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While the extant literature has highlighted the importance of UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs) in addressing commitment problems in civil wars, actor fragmentation presents additional challenges for conflict resolution. A higher number of competing actors not only worsens coordination problems but also aggravates the risk of opposition to a peace process, generating an environment prone to spoiler violence. This article argues that UN interventions matter more when commitment and coordination problems are worse, which corresponds to known traits of fragmented conflicts. Using data on civil conflict duration and intensity, we present evidence that UN PKOs are effective at mitigating adverse impacts of fragmentation. Fragmented conflicts are both longer and deadlier when the UN is not involved to support a peace process, while UN peacekeeping mitigates the effects of fragmentation.

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.

This article contributes to refining our understanding of how a robust Protection of Civilians mandate in peacekeeping missions may have unintended and harmful consequences for key local actors involved. It focuses specifically on local mission staff employed to collect vital data on human rights abuses, taking the example of the hybrid UN-African Union (AU) peacekeeping mission in Darfur, UNAMID. It further explores how the UN system lacks a clear policy or automatically built-in mechanisms to prevent potential harm to those on whose local knowledge it relies. While predominately based on interview data with a small number of former UNAMID frontline human rights data-collectors from Darfur, the dynamics unveiled speak to more general issues when interrogating protection of civilians as the central pillar of UN peacekeeping missions, also beyond scenarios where the government of a host-state is hostile to the mission. The article concludes that the protection of local staff should feature prominently in any mission's approach, including an active commitment to withdraw staff from their positions if their security is threatened or compromised.

What makes a UN member state contribute more peacekeepers to be deployed in hostile environments and place their troops at risk? A significant amount of scholarly research explores the need for, and effectiveness of, UN peacekeeping in conflict zones around the world. Few studies examine the factors that determine the size of peacekeeping contributions, and these studies do not focus on the role of neoliberal institutions. This study examines the relationship between the degree of linkages in neoliberal institutions and the size of peacekeeping contributions. I argue that the degree of linkages in neoliberal international institutions creates structural conditions that facilitate the information gathering process on the preferences and needs of UN member states and incentivize these states to contribute more peacekeeping troops. In my analysis of UN peacekeeping troop contributions data for all countries between 1990 and 2015, I find that the degree of neoliberal institutional linkages is the most consistent predictor of a UN member state's size of peacekeeping contributions.

This article documents humanitarian action undertaken by Chinese troops in six UN peacekeeping missions and shows that Chinese peacekeepers engaged in very similar types of humanitarian action regardless of their unit type or mission area. The patterns in their behaviour strongly suggest that their activities constitute a humanitarian program that is coordinated systematically at the level of China's national military organization. Potential explanations for the humanitarianism of Chinese peacekeepers include China's broader foreign policy objectives, its internal model of civil–military relations, the 'developmental peace' theory of peacekeeping and domestic public relations in China. Despite the UN's official policy of discouraging humanitarian action by military actors, national contingents can still implement humanitarian tactics largely due to the decentralized and fragmented command and control structure of UN peacekeeping missions. More broadly, such failure to protect the humanitarian space speaks to shortcomings of the current system of UN peacekeeping. Overall, closer attention to the role of national military doctrines and national military cultures would add significantly to our understanding of the behaviour of UN peacekeepers.

International organizations' ability to respond promptly to crises is essential for their effectiveness and legitimacy. For the UN, which sends peacekeeping missions to some of the world's most difficult conflicts, responsiveness can save lives and protect peace. Very often, however, the UN fails to deploy peacekeepers rapidly. Lacking a standing army, the UN relies on its member states to provide troops for peacekeeping operations. In the first systematic study of the determinants of deployment speed in UN peacekeeping, we theorize that this speed hinges on the incentives, capabilities, and constraints of the troop-contributing countries. Using duration modeling, we analyze novel data on the deployment speed in 28 peacekeeping operations between 1991 and 2015. Our data reveal three principal findings: All else equal, countries that depend on peacekeeping reimbursements by the UN, are exposed to negative externalities from a particular conflict, or lack parliamentary constraints on sending troops abroad deploy more swiftly than others. By underlining how member state characteristics affect aggregate outcomes, these findings have important implications for research on the effectiveness of UN peacekeeping, troop contribution dynamics, and rapid deployment initiatives.

