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Does the introduction of UN forces impact terrorism? We argue that at least initially, UN peacekeeping missions may significantly shift the local conflict bargaining process, creating incentives for terrorist and insurgent groups to increase their attacks against civilians. UN missions create a symbolic endpoint to initial negotiations, alter the balance of power between combatants, and may change the relationship between local combatants and the civilian population they rely on for support. We test this argument using monthly data from 12 African countries, analyzing the risk of terrorism at the local level. We find that the introduction of UN forces in an area significantly increases the short-term risk of terrorism, but longer missions in the country reduce this risk.

While the evolving nature and proliferation of UN peacekeeping operations in the post-Cold War period is well documented, we know less about how personnel are recruited for these missions. Furthermore, recent developments have rendered existing supply-side explanations for troop contributions less convincing. The increasing demand for personnel, along with stagnant UN reimbursement rates and the rising costs of participation that began during the 1990s, mean that it is less attractive than ever for developing countries to offer their own troops to what have become increasingly ambitious operations. Yet, we see a large pool of developing countries continuing to do so. To address this puzzle, we argue that UN member states with strong preferences for establishing peacekeeping missions have begun using foreign aid as an inducement to help potential contributors overcome the collective action problem inherent in multilateral peacekeeping operations. We uncover strong empirical evidence that these 'pivotal states' strategically allocate foreign aid to persuade contributing states to boost their contributions, and also to ensure that these missions continue to be staffed and maintained as costs rise, particularly during the post-1999 period. We also find that states are responsive to these financial inducements: foreign aid increases both the likelihood of contributing personnel and the size of a state's contribution. Theoretically, this article advances the scholarly understanding of international organizations and cooperation by illuminating an informal, extra-organizational strategy by which IOs can facilitate cooperation.

In this article, we introduce the Geocoded Peacekeeping Operations (Geo-PKO) dataset, which presents new data on subnational peacekeeping deployment for all UN missions to Africa, 1994-2014. The Geo-PKO dataset is the most comprehensive dataset of its kind and enables scholars to address new questions about peacekeeping operations and their effects by exploring variations in peacekeeping at the subnational level. The dataset offers information on several key features of peacekeeping deployment at the local level, such as data on the size of deployments and how these vary over time, as well as information on the location of mission headquarters, the type of peacekeepers deployed, and which troop-contributing countries deploy to each location. This article describes the data collection process and illustrates some of the many utilities of this dataset for the scholarly community. For example, we show that peacekeeping troops are able to reduce battle-related violence in areas with high road density, suggesting that peacekeepers' ability to project their power is stronger when they can increase their reach and more easily patrol larger territories. Hence, our data can fruitfully be combined with information such as socio-economic, geographical or demographic characteristics, to further explore how peacekeeping operations can contribute to peace and security in the areas where they operate. By providing fine-grained data on the location of peacekeepers across time and space, the Geo-PKO dataset should help facilitate important inquires that can push the research agenda on peacekeeping forward.

Existing research shows that peace after civil wars is more stable with peacekeepers present. Yet, violence persists in many postwar contexts, and although postwar violence is often strategic and closely linked to the faultlines of the preceding war, we know little about the impact of peacekeepers on such violence. What we know, moreover, focuses on the former combatants, while this study shows that the majority of deaths in postwar violence are inflicted by other armed actors. This is a challenge for peacekeepers who – for mandate or capacity reasons – usually focus on the warring parties. I argue that the impact of peacekeepers on postwar violence hinges on the extent to which they fill a public security gap after war, since responsibility for violence not covered by a mission's mandate lies with the often dysfunctional security agencies of the state. To test this I use a novel spatial approach to generate data that captures the manifold manifestations of violence across different postwar contexts. I find that only UN police – with their broader effect on public security – mitigate postwar violence generally. UN troops have some impact on civilian targeting by former combatants but no such effect could be identified for violence by other armed actors. The findings highlight the importance of peacekeeping police at a time when the modus operandi and capacity of UN police have been questioned, but also the importance of accounting for a multitude of violent actors when analysing the impact of international interventions more generally.

The International Relations (IR) literature has strongly criticised the invasive and top-down nature of liberal peace, facilitating a reinterpretation of the practice of international intervention in conflict-affected societies. Today, sustaining peace policy approaches advance longer-term missions, give a secondary role to external practitioners, and increasingly accept risks and failures. What is striking is that even when these policy discourses hold out the promise of liberating peacebuilding from dominant and top-down models of liberal intervention, the mood in the field is one of despair. By drawing on John Dewey's work on pragmatism and interviewing practitioners in Bosnia and Kosovo, the article reflects on the morass practitioners find themselves, diagnoses the source of the frustrations, and anticipates the direction of sustaining peace. Pragmatism adumbrates the idea of 'peacebuilding without peace', encouraging practitioners to experiment, give primacy to their doings and explore this world without hope of success and dreams of otherworldliness.

