Jacob D. Kathman

United Nations Peacekeeping and Civilian Protection in Civil War

Does United Nations peacekeeping protect civilians in civil war? Civilian protection is a primary purpose of UN peacekeeping, yet there is little systematic evidence for whether peacekeeping prevents civilian deaths. We propose that UN peacekeeping can protect civilians if missions are adequately composed of military troops and police in large numbers. Using unique monthly data on the number and type of UN personnel contributed to peacekeeping operations, along with monthly data on civilian deaths from 1991 to 2008 in armed conflicts in Africa, we find that as the UN commits more military and police forces to a peacekeeping mission, fewer civilians are targeted with violence. The effect is substantial - the analyses show that, on average, deploying several thousand troops and several hundred police dramatically reduces civilian killings. We conclude that although the UN is often criticized for its failures, UN peacekeeping is an effective mechanism of civilian protection.

Beyond Keeping Peace: United Nations Effectiveness in the Midst of Fighting

While United Nations peacekeeping missions were created to keep peace and perform post-conflict activities, since the end of the Cold War peacekeepers are more often deployed to active conflicts. Yet, we know little about their ability to manage ongoing violence. This article provides the first broad empirical examination of UN peacekeeping effectiveness in reducing battlefield violence in civil wars. We analyze how the number of UN peacekeeping personnel deployed influences the amount of battlefield deaths in all civil wars in Africa from 1992 to 2011. The analyses show that increasing numbers of armed military troops are associated with reduced battlefield deaths, while police and observers are not. Considering that the UN is often criticized for ineffectiveness, these results have important implications: if appropriately composed, UN peacekeeping missions reduce violent conflict.

Armed intervention and civilian victimization in intrastate conflicts

Research has begun to examine the relationship between changes in the conflict environment and levels of civilian victimization. We extend this work by examining the effect of external armed intervention on the decisions of governments and insurgent organizations to victimize civilians during civil wars. We theorize that changes in the balance of power in an intrastate conflict influence combatant strategies of violence. As a conflict actor weakens relative to its adversary, it employs increasingly violent tactics toward the civilian population as a means of reshaping the strategic landscape to its benefit. The reason for this is twofold. First, declining capabilities increase resource needs at the moment that extractive capacity is in decline. Second, declining capabilities inhibit control and policing, making less violent means of defection deterrence more difficult. As both resource extraction difficulties and internal threats increase, actors’ incentives for violence against the population increase. To the extent that biased military interventions shift the balance of power between conflict actors, we argue that they alter actor incentives to victimize civilians. Specifically, intervention should reduce the level of violence employed by the supported faction and increase the level employed by the opposed faction. We test these arguments using data on civilian casualties and armed intervention in intrastate conflicts from 1989 to 2005. Our results support our expectations, suggesting that interventions shift the power balance and affect the levels of violence employed by combatants.

United Nations peacekeeping personnel commitments, 1990–2011:

This paper presents new data on personnel commitments to United Nations peacekeeping operations from 1990 to 2011. For every operation during this period, data on the number of deployed troops, police and military observers are coded at the monthly level. Additionally, the number of each personnel type contributed by every UN member state is recorded. These data offer opportunities for testing theories of peacekeeping and conflict processes and present research avenues for which data have hitherto not existed. Herein, I introduce the data and coding processes, present trends, illustrate prospects for research that could benefit from these data and provide an empirical application.

Civil War Diffusion and Regional Motivations for Intervention

Third-party states consider the regional destabilization consequences of civil wars when deciding to intervene. However, previous work implicitly assumes that potential interveners base their intervention decisions solely on their links to the civil war country. This approach is unlikely to reflect the regional concerns of interested parties. When a civil war is increasingly likely to infect its surrounding region, potential interveners with strong interests in those states neighboring the conflict will be more likely to intervene to contain the violence. Thus, relationships outside the civil war state—intervener dyad are causally associated with intervention. To test these arguments, the author accounts for the contagious properties of civil wars and the regional interests of third parties, constructing dynamic measures to represent the contagion threat posed to third party regional interests. Analyses of these measures support the argument that third parties are increasingly likely to intervene as the risk of diffusion increasingly threatens their regional interests.

Managing Threat, Cost, and Incentive to Kill The Short- and Long-Term Effects of Intervention in Mass Killings

How do third-party interventions affect the severity of mass killings? The authors theorize that episodes of mass killing are the consequence of two factors: (1) the threat perceptions of the perpetrators and (2) the cost of implementing genocidal policies relative to other alternatives. To reduce genocidal hostilities, interveners must address these factors. Doing so requires that interveners alter the genocidaire’s expectation of a successful extermination policy, which in turn requires a demonstration of the third party’s resolve. This cannot be achieved immediately upon intervention, and, given the perpetrator’s strategic response to third-party involvement, the authors expect intervention to increase hostilities in the short term. With time, however, the authors contend that the characteristics of impartial interventions offer the greatest opportunity for reducing the violence in the long term. A statistical analysis of the 1955–2005 period supports the theoretical expectations.

Too Much of a Bad Thing? Civilian Victimization and Bargaining in Civil War

While studies of the motives for intentional insurgent violence against civilians are now common, relatively little academic research has focused on the impact of victimization on conflict processes or war outcomes. This article addresses this gap in the literature. Specifically, the authors examine the influence of civilian victimization on bargaining between the regime and insurgents during a civil war. A curvilinear relationship between the level of civilian victimization used by insurgents and the likelihood that conflict ends in negotiated settlement is posited. The probability of settlement is highest for groups that engage in a moderate level of civilian killing but declines at particularly high levels. A competing risk analysis using monthly conflict data on African civil wars between 1989 and 2010 supports this argument.

United Nations peacekeeping dynamics and the duration of post-civil conflict peace

How do the qualities of United Nations peacekeeping operations (PKOs) influence the duration of peace after civil wars? Recent work shows that UN peacekeeping extends the duration of peace. However, this work has only been able to assess whether the presence or absence of UN missions affects post-conflict peace processes. Such analyses offer little in the way of policy prescriptions for planning and structuring PKOs to effectively pursue their goals. By employing fine-grained data on the personnel composition of PKOs, and generating expectations from rationalist bargaining models of civil war, we argue that the number and type of personnel deployed to a PKO influence the UN’s ability guarantee peace by addressing the information and commitment problems that so often lead to the collapse of post-conflict peace. We analyze how the composition of missions influences the duration of peace, finding that, as the number of UN military troops deployed increases, the chance of civil war recurring decreases. However, other personnel types do not have the same effect. We conclude that the effectiveness of post-conflict peacekeeping lies in the ability of PKOs to alleviate commitment problems through the deployment of military troops that are able to defend the peace.

United Nations Bias and Force Commitments in Civil Conflicts

A sizeable literature has been devoted to determining the effectiveness of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping in ending civil wars. Much less work has attempted to improve our understanding of the force-level commitments made by the UN to ongoing conflicts. We systematically address the issue of UN force commitments to civil conflicts and their relation to conflict hostility. Specifically, we posit that UN force deployments are a product of UN Security Council (UNSC) bias in favor of or against individual conflict factions and the battlefield performance of those combatants. To test our arguments, we employ newly collected data on UNSC resolution bias, monthly peacekeeping personnel commitments, and dynamic monthly-conflict conditions for African civil conflicts over the 1991–2008 period. We find that bias in UNSC resolutions is an important determinant of UN troop-deployment levels when its preferred side is sustaining higher casualties. These findings have important implications for peacekeeping effectiveness.