Explaining Police Misconduct in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations, 2010-2019

ABSTRACT

Several recent studies consider the determinants of misconduct by military personnel deployed to United Nations peacekeeping operations (PKOs). While the majority of peacekeepers carry out their duties honorably and often at great personal risk, these studies operate from the premise that misconduct by even a few peacekeepers can undermine a mission, and reduce support for future missions. Even so, misconduct by civilian police deployed to PKOs remains massively understudied in comparison to their military counterparts, though UN police are more likely to face credible allegations of misconduct compared to UN troops. Based on the inclusive or extractive incentives of contributor states, we find support for the argument that the behavior of security personnel at home readily predicts misconduct when deployed to PKOs. This same logic has implications for the UN's increasingly preferred ‘Formed Police Units,’ whose use may actually increase the likelihood of sexual exploitation and abuse.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

2 Horne, Robinson, and Lloyd, “Relationship between Contributors’ Domestic”; Karim and Beardsley, “Explaining sexual exploitation and abuse”; Moncrief, “Military socialization”; Nordås and Rustad, “Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.” In keeping with recent practice, ‘peace operations’ and ‘peacekeeping’ are used interchangeably.

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

3 Donais and Tanguay, “Protection of Civilians”; Holt, Taylor, and Kelly, Protecting Civilians.

4 Osland, “UN Policing.”

5 Acemolgu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail.

6 Checkel, “Socialization and violence,” 592.

7 Smith and Smith, “Human Trafficking.”

8 Beber et al., “Peacekeeping, Compliance.”

9 Kovatch, “Sexual exploitation and abuse.”

10 E.g., Butler, Gluch, and Mitchell, “Security Forces and Sexual Violence”; Cohen and Nordås, “Sexual violence.”

11 Nordås and Rustad, “Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.”

12 Moncrief, “Military socialization.”

13 Karim and Beardsley, “Explaining sexual exploitation and abuse.”

14 Rodriguez and Kinne, “Blue Helmets, Red Flags.”

15 Horne, Robinson, and Lloyd, “Relationship between Contributors’ Domestic.”

16 Karim and Beardsley, “Explaining sexual exploitation and abuse.”

17 Regarding the greater preparedness and socialisation of FPUs, the UN’s training standards for FPUs recognizes an initial lack of standards and ensuing fatal incidents in the first FPU deployed to Kosovo in 2007 as the rationale behind establishing standards for (among other things) knowledge and skills in public order management and knowledge of basic human rights applied to policing. Of the four FPU training units, one is devoted to international law framing the actions of peace operations, and another centers on the values and standards of conduct expected of peacekeepers (UNPOL, “Temporary Training Standards,” 2). Likewise the UN’s formal policy on FPUs in PKOs emphasizes training in codes of conduct, the use of force, protection of civilians, the special role of women peacekeepers in promoting goals of equality and inclusion, and the responsibility to train national police to these standards (UN DPKO, 2016, “Policy”). Italy’s Center of Excellence for Stability Police Units (CoESPU), discussed below, was created in collaboration with the UN to turn (primarily) African FPUs into ‘Carabinieri-like Peacekeepers,’ grounded in principles including professionalism, accountability, transparency, and respect for human rights (CoESPU, “Values and Principles”). Individual police officers (IPOs), by contrast, receive pre-deployment training in their home countries (UN DPKO, Standard Operating Procedure), and even this has been found to be inconsistent (Sebastían, Role of Police, 14).

18 E.g., Yilmaz, “UN Peacekeeping.”

19 Acemolgu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail, 81.

20 Ibid., 81-82.

21 Osland, “UN Policing,” 193.

22 Mawby, “Models of Policing.” Wilén makes a similar argument with respect to peacekeeping troops, where the presence of TCCs with authoritarian tendencies undermines democratic change and transparency in security sector reform (Wilén, “Examining the Links”).