The mixed record on civil war termination shows that it is a difficult task, one fraught with uncertainty and risk. Gaining consent for peacekeeping is one strategy policymakers and scholars forward to reduce these concerns. Formal and informal work argues that allowing peacekeeping serves as a costly signal of peaceful intentions; however, these models treat peacekeeping costs as exogenous. I argue that peacekeeping costs have an endogenous element and use consent for peacekeeping missions as a proxy measure. Three conclusions are evident. It is difficult to determine whether belligerents are insincere actors in a peace process or merely distrustful, but consent can tell us whether a ceasefire is precarious and therefore more likely to fail; peacekeeping is difficult but meaningful under some conditions, and reliable information can be taken from negotiating, not just war-fighting. These results qualify the extent to which peacekeeping, with its changing emphasis on consent, can improve its outcomes.

The maintenance and/or achievement of security is of paramount importance within settings recovering from armed conflict; however existing studies in the field of peacebuilding do not sufficiently explore how various processes undertaken within peacebuilding programming result in different types of security outcomes at the individual and community level. In this article, I develop a novel conceptual framework for analyzing "micro-level" security risks and benefits of peacebuilding processes, through an adapted version of Johan Galtung's work on direct and structural violence. For the purposes of this article, the framework is applied in the context of "local" transitional justice (TJ) processes used in the aftermath of armed conflict, for which advocacy and implementation has increased in the recent past. Relying on a social psychological definition of security, I disaggregate components of direct and structural violence and use illustrative examples from existing empirical studies about the effects of local TJ processes in various settings to demonstrate ways in which these types of violence may be perpetuated, or initiated in new forms through these processes, thus posing security risks. The framework is further developed through the elucidation of factors that may help to repair the consequences of direct and structural violence and/or hinder the likelihood of their repetition, thematically conceptualized as physical and psychological welfare and social justice (respective to direct and structural violence) that I suggest link to security benefits. The framework intends to provide new perspectives on understanding how peacebuilding processes may both promote and prevent security from being realized at the local level following armed conflict.

As one of the most conflict prone regions, the importance of research focusing on peacebuilding on the African continent cannot be over-emphasized. Since the end of the colonial rule, the development of peace and security context in the African continent has been influenced by a specific agenda linked with the removal of the imperial forces. The peace and security narratives have highlighted the need for "African solutions for African problems" with a reference to African sovereignty and ownership of peace and security issues on the continent. At the same time, peace interventions by African states have proven to be no less controversial than international alternatives. Such contemporary contradictions in peacebuilding context in Africa highlight the need to analyze the notion of African peacebuilding, the discussions around peacebuilding activities on the continent and elaborate how the topic is addressed in current discussions. With the use of narrative analysis, this thesis seeks to contribute to this need by analyzing how experts of peacebuilding produce information about the challenges, prospects and future trends of peacebuilding efforts in Africa. The research aims to answer what kind(s) of narrative(s) about peacebuilding in Africa is produced by the Kujenga Amani ('building peace' in Swahili) podcast of the African Peacebuilding Network of the Social Science Research Council. Moreover, this thesis seeks to contribute to the discussion on how information is produced and how the production of certain narratives about peacebuilding in Africa from certain positions (re)shape the realities they reflect. The resulting narratives are the needy Africa -narrative, African first -narrative and real peace is local but liberal -narrative. The first two narratives answer how the African is narrated through the peacebuilding in Africa and the last narrative what kind of peace is narrated through peacebuilding in Africa. The results create a paradox where the 'African' perspectives, 'African' ownership and 'local' peacebuilding are promoted as a critique to the failures of liberal peace while at the same time, the ideals of peace and peacebuilding in Africa are connected to the liberal peace theory. The same contradiction of reasoning the current state of peacebuilding in Africa is present in all three narratives. This thesis concludes that the widespread discourse of 'African peacebuilding' and the promotion of 'local' and 'African' approaches to peacebuilding seems to create a picture of, as if there would be, agreed understanding of both the content and meaning of these concepts as well as the consequences of creating policies which reflects a certain understanding of the 'African'. In the light of this thesis however, such consensus over the concepts remains to be defined, which sets both hindrances of developing efficient and adaptable peacebuilding approaches and increases the risk of misusage of the concepts to cover other motives and agendas. This thesis concludes by stating that the concept of 'African peacebuilding' needs to be further evaluated and its contextual usages and motives assessed in order to avoid using the term just as a rhetorical façade. Furthermore, it introduces an idea of a needs-based peacebuilding approach, which moves beyond pre-defined conceptual categorizations exposed from the outside that produce unnecessary distinctions between liberal, local and African and instead focus on the genuine engagement of the local actors and their context specific needs.

