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Brazil's role in UN peacekeeping operations has been subject to increasing attention from academics and policy makers alike. While some authors praise Brazil's engagement in the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) as a case of innovative South-South cooperation, others accuse Brazil of using Haiti as a 'testing ground' for repressive anti-gang tactics that have subsequently been introduced at home. This article challenges these two dominant views on Brazil's role in Haiti. Based on a period of six months of fieldwork in Port-au-Prince and interviews with key Brazilian actors, the article draws a parallel between MINUSTAH's military raids in gang-ruled neighbourhoods coupled with police reform in Haiti, on one hand, and the Pacifying Police Units (Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora) plus the accompanying UPP Social in Rio de Janeiro, on the other hand. It is argued that Brazil's peacekeeping strategy, at home and abroad, is a mix of coercive and cooperative measures reminiscent of counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics already employed during the French colonial war in Algeria. Moreover, it is shown that policing techniques borrowed from the US are employed to ease the tension between carrots and sticks, notably so in the urban environment in which Brazilian peacekeeping is taking place.

United Nations peacekeeping soldiers commit atrocities while deployed despite their mandate to protect civilians from harm. Yet, there is tremendous variation across missions in reported human rights abuses. Why are some missions more susceptible to misconduct than others? To answer this puzzle, we identify three broad sources of influence on peacekeeper behavior: institutions, society, and military culture. Using newly collected data, we find that host-country and contributing-country institutions, particularly press freedoms and rule of law, dramatically decrease violations. Compliance with international humanitarian law also decreases violations, though to a lesser degree than institutions. Societal influences, such as gender norms and income inequality, have virtually no impact on abuses. We illustrate the utility of these findings by generating out-of-sample predictions for hypothetical peacekeeping missions in countries with recent political turmoil.

What effect do power-sharing institutions agreed to as part of civil war settlements have on the development of the rule of law in post–civil war states? We contend that power-sharing measures facilitate the emergence of the rule of law in two ways. First, they establish a form of institutional constraint that promotes judicial autonomy and independence. Second, they foster a sense of security among judges and other political actors that bolsters commitment to the law. We demonstrate the plausibility of a positive relationship between power sharing and the rule of law through an analysis of post–civil war states between the years 1948 and 2006. Our findings suggest that civil war settlements can help to establish the rule of law when they include mechanisms aimed at allaying the insecurities of political actors in the postconflict environment.

This article is concerned with the relationship between the quality of a country's governance institutions and the degree of civil order it experiences. Using evidence from Somaliland, it argues that order and peaceful cohabitation can be sustained not only when, but even partly because, governance institutions are incapable of reliably controlling violence. It suggests that Somaliland's postconflict peace is less grounded in the constraining power of its governance institutions than in a powerful discourse about the country's structural, temporal, and physical proximity to war. Through its sensitivity to the ease with which peace gives way to war, this discourse indirectly harnesses an apparent propensity to disorder as a source of order. This case challenges the "common sense" causal relationship between institutions and order. If either the strength or the weakness of institutions can offer foundations for order, then neither quality can be assigned as its cause without also being its effect. This has important implications beyond Somaliland by suggesting that, if weak institutions can support order under certain discursive conditions, then discourse—which is inherently fluid—also mediates the relationship between robust institutions and order. This makes them more susceptible to rapid change than usually imagined.

Since the 1950s, US military personnel have taken on an increasingly diverse set of responsibilities, including less traditional roles delivering disaster aid and engaging in public diplomacy. Focusing on a particular subset of deployments, humanitarian and civic-assistance deployments to Latin America, we examine the effect that a US military presence can have on public opinion in the host country. We focus on the microfoundations of popular support and use survey data and newly collected subnational data on deployments to examine the effect of these deployments on mass attitudes toward the US military and government in Peru. We find that these deployments do improve perceptions of the US military and government, and correlate with assessments of US influence that are more positive. Our findings bolster the conclusions of previous research that shows how aid can both improve public attitudes toward the donor country and address the foreign aid attribution problem.

A large share of civilian staff working in international peace operations are nationals of the host state. Academic research has not yet investigated the effect of these locally recruited bureaucrats on peacebuilding. Theoretically, it is argued that to accomplish their missions in complex environments, peace operations require crucial knowledge about local perceptions, politics, and customs. Local staff can have a positive performance impact by soliciting such knowledge. But information advantages create new principal-agent problems. Peace operations have a hard time scrutinizing their employees' allegiances, and they risk sabotage from within. Empirically, it is shown that peace operations conducted by the United Nations (UN), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and the European Union (EU) differ significantly in how they navigate the ensuing tension by enabling or restricting the influence of their local staff. A new data set on the staffing of 52 peace operations as well as analysis of internal staff policies yields significant variance in the potential of local staff to influence peacebuilding policy implementation, which is most extensive in the OSCE, followed by the UN and the EU. This finding warrants more attention on the role of local staff as information gatekeepers who could be at the center of potential frictions between international and local norms and knowledge.

A small but growing literature has started to analyse the European Union (EU) 'as an effective peacemaker'. We make a contribution to this field by investigating EU mediation effectiveness in the Russia–Ukraine conflict. The focus is on perceptions of effectiveness. Based on information from semi-structured interviews, we compare EU self-images with Ukrainian evaluations of EU mediation efforts. How effective is the EU, including its Member States, deemed to be? What factors are believed to lie behind perceived (in)effectiveness? We concentrate on four such factors, derived from the mediator literature: perceived (im)partiality, coherence and credibility and, finally, evaluations of the EU's mediation strategies. Both internal and external views singled out EU member states as the most effective actors in current mediation. The role of EU was seen in ambivalent terms by both sides. All the four determinants of mediation effectiveness are discussed in our material, but differ considerably in the degree of attention given to each of them. While (im)partiality is not a factor that is linked to effectiveness in any straightforward way, EU incoherence is associated with inconsistent and weak policies, notably in the Ukraine material.

International organizations continuously deploy civilian capabilities as part of their peacekeeping and crisis management operations. This presents them with significant challenges. Not only are civilian deployments rapidly increasing in quantity, but civilian missions are also very diverse in nature. This article analyses how international organizations have learned to deploy their civilian capabilities to deal with a growing number and fast evolving types of operations. Whereas the previous literature has addressed this question for individual international organizations, this article uniquely compares developments in the United Nations (UN), European Union (EU) and Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), three of the largest civilian actors. Drawing on the concept of organizational learning, it shows that all three organizations have made significant changes over the last decade in their civilian capabilities. The extent of these changes, however, varies across these organizations. The article highlights that the EU, despite its more homogeneous and wealthier membership, has not been able to better learn to deploy its civilian capabilities than the UN or OSCE. We show that the ability of these organizations to learn is, instead, highly dependent on institutional factors.