Better peacekeepers, better protection? Troop quality of United Nations peace operations and violence against civilians

Nadine Ansorg,Felix Haass

doi:10.1177/0022343318785419

Nadine Ansorg, Felix Haass

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343318785419

Copy DOI

Abstract

Why do similarly sized peacekeeping missions vary in their effectiveness to protect civilians in conflicts? We argue that peace operations with a large share of troops from countries with high-quality militaries are better able to deter violence from state and non-state actors and create buffer zones within conflict areas, can better reach remote locations, and have superior capabilities – including diplomatic pressure by troop contributing countries – to monitor the implementation of peace agreements. These operational advantages enable them to better protect civilians. Combining data from military expenditures of troop contributing countries together with monthly data on the composition of peace operations, we create a proxy indicator for the average troop quality of UN PKOs. Statistical evidence from an extended sample of conflicts in Africa and Asia between 1991 and 2010 supports our argument.

Highlights

Do peacekeeping operations (PKOs) with well-trained troops and advanced military hardware better protect civilians from violence in armed conflicts than illequipped deployments? Or is it only troop size and mission diversity that shape a PKO’s ability to reduce violence against civilians (Hultman, Kathman & Shannon, 2013; Bove & Ruggeri, 2016)? The cases of the Central African Republic (CAR) and Mali illustrate these questions well: despite the presence of over 9,000 troops in the CAR in September 2015, the Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) failed to contain the killing of 75 civilians in September of the same year
Note that the negative relationship between troop quality and one-sided violence persists even though we explicitly control for the number of troops on the ground
We demonstrate that troop quality of United Nations (UN) peace operations can reduce civilian victimization in internal conflicts

Summary

Introduction

Do peacekeeping operations (PKOs) with well-trained troops and advanced military hardware better protect civilians from violence in armed conflicts than illequipped deployments? Or is it only troop size and mission diversity that shape a PKO’s ability to reduce violence against civilians (Hultman, Kathman & Shannon, 2013; Bove & Ruggeri, 2016)? The cases of the Central African Republic (CAR) and Mali illustrate these questions well: despite the presence of over 9,000 troops in the CAR in September 2015, the Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) failed to contain the killing of 75 civilians in September of the same year. PKO-specific and conflict-specific control variables in our basic specification: the lagged monthly number of troops, police, and military observers deployed to the conflict-month.10 Kathman (2013) provides comprehensive data on troop contributions to UN peacekeeping missions, we construct this measure using data from the International Peace Institute (IPI) (Perry & Smith, 2013) which hand-coded the same data as Kathman (2013).

Results

Conclusion