This dissertation analyzes the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) as a peacemaking tool in conflicts around climate change for Inuit in Nunavut/ Canada and Greenland. Climate change, a form of colonialism, exposes Inuit to conditions of structural violence. Processes of decolonization are needed for conflict transformation (CT). The question of whether the ICC is an agent of peacemaking was approached from two perspectives: the ICC/ international perspectives and the community/ local perspectives. This qualitative research is aligned with an Inuit research paradigm that is based on Inuit knowledge. It involved observation, content analysis, and quantitative surveys. The main research method was conversation (with ICC representatives from Greenland and Canada and with local Inuit from Maniitsoq/ Greenland and Panniqtuuq/ Nunavut). Decolonization as both processes of assimilation into the dominant structure and processes of resistance against the dominant structure is reflected in the Hybrid Peace model that incorporates local/ Indigenous conflict resolution approaches with imported/ Western peacemaking tools. This study's first key finding is that the ICC is an agent of Hybrid Peacemaking for Inuit in conflicts related to climate change because it combines pre-contact Inuit forms of conflict resolution rooted in Inuit knowledge (e.g. working collaboratively toward a common goal, pragmatism, conflict avoidance, and public conflict resolution) with typical Western conflict resolution mechanisms (e.g. establishing a non-governmental organization, dealing with political decision-makers, and actively co-creating the international political level to enhance the voice of Inuit). The second key finding is that there is a rich array of Everyday Peacemaking processes in both communities, wherein local Inuit have realized innovative and creative ways of coping with their daily challenges by sharing time with each other, developing and maintaining relationships, active listening, entertaining, and healing by being in nature. ...

This thesis explores the shift of focus in peacebuilding projects that has been funded by UN Peacebuilding Fund (PBF) in Kyrgyzstan. After the ethnic violence in 2010, UN was invited to perform peacebuilding in the country. This was funded through the PBF, a branch of the so- called UN Peacebuilding Architecture. However, in 2017 the peacebuilding projects shifted focus and started doing Prevention of Violent Extremism (PVE). The problem in Kyrgyzstan was now represented as violent extremism. Fionnuala Ní Aoláin (2016:290) has described the inclusion of anti-terrorism into peacebuilding and security debates as a "classic 'mission creep'". I found a development of this 'mission creep' in the peacebuilding projects in Kyrgyzstan. By applying the What is the Problem Represented to Be? method, the representation of what was presented as 'unpeaceful', 'the road to peace' and 'peace' was analyzed in two Peacebuilding Priority Plans (PPP). Then the genealogy of these representations was traced through 34 project description documents, spanning over eight years. Moreover, I argued that the peacebuilding could be viewed as a dispositif (apparatus) that was responding to an "urgent need" in Kyrgyzstan. I found that the 'urgent need' shifts from ethnic violence to violent extremism, yet much of the rationale stay the same. The 'unpeaceful' described, is fundamentally Kyrgyzstan's failure to be a liberal democratic state with liberal institutions, citizens, and values. There is also a strong theme of describing a lack of 'civic-ness' as the problem in Kyrgyzstan. This 'civic- ness' has a soviet tradition in Kyrgyzstan but shows signs in my data of being reinterpreted into a liberal framework. However, the inclusion of PVE into the peacebuilding dispositif has gradually led to an inclusion of security concerns that is in a tension with human rights. Moreover, the inclusion of PVE introduced a high level of ambiguity and uncertainty that affects the legitimacy of the activities. I conclude that the 'mission creep' of PVE into the peacebuilding dispositif is problematic. This is especially true in a sensitive context like in Kyrgyzstan, where the marginalized minority is now being pointed out by the state as making up the larger part of Foreign Terrorist Fighters.

Women war veterans in South Sudan were active in armed conflicts at the front as well as in peacebuilding efforts in their home communities. In 2000, the United Nation Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) was adapted to include women with their unique conflict experiences and needs in decision-making positions in conflict resolution. Twenty years later, this thesis explores how efforts linked to UNSCR 1325 are implemented in the case study of South Sudanese women war veterans. I explore factors within the Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programme which facilitated or hampered benefits for former women soldiers in the country, contributed to or restrained their meaningful participation in peace processes, and how their contributions to combat and peace have been acknowledged. To answer the research questions, eighteen qualitative interviews were conducted. Ten South Sudanese women war veterans who had participated in DDR and local peace processes as well as eight WPS experts were interviewed. In this process, I identified the following factors which deprived women from benefits intended by the DDR programme: lacking security at DDR sites, insufficient theoretical training, culturally insensitive childcare services, the prevention of a stable income and the failure to foster basic security in South Sudan. The thesis concluded that achievements by women war veterans in combat and peacebuilding received only little attention as they continue to be side-lined in the national peace process. By applying the Feminist Peace and Conflict Theory (FPCT) in the analysis, I identified patriarchal structures and the hierarchical order in the South Sudanese society as well as the neoliberal approach in international peacebuilding as potential root causes for the lacking implementation of UNSCR 1325 on the ground. ; NORAD ; M-DS

