Do Incentives Matter? Resilience and Reliability of Force Deployments to UN Peacekeeping Operations

Abstract

UN peacekeeping operations with adequate resources can reduce the intensity and recurrence of armed conflict, yet troop shortfalls limit many missions. We argue that organizational incentives for contributing countries matter and can increase the resilience and reliability of peacekeeping deployments. In particular, states motivated by material and status rewards will exhibit greater resilience and reliability than countries for which organizational incentives are largely irrelevant. We operationalize resilience via casualty tolerance, and reliability via the gap between authorized and deployed personnel to UN operations. A fine-grained empirical analysis of peacekeeping contributions lends support to our argument, showing that countries motivated by organizational incentives have a higher casualty tolerance and lower deployment gaps than countries for which organizational incentives are less salient. Our findings suggest that multilateral organizations could use material and status rewards more widely to strengthen the supply of peacekeepers as well as global public good provision in other domains.