23 Belgioioso, Di Salvatore, and Pickney, “Tangled up in Blue.”

24 Saati and Wimelius, “Building peace abroad.”

25 Dupont and Tanner, “Not always a happy ending”; Goldsmith, “It wasn’t like normal policing.”

26 Porter and Warrender, “Multivariate model of police deviance.”

27 Newburn, Literature Review; Punch, “Rotten Orchards.”

28 Punch, “Police corruption,” 304.

29 Bueno de Mesquita et al., Logic of Political Survival, 344-45. Subsequent work in selectorate theory goes on to argue that peacekeeping specifically provides an opportunity for autocratic states to maintain costly security forces designed for domestic repression (Levin, et al., “Selectorate Theory”).

30 Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army.

31 Scharpf and Glaßel, “Why Underachievers Dominate.”

32 Bellamy and Williams, Understanding Peacekeeping, 58-65. The best known typology of contributor state motivations comes from Bellamy and Williams (“Politics and Challenges,” 18-21). See also Findlay, “The New Peacekeepers,” 7ff; Sotomayor, “Myth of the Democratic Peacekeeper,” 32-33.

33 Kenkel, “Brazil,” 345.

34 Cunliffe, “From Peacekeepers to Praetorians”; Duursma and Gledhill, “Voted out”; Findlay, “The New Peacekeepers”; Gaibulleov et al., “Personnel contributions to UN”; Worboys, “Traumatic Journey.”

35 Irish Times, “UN policeman charged.”

36 Koyama and Myrttinen, “Unintended consequences of peace operations,” 35-36.

37 Ibid., 32.

38 Dickinson, “For Tiny Burundi.”

39 UNPOL, “Formed Police Units.”

40 Sebastían, Role of Police, 6.

41 IPOs are classified as experts on missions, entitling them to a mission subsistence allowance (MSA) of $100-$300 per day, which are allotted over and above an officer’s salary. The incentive for corruption is significant, and the practice has led to instances of police paying bribes and kickbacks to be deployed or to extend their deployments with PKOs. Perhaps more importantly, those who are willing to engage in graft are, by this logic, more likely to be deployed. PCCs, meanwhile, are disincentivized from contributing their best officers, as contributor states do not receive any UN compensation for providing IPOs. Thus, incentives at both the individual and state levels suggest a predisposition toward deploying subpar IPOs.

42 Based on its own methods of compensation, the UN also has an incentive to prefer FPUs to IPOs. On average, IPOs cost the UN about 75 percent more than FPUs, per officer (Durch and England, Enhancing United Nations Capacity, 27).

43 Pyman et al., Corruption and Peacekeeping; Transparency International, Assessment of Corruption Risks.

44 Durch, “United Nations Police Evolution,” 14.

45 Durch and England, Enhancing, 18.

46 Ibid.

47 CoESPU, “About Us.” While CoESPU operates according to a train-the-trainer model, there is no public data to our knowledge of the extent to which CoESPU graduates actually go on to train PCC units who then deploy to a PKO.

48 UN DPKO, Policy (Revised), para. 81. However, experts consulted expressed uncertainly about the extent to which AOCs actually prevented FPUs from deploying.

49 Osland, “UN Policing,” 199.

50 Autesserre, Peaceland; Howard, UN Peacekeeping; Moncrief, “Military socialization.” For example, building on Checkel’s (“Socialization and violence,” 595) notion that socialisation can be ‘layered and multiple,’ Moncrief (“Military socialization,” 718) contends that ‘socialization at the level of the peacekeeping mission can help explain variation in SEA, not just prior socialization in the troop-contributing military.’ See footnote 17 for examples of the UN’s contention that significant socialization can occur at the mission-level.

51 Ruffa, “Military Cultures.”

52 Flaspöler, “Adding peacekeepers,” 122.

53 Moncrief, “Military socialization.”

54 UNMISS, “UNMISS Acts on Allegations.”

55 Past efforts by the UN to survey PCCs on the question of their extraterritorial criminal jurisdiction over their police deployed on mission have in most cases been met with no response, meaning the UN’s declaration of PCC sole jurisdiction is ‘in effect gambling that the necessary jurisdiction and political will be available if and when disciplinary action is needed’ (Durch, et al., Improving Criminal Accountability, 37).

