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The German Armed Forces contribute to the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA). This is the first time in more than 20 years that Germany has deployed a strong contingent for a United Nations peacekeeping operation, though the UN's multilateral crisis management is currently required to operate in very different conflict contexts. The Federal Government should scrutinize how Germany can participate more comprehensively and more strategically in these missions than it has done up to now. There are a number of reasons to sustain, prioritize and extend this commitment which pertains to issues of strategy, personnel policy, training and equipment. (author's abstract)

The number of uniformed personnel serving in UN peace missions reached a new record in 2016, at almost 123,000. Following grave failings of UN missions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan, there is growing awareness within the UN of a widening disjoint between the expectations placed upon peacekeeping forces and what they can actually achieve. One aspect of the debate relates to the question of how robustly UN missions should operate in enforcing their mandate. In some quarters the resolute use of force is seen as the key to greater success. Almost three years ago the UN sent a Force Intervention Brigade to Congo with an explicit mandate to neutralise armed groups. An assessment of its record reveals that the brigade cannot be regarded as an organisational model worth replicating, and that peace-enforcing mandates do not necessarily lead to greater success in peacekeeping. (author's abstract)

Unbewaffnetes Ziviles Peacekeeping - wie man ZivilistInnen wirksam ohne die Drohung mit Gewalt schützt. Das ist die Übersetzung des Titels des englischsprachigen Hintergrund- und Diskussionspapiers, das jetzt neu erschienen ist. Die drei Autorinnen fassen in dem Papier den Stand der wissenschaftlichen Forschung zu Zivilem Peacekeeping zusammen. Sie stellen die Grundgedanken dieses Ansatzes dar, Menschen vor kriegerischer Gewalt auf gewaltfreiem Wege zu schützen, beschäftigen sich mit der Akzeptanz dieses Ansatzes in der Politik und geben einen Überblick über die vorhandene Literatur zum Thema.

"Although prospects for peacekeeping and peacebuilding in Africa have significantly improved since the end of the East-West conflict, creating the conditions for lasting peace nevertheless remains a challenge. While liberal peace as ideological frame and strong regional security organisations (RSOs) account for positive impacts and great potential, their effectiveness remains a hope, rather than a given. This report contributes to the debate on the effectiveness of peacekeeping/ peacebuilding on the African continent by analysing the policies and activities of the African Union (AU) and the European Union (EU) as well as some of its member states regarding two global norms: a) Protection of Civilians (POC) as one task of peacekeeping operations and b) Security Sector Reform (SSR). Based on the examples of Darfur, Chad, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe, the report finds that the similar interpretation of doctrines is promising and can be considered an indicator that a layered system of global security governance based on strong and connected RSOs could be both effective and legitimate. However, this alignment of doctrines remains fragile and does not always translate into increased effectiveness at the local level due to three classes of frictions the report identifies." (author's abstract)

Internationale Interventionen zur Friedenskonsolidierung sind seit den 1990er Jahren in der internationalen Politik in den Vordergrund gerückt. Dieser Wandel hat zu umfangreichen Untersuchungen über die Bedingungen für erfolgreiche Interventionspraktiken und die normativen Spannungen, die sie in den Zielländern oft hervorrufen, geführt. Der wissenschaftliche Diskurs hat die sich entwickelnden Ansätze der internationalen Friedenskonsolidierung in mehreren turns konzeptualisiert: Das Konzept des liberal peacebuilding wurde mit dem Fokus auf local ownership kritisch beleuchtet, gefolgt vom Ruf nach robusteren oder pragmatischeren Mandaten. Immer wieder wird auch die konzeptionelle Debatte über die verschwimmenden Grenzen zwischen Friedenskonsolidierung (peacebuilding) und Friedenserhaltung (peacekeeping) geführt. Eine zentrale Frage, die sich aus den genannten Debatten ergibt, betrifft die Rolle von Zwang in der Friedensförderung: Erleben wir eine Verschiebung hin zu mehr zwangsbasierten (robusten) Ansätzen? Oder hat die Kritik an der liberalen Friedenskonsolidierung und die zunehmende Bedeutung von sogenannten "neuen" Akteuren aus dem Globalen Süden zu einem Trend von weniger Zwang (light footprint) und einer stärkeren Berücksichtigung von local ownership und Inklusivität geführt? Aufbauend auf einem Literaturstand zur Konzeptualisierung von Zwang schlägt dieses Working Paper einen konzeptionellen Rahmen vor, um die Rolle von Zwang in der Friedensförderung zu untersuchen. Es untersucht die komplizierte Beziehung zwischen Zwang und Frieden und beschreibt die verschiedenen Erscheinungsformen von Zwang in der Friedensförderung. Der konzeptionelle Rahmen wird beispielhaft in einer Untersuchung afrikanischer regionaler Reaktionen auf Putsche als Zwangsregime veranschaulicht. Abschließend unterstreichen wir die Notwendigkeit einer systematischen Betrachtung von Zwang in der Friedensforschung und heben dessen Bedeutung für die Gestaltung der Ergebnisse und der Wirksamkeit von internationalen Interventionen hervor.

