulaschek and Perry, “Do Civil War Parties Heed the UN? ”
11 The ISO standard country codes are a good model. A future integrative project might investigate the effect of mandate flexibility (using Allen and Yuen’s data) on conflict actor compliance with Council demands (using the IPI data).
12 See also, Dorussen, “Introducing PKOLED”; Ruggeri, Gizelis, and Dorussen, “Managing Mistrust.”
13 See also, Smidt, “UN Peacekeeping Activities.”
14 Autesserre, “Going Micro,” 496.
15 See also, Ruggeri, Gizelis, and Dorussen, “Events Data as Bismarck’s Sausages?” Here, the scholars acknowledge that SG reports may present the UN “in an overly favorable light”, but argue that competing political priorities and public scrutiny mitigate concerns. Further, the project uses an outside source, ReliefWeb, to randomly crosscheck events as a robustness test
16 Salehyan, “Best Practices in the Collection of Conflict Data”; Hensel and Mitchell, “Lessons from the ICOW Project.”
17 IPI Peacekeeping Database, coding manual, 34.
18 Even as the gains in efficiency are “pretty amazing”, IPI’s data manager stressed that the process remains “vulnerable to its complexity”. A smooth encoding requires that the UN use consistent URLs, that documents are formatted predictably, and, in the event that problems arise, that the manager is able to identify and repair glitches. Personal communications. April 4, 2016.
19 Hammond and Weidmann, “Using Machine-coded Event Data for the Micro-level Study of Political Violence.”
20 For more on reporting requirements, see: DPKO, “SOPs for Reporting”; DPKO/DFS, “UN Force HQ Handbook.”
21 DPKO, “SOPs for Reporting,” 14. Additionally, Convergne and Snyder outline the particular sensitivities surrounding geospatial UN data. “Making Maps to Make Peace.”
22 For analogous challenges in conflict and terrorism research, see Gleditsch, Metternich, and Ruggeri, “Peace and Conflict Research”; Sandler, “Analytical Study of Terrorism.”
23 For example, OIOS, “Secretariat Evaluation Scorecards,” 6. The internal review concludes, “While appreciating the need for maintaining confidentiality for sensitive issues, DPKO/DFS may want to consider making some [of] its key evaluation results publically available, in order to increase transparency and utility”. The HIPPO report advises that DPKO introduce “regular independent evaluations using external expertise to assist missions through objective assessments of progress,” para 172.
24 For more on the UN’s data management as a “critical shortage”, the need for increased investment in M&E, and the organization’s general “data sclerosis”, see: DPKO/DFS, “New Horizon Report,” 15–16, 27; HIPPO, “Uniting Our Strength,” para 172; Expert Panel, “Performance Peacekeeping.”
25 Expert Panel, “Performance Peacekeeping,” 137. The panel explains, “Only summary data are shared in SITREPs, with rich operational details hidden in opaque section-owned spreadsheets, documents and emails … With only textual data shared … it is difficult for the mission to maintain an updated view of the state of key indicators”.
26 S/2012/820; S/2014/158; S/2014/708; S/2014/821; S/2015/118; S/2015/296; S/2015/655; S/2015/902; S/2016/138; S/2016/341.
27 In addition, the Geospatial Information Section (GIS) has recently started to sporadically upload maps to its website, providing one map at a time for each mission. See: http://www.un.org/Depts/Cartographic/english/htmain.htm.
28 See also, forthcoming Ruggeri, Dorussen, and Gizelis, “On the Frontline Every Day?”; Ruggeri, Dorussen, and Gizelis, “Winning the Peace Locally.”
29 In the case of UNMISS, only one deployment map is currently available for all of 2011, none for 2012, and then several each for 2013 and 2014. A GIS officer explained that operational maps “may be accessible once a mission becomes liquidated”. How frequently GIS creates maps for internal use remains unclear. Email communications. April 12, 2016.
30 S/2015/296, para 33; S/2015/655, para 37; S/2015/902, para 32; S/2016/138, para. 33. Note that the numbers were not included in the most recent SG report (2/2016/341). A 2015 audit of patrolling by UNAMID military units serves as a cautionary note that these numbers should be viewed with an appropriately critical eye, sensitive to the potential for bias and misreporting. OIOS, “Audit of Patrolling by Contingents.”
31 Personal communications, April 4, 2016. In making this point, it is useful to remember that while the UN and NATO deploy comparable numbers of forces abroad, the latter employs four times the number of headquarter staff. Smith and Boutellis, “Rethinking Force Generation,” 7.
32 Jentleson and Ratner, “Bridging the Beltway–Ivory Tower Gap,” 9.
33 More at: http://reliefweb.int/about.
34 OCHA also manages the Humanitarian Data Exchange, an open platform for sharing data that houses 4,000 datasets, 244 locations, 729 sources. More at: https://data.hdx.rwlabs.org/.
35 Stephanie Strom, “World Bank is Opening its Treasure Chest of Data.” For more, see: http://data.worldbank.org/node/8.
36 Strom, “World Bank is Opening its Treasure Chest of Data.”
37 Personal communications with IPI data manager. April 4, 2016.