56 Durch, “United Nations Police Evolution,” 18.

57 Durch et al., Improving Criminal Accountability, xi.

58 UNGA, Resolution 65/289; Resolution 66/264.

59 UNGA, “Special measures for protection,” para. 64.

60 UN DPKO, Policy (Revised), para. 65.

61 For example, the DPKO’s 2009 FPU policy document defined FPUs with respect to their ‘work in support of the establishment and maintenance of safe, democratic and human rights abiding communities … ’ (UN DPKO, para. 8).

62 Another change in UN policing going into effect around this time was the 2010 expansion of the UN Standing Police Capacity (SPC), which came into being in 2005 to support the startup of new missions and provide support to ongoing missions. 2010 also saw the introduction of a small but permanently staffed Justice and Corrections Standing Capacity (JCSC). As headquarters-level entities, both the SPC and JCSC are intended to build consistency and capacity for rule-of-law activities across UN police missions.

63 Durch, “United Nations Police Evolution,” 10. ‘Developed’ states are here determined by membership in the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

64 UN Missions, “Conduct in UN Mission Fields - Data.”

65 See United Nations (UN) Missions “Conduct in UN Mission Fields - Key Terms” and “Conduct in UN Field Missions – Other Misconduct,” for details regarding the classification of allegations.

66 Haschke, “Political Terror Scale,” 1.

67 Horne, Robinson, and Lloyd, “Relationship between Contributors’ Domestic Abuses,” 3. This study uses the average PTS scores derived from the United States Department of State and Amnesty International, excluding the scores from Human Rights Watch, due to a significant number of country-years lacking scores based on HRW reports.

68 Oztig, Gurkan, and Yigit, “Borders and Guns.”

69 Chu, “Hosting Your Enemy.”

70 Ansorg, Haass, and Strasheim, “Police Reforms.”

71 Two features of PTS are important with respect to potential endogeneity issues. First, PTS does not exclusively measure politically-motivated state behavior. As we do not assume that all misconduct perpetrated by peacekeepers is politically motivated, PTS remains a reliable source of information on domestic state behavior. Second, PTS excludes ‘extra-territorial violations,’ or those violations committed on international deployments (Haschke, 2). Thus, the use of PTS maintains conceptual distance between the independent and dependent variables employed in this study.

72 Controlling for FPUs and UNPOL force size also helps account for mission mandate, which is difficult to measure directly inasmuch as resources to fulfill a mandate matter more than the written mandate itself, while every UN PKO since 1999 given Chapter VII authorization for the use of force (Howard and Dayal, “The Use of Force”). Fortunately for purposes of measurement, larger deployments tend to correspond with more robust mandates (Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon, Peacekeeping in the Midst of War, 61), and previous work finds no relationship between mandate type (traditional vs. multidimensional) and UN troop misconduct (Horne, et al., “Relationship between Contributors’ Domestic”).

73 E.g., Karim and Beardsley, “Explaining sexual exploitation and abuse.”

74 UN Missions, “Conduct in UN Field Missions – Data.”

75 UNSG, “Special Measures for Protection.”

76 UNMISS, “UNMISS Acts on Allegations.”

77 UN Missions, “Conduct in UN Field Missions – Who Is Involved.”

78 UN OIOS, “About OIOS.”

79 E.g., Horne, Robinson, and Lloyd, “Relationship between Contributors’ Domestic”; Karim and Beardsley, “Explaining sexual exploitation and abuse.”

80 Daily Times PK, “Malik orders probe.”

81 Horne, Robinson, and Lloyd, “Relationship between Contributors’ Domestic.”

82 Nordås and Rustad, “Sexual Exploitation and Abuse”; Rodriguez and Kinne, “Blue Helmets, Red Flags”; Horne, et al., “Relationship between Contributors’ Domestic”; Moncrief, “Military socialization”; Karim and Beardsley, “Explaining sexual exploitation and abuse.”