The main goal of the article is to analyze the main problems of information support for the UN peacekeeping. Over the past decades, leading political leaders and experts have always paid very serious attention to information problems. Among foreign researchers, substantiating the role of information in the world, it is necessary to single out the works of A. Gore, Z. Brzezinski, M. Makluhan, A. Toffler and others. The UN Secretaries-General continue to pay great attention to information development, among which they made a special contribution to the information support of peacekeeping B. Gali and K. Annan. Among Ukrainian scientists exploring the role of information, information relations and the role of international organizations in them, I would like to highlight Pocheptsov G. G., Zernetskaya O. V., Litvinenko A. V. and Makarenko E. A. Among the works of Ukrainian researchers regarding the UN peacekeeping work, it is worth noting the work of V. S. Brus, L. I. Skorokhod and Y. S. Skorokhod and others. In the study of the UN information system, systemic and analytical methods were used. The historical approach allowed us to trace the evolution of UN activities in the field of information support for peacekeeping. The article analyzes the problems of information support for UN peacekeeping. The main elements of the concept of peacekeeping operations are highlighted. The foundations of the theory and practice of UN activities in the field of peacekeeping and its information support are considered. The main UN units involved in peacekeeping operations and their cooperation in the information sphere are analyzed. Conclusions have been made regarding the future of UN peacekeeping, which will depend on the Organization's ability to ensure the unity of objectives of its various departments, funds and programs, allow it to act in concert and use its resources in strategically important areas.

Introduction -- Srebrenica and Rwanda and the legal aftermath -- Omission liability in domestic law -- Scope for omission liability under international law? -- The peacekeeping commander as bystander : a moral obligation to act? -- The lege ferenda perspective on the legal framework of peacekeeping -- Conclusion.

By the end of 2008, the government of the state of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, established Peacekeeping Police Units (UPP) at certain favelas (slums). This pacification program aimed at occupying permanently those slums in Rio, promoting security and restoring bonds of trust between citizens and the police. This research's objective is to study the Peacekeeping Police Units narrative dynamics from the mediated point of view of the local newspaper, O Globo. Considering both real, and dynamic media narrative dimensions, we question the influence its reporting about the subject might have had in directing our attention, as well as our political demands. Putting it more generally, we question what has been said in a certain press narrative about the society which it mirrors. Having this framework in mind, we analyse the communication setting as we highlight the activity of reciprocal comprehension that makes it possible. It is then required to examine the media as a sphere of society as it stands in dialogue with other spheres of society and could alter the way we conceive social practices and society itself. The way O Globo has construed its narrative around the pacification project, between 2010 and 2018 : that is what this research tries to understand, weaving together the themes of poverty, insecurity, inequality, and fear. In a democracy, the media is the guarantee of the circulation of opinions, helping the political debate. Our focus is to analyse the way in which the discourse on insecurity, fear, and violence became present to the carioca reality through O Globo's coverage of the Peacekeeping Police Units. ; À la fin de l'année 2008, le gouvernement de l'État de Rio de Janeiro créa dans certaines favelas de la ville le projet des Unités de Police Pacificatrice, connu sous l'acronyme UPP. L'objectif de ce programme de pacification était d'occuper en permanence les bidonvilles de Rio afin de les sécuriser et de rétablir les liens de confiance entre les habitants et les policiers. L'objectif de cette recherche ...

Educational institutions' role is not limited to technology's progression or improvement in their social and economic values but also is to teach the lesson of harmony, humbleness, tolerance, equality, and justice. Educational institutions are not merely building individuals to strengthen society and eradicate the negativities but also to build a peaceful society. Pakistan's educational system is a complex one that does not merely involve government and private schools; there are also many registered or unregistered madrassas. Lack of regulation of the curriculum and monitoring of the activities of madrasas is a matter of concern. Terrorism, too, is linked to such madrasas, which contradicts and nullifies educational institutions' purpose and aim of building a peaceful society. The study applied the functionalism theoretical assumptions and employed Qualitative Document Analysis (QDA) based on the previous studies review of literature on educational institutions' role in building peaceful societies to figure out the gap and develop new findings. The study suggests committing the national educational system, with it, the school and its teachers so that from their work, they contribute towards building peace in society.