While there has been a long engagement with the impact of time on peacebuilding policies and practice, this engagement has to date focused predominately on issues of short- versus long-term initiatives, and of waning donor support for such initiatives. More recently, the critical peacebuilding turn has focused attention on the politics of the everyday as being essential to emancipatory endeavours enacted through localisation. Yet despite this, time itself has not been the subject of analysis, and the politics of time have not been integrated into the study of peacebuilding. This article, drawing both on historical institutionalist and on critical international studies analyses of temporality, provides a framework for analysing the impacts of time on the potential to achieve emancipatory peace. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Cambodia, this article asserts that a focus on Policy Time, Liberal Political Time, and Intergenerational Time highlights how peacebuilding initiatives are framed by disparate timescapes that limit the visibility of local chronopolitics, and that this in turn restricts local empowerment and resistances.

The EU seeks extensive partnership with other international organizations when it comes to security challenges. This is puzzling as the EU relies for its resources mostly on its member states. The relations between the EU and other international organizations have thoroughly been studied, yet scholars rarely question the actual rationale for partnership. We start from resource dependency theory which explains that almost all organizations are dependent on the resources of their partners. Yet we extend this theory by distinguishing between macro, meso and micro-level dependencies. To illustrate resource dependencies between the EU and other international organizations, we analyse EU's peacebuilding policies in Kosovo, Mali and Armenia. By accounting for macro- and micro-level dependencies we provide a more holistic perspective than conventional meso-level explanations. Our contribution is therefore to expand the scope of the resource dependency theory and provide a framework to analyse dependencies between the EU and other international organizations.

Brazil has been the largest troop contributor and provided all force commanders to the UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH, 2004–2017). As the military embraced a leading role in UN peacekeeping's turn towards peace-enforcement, Brazil's governments have increasingly relied on soldiers in public security – occasionally even portraying these operations as a sort of 'peacekeeping at home'. Yet how has Brazil's participation in MINUSTAH affected internal military operations? I argue that narratives of the military's effectiveness in Haiti have been used to legitimise the growing scope of internal public security missions. Drawing on data from a questionnaire-based survey, interviews and focus groups with soldiers and officers, this paper argues that the experience in Haiti has fuelled troops' demands for rules of engagement that resemble those in UN peacekeeping. Given the armed forces' increasing bargaining power in Brazil's politics, the military leadership has been able to successfully lobby in favour of changing parts of the legal framework for internal operations. Lessons from the 'robust turn' have been used to promote more coercive internal missions of Brazil's armed forces. Yet it is impossible to fully reconcile the content of the military's demands with the rule of law in a democracy.

Private military and security companies (PMSCs) are increasingly contracted to provide security in international peacekeeping missions. Yet, we know very little about the practical implications of this development. How do PMSCs reinforce and shape security management within UN peacekeeping operations, and what are the consequences for UN missions and their host populations? To answer these questions, we explore the operational, representative and regulatory security practices in the UN operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO). Our findings show how seemingly uncontroversial, even benign security practices can have unintended negative consequences. Specifically, we observe that the participation of security firms in MONUSCO's security management contributes to three developments: the differentiation of security between staff and locals, the hardening of MONUSCO's security posture, and the perpetuation of insecurity through the emergence of a local security economy. Contracted security is thus involved in reproducing forms of security that are in some ways diametrically opposed to the aims of the mission to protect civilians and facilitate a sustainable peace.

In this article, internationally supported peacebuilding is conceptualized as a cross-cultural relational endeavour, with international and local actors engaged in multiple forms of interactions in a local everyday context. Using a cultural-relational approach, two cases of peacebuilding are presented: Bougainville and Sierra Leone, which are at opposite poles of the spectrum of international-local peacebuilding interaction. Peacebuilding on Bougainville has drawn relatively little attention; the international intervention there was modest and small in size, and locals had considerable control of the peace process. By contrast, Sierra Leone is one of the best-known cases of peacebuilding, with massive external engagement and comprehensive external control. Both cases are considered success stories, but they differ considerably due to the differences in local-international relations. This is explained by focusing on two interrelated core aspects of the local-international interface: building relationships and trust, and security provision. Furthermore, another generally underestimated dimension of peacebuilding is explored, namely culturally different understandings of the spiritual realm and their effects on peacebuilding interventions.

