Suchergebnisse

Do internationally-backed peace operations and state-building efforts leave legacies of sustainable peace and viable states?1 To answer this question – which lies at the heart of the study and practice of multidimensional peacekeeping and peacebuilding – we need to document conditions that prevail after peace operations have ended, and consider the extent to which those conditions are the consequences of international interventions. That is, to understand the lasting impact of peace operations, we need to examine what happens after missions close. While this may seem intuitive, scholars and practitioners have made surprisingly few efforts to systematically document and explain conditions on the ground in former host states after peace missions have exited. In this forum of nine short contributions, we aim to partly remedy that empirical gap and, in so doing, generate debate and discussion about the legacies of peace operations. This introductory piece opens the forum by offering a brief overview of existing evaluations of peace(keeping) operations, highlighting the common tendency of analysts, scholars, and assessors to focus on the short-term, rather than lasting, impacts of interventions. I then identify and discuss three 'types' of legacy after peacekeepers exit and missions close, illustrating each by making reference to examples drawn from the contributions that follow.

Previous research has suggested that leaders of democratic regimes are particularly willing to contribute troops to United Nations peacekeeping operations because backing 'liberal' peacekeeping allows them to support the diffusion of liberal institutions. However, evidence used to sustain this argument is based on contribution patterns during the decade of peacekeeping that followed the Cold War. In this article, we argue that there has been a reversal in the relative willingness of democratic and non-democratic governments to provide the UN with peacekeepers since then. Specifically, we propose that the introduction of more 'robust' forms of peacekeeping during the '90s has rendered democratic governments reluctant to contribute large numbers of peacekeepers to UN operations because elected leaders are now concerned that voters may object to the deployment of national troops to high-risk humanitarian missions in which there is no clear national interest. By contrast, non-democratic leaders partly discount public opinion because they are less reliant on popular support to retain power. Thus, when non-democrats see that contributing troops to UN peacekeeping will bring them reputational and/or resource benefits, they are willing to contribute peacekeepers -- and on a large scale. We test our claims quantitatively. We find that, since the 1990s, democratic governments have remained more likely than non-democrats to contribute some troops to UN peacekeeping operations, but non-democratic governments have been more likely to make large-scale contributions. We also find that governments have been especially reluctant to make sizable contributions to peacekeeping when elections have been on the horizon.

'Peace' and (violent) 'conflict' are often seen as conceptual mirror images of one another; peace is the absence of conflict, and conflict is the absence of peace. Given this conceptual interdependence, some scholars see that the study of war/making and the study of peace/making are complementary – or even functionally identical – academic projects. Others, however, see that studies of violence and warmaking are antithetic to studies of peace and peacemaking. The six contributions to this JoGSS Forum explore these contrasting perspectives, with a view to assessing the 'state of the discipline' of peace and conflict studies (and cognate disciplines, such as security studies). The introduction offers provocations for debate. The two contributions that follow consider connections and disconnections between the study of conflict and studies of post-conflict peacebuilding and transitional justice, respectively. The next two contributions focus on areas of investigation that do not fit neatly into either the 'peace' or 'conflict' categories – Gender, and Nonviolence – and the authors explore how studies of these topics might create bridges between scholarship on peace and studies of violent conflict. The concluding contribution argues that 'mainstream' peace and conflict research has come to be dominated by positivist treatments of war and violence, and it draws attention to alternate approaches that have the potential to transform and ameliorate social relations.

Scholars in the field of "peace and conflict studies" have long worried that their discipline is divided -- between studies of war and warmaking, and studies of peace and peacemaking. However, empirical research into the existence, extent, and nature of such a division is scarce. We remedy this, by addressing two questions: 1) How is work in the field of peace and conflict studies distributed between its two nominal pillars: "peace" and (violent) "conflict"? 2) To what extent is there communication and exchange between the two sets of studies? Making use of a unique combination of methods, we find that studies of violence hold a dominant position in the field, although there is also a sizable body of work that explores topics of peace, understood as conflict prevention and/or response. That said, we find limited evidence of intellectual exchange between studies of war/making and peace/making. We also find evidence of gendered, regional, and methodological divides. We argue that such schisms may be preventing scholars of peace and conflict from collectively realizing the founding ontological goal of their discipline, which was to understand the causes of war in order to contribute to an understanding of how conflict can be managed peacefully.

Peacekeeping and development assistance are two of the United Nations' (UN) defining activities. While there have been extensive studies of UN engagement in each of these areas, respectively, less attention has been given to the relationship between peacekeeping and development. We examine that relationship in this article. We do so by first considering whether concepts and principles that underpin peacekeeping and development cohere. We then combine original quantitative data with qualitative analyses in order to document the degree to which development goals and activities have been incorporated into UN peacekeeping operations since their inception over 70 years ago. While we observe a steady increase in the level of engagement of peacekeeping with development over time, we argue that short-term security goals have been prioritized over longer-term development objectives in a number of recent UN peacekeeping operations, as peacekeepers have been deployed to contexts of ongoing conflict.