In their PRIF Report the authors focus on the various forms of resistance to and backlash against gender equality and gender-sensitive human rights in peacebuilding processes. Based on 33 interviews with key stakeholders, they explore how peacebuilders understand and perceive resistance to and backlash against the realisation of gender-sensitive human rights in peacebuilding. The report also sheds light on the counter-measures and strategies used by peacebuilders. Finally, the authors discuss the impact of feminist foreign policy on gender-sensitive human rights in peacebuilding.

Within the field of international peace and security, policy makers and analysts alike commonly treat collaboration and convergence among international organizations and intervention frameworks as a policy objective in itself. Indeed, from the focus on the 'comprehensive approach', during the 2000s, to the recent emphasis on multi-dimensional and integrated stabilization frameworks, institutional collaboration is cast as inherently positive and desirable in regard to addressing international collective matters. This article challenges such 'collaboration bias'. It does so by exploring the empirical effects of increasing collaboration and 'strategic partnerships' within the context of the current (re)turn to stabilization interventions. Specifically, focusing on Mali, it unpacks how contemporary stabilization efforts intensify collaboration across counterterrorism and peacekeeping interventions in ways that undercut policy implementation within one of the most central peacekeeping priority areas, namely the Protection of Civilians (PoC). In detailing key aspects on which contemporary peacekeeping-counterterrorism entanglements compromise protection efforts, the article conveys some of the 'dark sides' of cooperation regimes. It moreover highlights the need to not only explore regime complexity as a systemic feature of world politics but also unpack how it operates, and to what effect, at the meso and micro levels of policy implementation and practice.

United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations are among the most effective tools available for the international community to deal with threats to international peace and security. However, such operations have also been presenting significant shortcomings, like below average performances of some peacekeeping units. Against this backdrop, this article discusses the complexities of robust peacekeeping and the problem of military underperformance, intending to ascertain the significance of combat motivation as a contributing factor to the efficiency of UN military components and the effectiveness of robust peacekeeping missions. The results indicate the relevance of combat motivation for UN troops' better performances. Also, the findings point out the need to enhancing affective aspects in the preparation of the blue helmets, like self-confidence, small units cohesion, leadership, and sense of the cause.

In the past two decades, regional organizations and coalitions of states have deployed more peace operations than the UN. Yet most quantitative studies of peacekeeping effectiveness focus on UN peacekeeping exclusively, a decision owed to data availability more than to theories about the differential impact of UN and non-UN missions. As a result, we know little about the effectiveness of non-UN peacekeeping in mitigating violence. In this paper, we introduce and analyse monthly data on the approximate number of troops, police, and observers in both UN and non-UN peacekeeping operations between 1993 and 2016. Using these data, we show that when accounting for mission size and composition, UN and regional peacekeeping operations are equally effective in mitigating violence against civilians by governments, but only UN troops and police curb civilian targeting by non-state actors. We offer some theoretical reflections on these findings, but the main contribution of the article is the novel dataset on non-UN peacekeeping strength and personnel composition to overcome the near-exclusive focus on UN missions in the scholarship on peacekeeping effectiveness.

What is the impact of international peacekeeping missions for civil-military relations at home? This article unpacks the conditions that produce positive effects of peacekeeping participation on the domestic politics of an authoritarian regime. Drawing on field research, I discuss four mechanisms that link foreign policy making to domestic civil-military relations in Ben Ali's Tunisia. First, the deployment of troops for peacekeeping abroad presents obstacles for the coordination of coup plots at home. Second, incumbents can allocat material resources to meet officers' economic grievances. Moreover,peacekeeping operations serve to enhance corporate institutionalization through specific training programmes. Finally, peacekeeping contributes to a professional ethos and hence the depoliticization of the officer corps. These findings give rise to the notion that contributing to peace can have similar effects for domestic politics as going to war.