Coherence is a core objective in most multinational interventions and seems of particular relevance to UN peacekeeping missions with their increasing complexity and multidimensionality. Yet, coherence has rarely been studied empirically. We borrow the concept of 'fit' from organizational theory and use it to develop a conceptual framework to study coherence in peacekeeping operations. Fit is the degree of match between what is required by the mandate, on the one hand, and an institutional set-up and the implemented practices, on the other. We identify three relevant dimensions of fit to study coherence: strategic and organizational, cultural and human and operational fit. Our empirical material focuses on the UN mission in Mali (MINUSMA) and in particular on the interplay between the intelligence components and the rest of the mission. We draw upon a large empirical dataset containing over 120 semi-structured interviews, field observations and participation in pre-deployment exercises and evaluation sessions. Our empirical analysis suggests that low level of fit across several dimensions leads to inertial and widespread frictions in the practice of peacekeeping and could potentially undermine peacekeeping effectiveness. Building on existing scholarship on micro-level approaches to peacekeeping, we hope to further the debate on organizational dynamics within peace operations.

International peacebuilding is no longer dominated by Western actors and their liberal peace framework, neither there is a full-fledged alternative formulated by emerging peacebuilding actors. In this paper, I first establish the relationship between the liminality of emerging powers and their mimicry of the liberal peace. Secondly, I distinguish three forms of mimicry in peacebuilding that stem from emerging power liminality: a discursive mimicry, a complete mimicry and a substantive mimicry. In the case of the discursive mimicry, there is a liberal peacebuilding discourse which is rarely substantiated with policies. The complete mimicry is when both the liberal discourse and the policies are mimicked, and the substantive mimicry is a genuine adaptation of the liberal peacebuilding by the emerging power. The case of Turkish peacebuilding is analysed to illustrate the tripartite distinction. I demonstrate that Turkey mimics solely the discourse of the democratic peace thesis, while there is a complete mimicry of the Western model in security sector reform. However, the Turkish civil society peacebuilding and Turkey's approach to economic development substantively mimic their liberal peace counterparts. This article contributes to the critical literature on liberal peacebuilding by identifying the different forms of emerging actors' mimicry of the liberal peace.

Brazil's role in UN peacekeeping operations has been subject to increasing attention from academics and policy makers alike. While some authors praise Brazil's engagement in the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) as a case of innovative South-South cooperation, others accuse Brazil of using Haiti as a 'testing ground' for repressive anti-gang tactics that have subsequently been introduced at home. This article challenges these two dominant views on Brazil's role in Haiti. Based on a period of six months of fieldwork in Port-au-Prince and interviews with key Brazilian actors, the article draws a parallel between MINUSTAH's military raids in gang-ruled neighbourhoods coupled with police reform in Haiti, on one hand, and the Pacifying Police Units (Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora) plus the accompanying UPP Social in Rio de Janeiro, on the other hand. It is argued that Brazil's peacekeeping strategy, at home and abroad, is a mix of coercive and cooperative measures reminiscent of counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics already employed during the French colonial war in Algeria. Moreover, it is shown that policing techniques borrowed from the US are employed to ease the tension between carrots and sticks, notably so in the urban environment in which Brazilian peacekeeping is taking place.

The assumption that peacekeeping requires soldiers carrying weapons is widespread; 35 years of successful peacekeeping by unarmed civilians is often overlooked. The original definition of peacekeeping is being confused with peace enforcement and peace operations. Limited interest has led to underfunding of unarmed civilian peacekeeping (UCP) with fewer resources for both study and praxis. Marginalization of civilian peacekeeping has restricted the options for complex interventions; this reduced vision of peacekeeping is open to challenge in the light of evidence from the field. This paper first examines what is meant by peacekeeping and UCP. The relationship of UCP to nonviolence, feminism, and peace studies is considered. The constraints and limits of peacekeeping by armed military personnel during, or after, violent conflict are outlined. The core tasks of peacekeeping are analysed, and evidence from the field is presented to show that these core tasks can be (and have been) successfully undertaken by unarmed civilians for three decades, world-wide. The argument that armed military personnel are necessary, even essential, for peacekeeping is not supported by the evidence of civilian success in undertaking the core tasks. The paper ends with conclusions and a call for a new paradigm for peacekeeping.