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"This book is a long overdue assessment of the role of UN agencies in peacekeeping operations. Special emphasis is given to that most vexed category, 'complex emergencies', involving entrapped or victimized civilian populations and a plethora of UN, national military and NGO actors." "While based on the full range of recent history, the contributions to this volume are forward looking and policy oriented, bringing a hardedged practicality to complex and hitherto under-examined issues."--Jacket

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.

This chapter traces three different conceptions of peaceful change in Western Europe since 1945 and discusses their implications for understanding peaceful change in Western Europe today. The first is Hobbesian Western Europe. Corresponding to a largely realist understanding, Hobbesians view peaceful change in Western Europe as a by-product of balancing and hegemony in the Cold War. The second is Lockean Western Europe. Corresponding to a largely liberal understanding of peaceful change, the Lockean perspective views peaceful change in the region as the product of liberal democratic states responding rationally to the challenges of international anarchy by institutionalizing the region. The third is Kantian Western Europe. Corresponding to a largely constructivist understanding of peaceful change, Kantians view peaceful change in Europe as the construction of a civil league of nations exercising 'normative power Europe' inside and outside the region.

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.

Militaries around the world have benefited from computerized games. Many recruits have been attracted to the military through military-style video games. After recruitment, games and simulations provide an important means of soldier training, including before actual deployments. However, electronic games are lacking for UN peace operations. The multidimensionality of peacekeeping has yet to be simulated in serious games to complement the many games that too often depict a binary battlefield of blue-team versus red-team (or, often in public games, good versus evil). Not only could soldiers benefit from nuanced and ambitious peace-related games, so too could civilian peacekeepers, and the public at large. Peacekeeping gaming should not be merely at the tactical level; the operational and strategic levels can be gamed as well. The decision-making in future peacekeeping simulations could help instruct conflict-resolution and critical thinking skills. The paper posits that such digital games could be an important tool for current and future peacekeepers, both military and civilian. Commercial games could also help educate the public on UN peacekeeping. The paper suggests that the United Nations partner with some member states and perhaps the video game industry to provide in-depth training simulations that mirror the challenges and complexities of modern peace operations.

Do UN peacekeeping forces protect civilians from harm in post-war environments? Current evidence suggests that the answer to this question is yes. But extant research mostly examines this relationship at the country-level and consequently has logical difficulty tracing decreases in civilian fatalities to actual peacekeeper activities. We would have more confidence in the ability of peacekeepers to limit harm and protect non-combatants if the reduction in violence occurred locally where blue helmets were positioned. Using original geocoded data of yearly UN deployments in four Sub-Saharan African conflicts (Sudan, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ivory Coast), we find that peacekeeping units get locally deployed to violent post-war areas and they reduce the level of civilian harm almost immediately. But, in areas without violent clashes between government forces and rebels, we find peacekeeping units more responsive to civilian targeting by rebels, which indicates a reluctance among peacekeepers to confront government forces that target civilians. While host nation consent is crucial for the success of a peacekeeping mission, the findings from this study caution against nurturing illiberal regimes by failing to check government atrocities. The failure to confront government abuse can jeopardize long-term peace and reconciliation.

African political elites have been forthcoming with military support for United Nations peacekeeping missions, contributing substantially to these missions' workforce. Despite their contribution, most studies on peacekeeping omit the African soldier's voice on his experiences of the African war theatre. This article features Ghanaian soldiers' narratives based on their peacekeeping deployments and illuminates how Ghanaian peacekeepers connect their experiences to their home society. In this contribution, I illustrate how Ghanaian soldiers' narratives about peacekeeping experiences are framed as deterring examples for their home society, thus potentially impacting their actions and behaviours. Based on long-term qualitative research embedded with the Ghanaian military, drawing from interviews and informal conversations with peacekeeping veterans and serving military operatives, it is argued that Ghanaian soldiers' narratives of peacekeeping experiences and the collective processes through which these narratives gain currency in the barracks and beyond are informed by introspection in the post-peacekeeping deployment phase

This article studies how when post-conflict justice works alongside a peacekeeping operation following a civil conflict, a two-pronged pacifying effect is activated. While justice mechanisms deal with the factors underlying the conflict, peacekeepers increase the costs for the potential spoilers of the peace while also supporting the justice processes. The findings in this study have important implications for conflict-ridden states attempting to escape the 'conflict trap'.