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After a decade of remarkable growth in the early 2000s, UN peacekeeping has entered a period of sharp contraction. This trend has been especially severe for civilian peacekeepers, who play vital though often neglected roles in UN operations: the number of civilian peacekeeper positions has shrunk by 37% since 2010. This article draws on 164 research interviews and the vast Business literature on downsizing to explore the effects of this contraction of the UN's remaining civilian peacekeepers and the missions that employ them. To conceptualize this impact, the article begins by outlining the contributions a range of civilians – international and national staff, UN Volunteers and contractors – make to UN peacekeeping. Mobilizing insights from Business scholars, it then argues that difficult downsizing processes, high employee commitment, and workforce stratification place UN missions at high risk of 'downsizing survivor syndrome': sustained organizational productivity losses due to decreased individual performance and team coherence. The article then confirms empirically that the nature of UN peacekeeping downsizing, job insecurity, and competition among personnel categories pose profound risks to civilian peacekeeper performance and therefore challenge effective mandate implementation. It also highlights that decreased inter-mission mobility due to the contraction of UN peacekeeping overall exacerbates this effect.

Venue -- the institutional setting in which actors interact -- is a critical but neglected factor in international norm creation. This article brings together constructivist and rationalist insights to explain both why and how venue affects norm creation and how norm leaders choose among different venues. First, it highlights the importance of negotiation alongside persuasion in norm emergence -- the first stage of Finnemore and Sikkink's (1998) norm life cycle -- thus opening space for a full consideration of venues within the constructivist paradigm. Second, it details how venue membership, mandate, output status, rules of procedure/operating procedures and legitimacy affect both the content and the level of international support of an emerging norm. Third, it offers a conceptual framework for understanding how norm leaders choose venues. Finally, it illustrates the impact of venue on norm creation and the dynamics of strategic venue choice by examining venue changes during the movement to ban anti-personnel landmines and the effort to promote international consensus on humanitarian intervention. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Sage Publications Ltd. & ECPR-European Consortium for Political Research.]

Venue — the institutional setting in which actors interact — is a critical but neglected factor in international norm creation. This article brings together constructivist and rationalist insights to explain both why and how venue affects norm creation and how norm leaders choose among different venues. First, it highlights the importance of negotiation alongside persuasion in norm emergence — the first stage of Finnemore and Sikkink's (1998) norm life cycle — thus opening space for a full consideration of venues within the constructivist paradigm. Second, it details how venue membership, mandate, output status, rules of procedure/operating procedures and legitimacy affect both the content and the level of international support of an emerging norm. Third, it offers a conceptual framework for understanding how norm leaders choose venues. Finally, it illustrates the impact of venue on norm creation and the dynamics of strategic venue choice by examining venue changes during the movement to ban anti-personnel landmines and the effort to promote international consensus on humanitarian intervention.

ABSTRACTThree critical trends in the evolving practice of regional peacekeeping in sub-Saharan Africa have undermined the usefulness of the common conceptual dichotomy between regional peacekeeping and UN/global peacekeeping. First, sub-Saharan African states have distanced themselves from long-term autonomous regional peacekeeping, and currently favour explicitly interim missions that are a prelude rather than an alternative to UN peacekeeping. Second, the analytically clear line between regional peacekeeping and the separate sub-Saharan African tradition of solidarity deployments (i.e. military support of embattled governments) has in practice become blurred, and the regional vs global peacekeeping dichotomy not only fails to acknowledge this trend but helps to obscure it. Finally, sub-Saharan African states are increasingly addressing regional conflicts by participating in UN operations deployed in the region. UN peacekeeping has thus emerged as a preferred form of regional peacekeeping in sub-Saharan Africa.