Liberal peacebuilding's imperfect record of involving local actors in rebuilding post-conflict societies paved the way for the local turn in peacebuilding. One of the issues the local turn highlights is local involvement in peacebuilding processes. Drawing from the experiences of previous peacebuilding missions in Cambodia, Kosovo, and Timor-Leste, this paper contributes to the local turn by identifying the types of local involvement in peacebuilding and their consequences on post-conflict societies. This identification could be useful in steering the local turn away from the same flawed local involvement that brought liberal peacebuilding into crisis. The analysis in this paper demonstrates how exclusive, superficial, non-representative, and politicized types of local involvement failed to achieve or sustain peace in Cambodia, Kosovo, and Timor-Leste. The conflict-promoting tendencies of these types of local involvement make a case for a normative agenda that is inclusive, substantive, representative, and transformative.

The United Nations' Department of Peacekeeping Operations increasingly employs private military and security companies (PMSCs) to provide a range of services in peacekeeping operations (PKOs). The UN's reliance on PMSCs is often justified by quantity and quality gaps in traditional peacekeeping forces that must be filled by private companies' expertise and efficiency. We argue that these long-standing gaps cannot adequately explain the use of PMSCs, which do not bring unique services and potentially undermine UN legitimacy. Instead, the UN's organizational rigidity, financial flexibility, and procurement opaqueness encourage PMSC use without accurately assessing their need, costs, and benefits. We suggest organizational reforms, without which PMSC involvement in peacekeeping operations is likely to continue and expand, and we propose further research to explain the PMSC phenomenon.

Recent trends in international responses to civil war and humanitarian crises highlight the growing importance of multilateral intervention by intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Academics and practitioners agree that higher levels of cooperation should yield better outcomes, while the literature emphasizes the importance of commitment. Yet the question of how organizations collaborate with each other and local authorities remains largely uncharted, despite its growing importance for the future of international peacemaking and peacebuilding. This paper analyzes DDR processes within the context of organizational networks and programme 'ownership.' It extends existing literature by adding nuanced understandings of ownership and assessment of the interactive processes through which the programme is offered as factors in understanding outcomes. The paper focuses on two factors – ownership and collaboration (both type and scope) –to analyze how IGOs interact and in particular comprise or respond to the local/international nexus of DDR peacemaking and peacebuilding. Its findings suggest that no single factor is sufficient for understanding DDR outcomes. Contrary to standard beliefs, the locus of ownership of may not be as critical as other factors, and context may be more important to outcomes than incentives. These findings define areas for further research related to specific combinations of factors and the causal dynamics and challenges of collaboration among participants.

Does UN peacekeeping reduce the number of people forcibly displaced by violence? While previous research has found that the presence and size of peacekeeping deployments can reduce violence, little is known about how peacekeepers affect other aspects of civilian protection. Using original data on sub-national events of forced displacement and the location and size of UN troop deployments this study systematically evaluates the criticized efforts of UNMISS in South Sudan, while simultaneously testing hypotheses on peacekeepers and forced displacement. It is hypothesized that increasing numbers of troops affect the flight equation among civilians through the promise of and actual deterrence of violence. These deterrence-based hypotheses are also discussed in relation to the South Sudan context, creating scope conditions for their possible application in this case. The statistical analysis provides, however, no robust evidence for peacekeepers reducing the occurrence or levels of forced displacement, and only weak evidence of displaced congregating in larger numbers around peacekeeping locations. The paper ends by arguing that the theoretical argument provided may still be valid, but that an effect was not feasible to identify in South Sudan where the peacekeeping mission – despite its comparatively large numbers – lacks credible deterrent capacity.

In the face of the repeated failure of international peacebuilding to build peace, one strand of the literature argues that failure can only be understood by 'zooming in' – by focusing on peacebuilders, the local populations they purport to help, and the relationship between them. This article draws on the insights of this literature to argue that international peacebuilding should be understood as an instance of structural injustice. Studies of the encounter between international interveners and local populations tend to focus on the differences between these groups and their problematic relationship. I argue that 'zooming in' reveals much more than the differences between interveners and locals: it uncovers how their relationship presents parallels and similarities with others, such as the relation between colonizers and colonized. The relationship between internationals and locals is problematic not because of each group's characteristics and their difference, but because of the social positions they relate from. These hierarchical social positions give some groups the power to intervene in the lives of others. The article argues that the encounter between internationals and locals should be 'de-exoticized' and that hierarchy, rather than difference, should be at the centre of the critical peacebuilding literature.