83 This finding is somewhat surprising given previous work showing at least some support for the idea that women military peacekeepers may reduce SEA misconduct by UN troops (Karim and Beardsley, “Explaining sexual exploitation and abuse.”). In fact, the precise relationship between women peacekeepers and misconduct is far from settled. Hoover Green (“Command and (Maybe) Control,” 554) notes that the presumed causal mechanisms at work between women peacekeepers and reductions in SEA – that women are less likely to commit SEA themselves and may exert a restraining force on male colleagues – is less than clear, asking, ‘Is there a per se effect of women in the peacekeeping setting, or are women more likely to join militaries that are, independently, less likely to perpetrate SEA?’ Karim and Beardsley (Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping, 3ff) argue that gender power imbalances in peacekeeping may explain how even an increase in the number of women peacekeepers may not have desired effects in reducing misconduct, because of continued restrictions in women’s roles. If women peacekeepers are relegated to support roles away from the places and situations where misconduct is most likely to occur, increased numbers will not translate into reductions in misconduct. Alternatively, it could be that an increase in female peacekeepers also leads to an increase in reporting of SEA and other misconduct, which would mask any positive impact of women’s increased presence. None of these explanations is mutually exclusive of the others, and all three suggest the importance of drawing peacekeepers from inclusive and rights-respecting contributor states.

84 Haschke, “Political Terror Scale,” 4.

85 By contrast, other possible measures of states’ extractive tendencies – standard indicators of rule of law, polity, and corruption (not reported) – all fail to predict the various types of UNPOL misconduct. These findings are consistent with our claim that PTS offers an advantage over alternatives by measuring the actual behavior of security services as opposed to measuring more general state characteristics. These variables are all too highly correlated with PTS and with one another in our dataset to place together in the same model.

86 These results hold even when PKOs with no FPU presence are excluded, though sample size falls to n = 77.

87 Durch et al., Independent Progress Review.

88 E.g., Karim and Beardsley, “Explaining sexual exploitation and abuse”; Moncrief, “Military socialization”; Nordås and Rustad, “Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.”

89 Flaspöler “Adding peacekeepers”; Flaspöler, African Peacekeeping Training Centres; Newburn, Literature Review; Punch, “Police Corruption”; Punch, “Rotten Orchards.”

90 Abdenur, “UN Peace Operations”; Albrecht and Podder, Protection of Civilians.

91 Other state-based initiatives show promise, such as the 2004 creation of the Australian Federal Police International Deployment Group (IDG) and Canada’s International Police Peacekeeping and Peace Operations Program (IPP) administered under the Canadian Police Arrangement, in operation since 2012. While these programs followed the Brahimi Report’s recommendation that state’s create pre-qualified police for deployment, the states who followed through on this suggestion are no longer major police contributors to UN missions.

92 Durch and England, Enhancing United Nations Capacity, xii.

93 UNGA, “Criminal accountability,” para. 72-90.

94 Flaspöler, “Adding peacekeepers”; African Peacekeeping Training Centres.

95 Elron et al., “Cooperation and Coordination”; Greener, “UNPOL”; Haddad, “Teaching Diversity.”

96 Checkel, “Socialization and violence,” 594.

97 Durch et al., Improving Criminal Accountability, viii.

98 UN DPKO, Directives for Disciplinary Matters, 4.

99 UNGA, “Special measures for protection,” para. 45.

100 HR, “Peacekeepers: Allegations of Abuse.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cale Horne

Cale Horne (PhD, 2010, University of Georgia) is Professor of Political Science at Covenant College. His research interests include United Nations peacekeeping, political violence, and the domestic politics of authoritarian states.

Megan Lloyd

Megan Lloyd is a PhD student in Political Science in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland – College Park.

Ashley Pieper

Ashley Pieper is a PhD student in Political Science in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia.