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ABSTRACT
In their 2018 article, Diehl and Druckman address several hurdles that may hinder the effectiveness of multiple mission peace operations. One of these hurdles is the extent to which two or more missions are compatible. Based on the idea that similar missions have positively reinforcing effects, we propose alternative indicators of the compatibility concept in the context of nine types of UN missions conducted within the same peace operation. We code all missions in each of 70 UN peace operations (1948–2016) on twelve characteristics, such as whether the mission could be considered impartial or biased, whether it allows for an easy or hard exit, and coordination with IOs or the host government. A multidimensional scaling analysis is performed to evaluate the proximity of these missions: missions closer in proximity are regarded as being more compatible than those farther away. The proximity scores are used to develop the three compatibility indicators based on different theoretical logics. We then apply these indicators in some preliminary statistical analyses and also compare two peace operations with different compatibility characteristics to illustrate on-the-ground relevance of the indicators. Methodological issues concerning validity, next steps in the research, and policy implications are discussed.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See Diehl and Balas, Peace Operations, which include political missions, for a list of all operations since 1948, including those by the UN, regional organizations, and multinational coalitions. For UN operations, see Koops et al. (eds), Oxford Handbook of United Nations Peacekeeping Operations.
2 de Coning and Brusset, Towards a Comprehensive Results-based Reporting.
3 Diehl and Druckman, “Multiple Peacekeeping Missions.”
4 The International Peace Institute has issued a series of papers on sequencing with respect to different operations; representative is International Peace Institute, “The Case of MINUSMA”. This is also mentioned in A4P Declaration of Shared Commitments. See also the UN HIPPO report concerning multiple mandates – United Nations, Report of the Independent High-Level Panel on Peace Operations.
5 See Di Salvatore and Ruggeri, “Effectiveness of Peacekeeping Operations”; Sandler, “International Peacekeeping Operations.”
6 Diehl and Druckman, “Multiple Peacekeeping Missions.”
7 Findlay, The Use of Force.
8 Ibid.
9 We make two changes to the original Diehl and Druckman, “Multiple Peacekeeping Missions,” list. We drop consideration of the Preventive Deployment mission as it is more of a hypothetical or prospective mission in that it appears empirically only once among the 70 UN operations. Similarly, we drop the Pacification/Coercive mission because only two missions were formally charged with this task; furthermore, given that most UN operations in the twenty-first century were authorized under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, it could now be argued that ‘robust’ missions with more permissive rules of engagement are permitted for all recent operations.
10 Diehl, Druckman, and Wall, “International Peacekeeping and Conflict Resolution.”
11 We began with an early version specified in Diehl, Druckman, and Wall, “International Peacekeeping and Conflict Resolution.”
12 Walton and McKersie, A Behavioral Theory.
13 see Hopmann, “Two Paradigms of Negotiation,” for an application to international negotiations.
14 see Druckman and Wall, “A Treasure Trove,” for a review of these somewhat distinct literatures.
15 For example, Svensson, “Who Brings Which Peace.”
16 See Diehl, Druckman, and Wall, “International Peacekeeping and Conflict Resolution” for more rationale on this set of dimensions.
17 We choose to highlight the similarity rather than the complementarity of a peace operation's characteristics. This is based on the assumption that these elements are moving in the same direction. For example, it is difficult to imagine how high levels of coordination with the government in one mission would complement low coordination in another, or how an integrative process would complement a distributive process.
18 Rietjens and Ruffa, “Understanding Coherence in UN Peacekeeping.”
19 Druckman, Singer, and Van Cott, Enhancing Organizational Performance; Curran, “Training for Peacekeeping.”
20 Bellamy and Williams, “Local Politics,” 281.
21 The missions are coded according to their ideal types along the specified characteristics. We recognize that there might be some variation in practice and over time during a particular operation. This potential limitation is reflective of many efforts to identify and code components of key concepts (e.g. democracy, corruption, judicial independence), but necessary to make cross-case comparisons. Individual case studies could reveal any differences and be reflected in analyses.
22 The first two characteristics, role orientation and conflict management process, may be regarded as categorical rather than ordinal or scaled.
23 Fern, Advanced Focus Group.
24 The correlations between first round coder judgments are .49 (coders 1 and 2), .57 (coders 1 and 3), and .65 (coders 2 and 3).
25 No attempt was made to appoint one of us as a final arbiter. The decisions evolved from the iterations of judgment and discussion. In two cases, consensus was not reached and we took the average of the three codings.
26 See individual chapters in Koops et al., The Oxford Handbook.
27 Franke and Warnecke, “Building Peace”; Mullenbach, “Third-Party Peacekeeping.”
28 Kruskal and Wish, Multidimensional Scaling.
29 We are not naming the horizontal and vertical dimensions. Rather we are examining locations of the missions in the four quadrants. Our interest is the distances in the MDS space rather than where the missions align on each of the dimensions.
30 Kruskal and Wish, Multidimensional Scaling.
31 Operations with one mission are excluded from the analysis. They do not raise compatibility issues.
32 United Nations Protection Force – UNPROFOR – had traditional, DDR, humanitarian, and local security missions.
33 The United Nations Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad – MINURCAT – had humanitarian, human rights, rule of law, and local security missions.
34 See Thies, “Role Theory.”
35 International Peace Institute, “The Case of MINUSCA,” p. 4.
36 International Peace Institute, “The Case of UNMISS.”
37 Note that comparisons on this 100-point scale are valid across cases within each of the three indicators below and not necessarily across different indicators.
38 United Nations Emergency Force I – traditional and DDR missions.
39 United Nations African Union Mission in Darfur – Traditional, Humanitarian, Election, Human Rights, Rule of Law, Local Governance, and Reconciliation.
40 United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone.
41 The standard deviation is only 9.34 when excluding the zero cases.
42 For example, the mean (Indicator 2) weighted by the number of missions produced an indicator with a correlation of +.98 with the sum (Indicator 1) and therefore not distinct from the latter. Various combinations (e.g. additive, multiplicative, weighted) of Indicators 1 and 2 produced similar results.
43 The duration of the mission is measured in years from the first year of deployment to the year of termination. Sixteen cases are censored as they were ongoing through 2016, the endpoint of the analysis. We also we dropped an extreme outlier from the rescaling transformation as it distorted and compressed all the other scores; after the transformation, we assign 100 to that outlier in the data and 99 to the next highest score.
44 Additional and alternative indicators are possible from our methodology and the spatial configurations in , although we caution that these should be based on their own plausible or compelling logics rather than what might produce the best fit in a given case or model.
45 Many of these difficulties are discussed in Diehl and Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations.
46 See Hultma, Kathman, and Shannon, Peacekeeping in the Midst.
47 Uppsala Conflict Data Program, https://ucdp.uu.se/ (last accessed on 13 September 2020).
48 See Druckman and Wagner, “Justice Matters.”
49 See Doyle and Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace.
50 Blair et al, When Do UN Peacekeepers Implement Their Mandates, show that peacebuilding-related tasks are more disrupted when PKOs are assigned a greater variety of tasks.
51 United Nations Mission in the Central African Republic.
52 Score on Indicator 3 assumes the continuation of the two missions for the full 11 years of the operation.
53 For example, Eriksen, “The Liberal Peace.”
54 Holt, Taylor, and Kelly, Protecting Civilians.
55 Tull, “Peacekeeping in the Democratic Republic of Congo.”
56 Election supervision was a mission in the middle of the operation, and one that was not repeated after its conclusion; even as some democratization actions continued thereafter.
57 Effectiveness of Peace Operations Network, “Assessing the Effectiveness.”
58 See Hellmüller, The Interaction between Local.
59 Esmenjaud, “United Nations Mission in the Central African Republic”; Ninth Report of the UN Secretary General.
60 MacQueen, United Nations Peacekeeping in Africa.
61 Early work by Campbell and Fiske “Convergent and Divergent,” on the multitrait (concepts), multimethod (indicators) matrix is relevant. This is a popular analytic technique for gauging fits between alternative measures and concepts.
62 The statistical analyses and case studies discussed above provide preliminary evidence for predictive validity. Nevertheless. the measures used do not always gauge operation effectiveness; some are exogenous to the operations.
63 Diehl and Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations.
64 Ibid.
65 See Di Salvatore and Ruggeri, “Effectiveness of Peacekeeping Operations”; Sandler, “International Peacekeeping Operations.”
66 Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, Peacekeeping in the Midst.
67 Ruggeri et al., “Managing Mistrust.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Daniel Druckman
Daniel Druckman is Professor Emeritus at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University in Arlington Virginia. He is also an Honorary Professor at Macquarie University in Sydney and at the University of Queensland in Brisbane Australia.
Grace Mueller
Grace Mueller is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Paul F. Diehl
Paul F. Diehl is Ashbel Smith Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas-Dallas and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Krulak Center, Marine Corps University (USA).