UN peacekeeping was not designed to wield force, and the UN's permanent five (P-5), veto-wielding Security Council members do not want the UN to develop a military capacity. However, since 1999, the UN Security Council has authorized all UN multidimensional peacekeeping operations under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to use force. The mandates do not serve to achieve the council's stated goal of maintaining international peace, nevertheless, the council repeats these mandates in every multidimensional peacekeeping resolution. Neither constructivist accounts of normative change, nor the rational pursuit of stated goals, nor organizational processes can explain the repetition of force mandates. Instead, we draw on insights from small-group psychology to advance a novel theoretical proposition: the repetition of force mandates is the result of “group-preserving” dynamics. The P-5 members strive to maintain their individual and collective status and legitimacy by issuing decisions on the use of force. Once members achieve a decision, the agreement is applied in future rounds of negotiations, even when the solution does not fit the new context and may appear suboptimal, illogical, or even pathological. Privileging the achievement and reproduction of agreement over its content is the essence of group preserving. We present an original data set of all peacekeeping mandates, alongside evidence from dozens of interviews with peacekeeping officials, including representatives of all of the Security Council's permanent members. We assess this original data using expected causal process observations derived from rationalist, constructivist, organizational, and psychological logics.
Women’s greater presence in informal peace processes is often noted in works on peace processes, but there has been little systematic evidence about this involvement. This article is the first systematic study of women’s participation in informal peace processes. We find that women are a significant presence in civil society efforts to forge peace outside formal negotiation rooms: nearly three-fourths of identifiable informal peace processes have clear evidence of involvement from women’s groups. This research indicates that women advocate to be included in formal peace processes, work to legitimate formal negotiations and organize for peace, advocate for the inclusion of women’s rights issues in the final peace agreement, provide information on human rights violations to participants in the formal peace process, engage in local conflict resolution, and advocate as partisans for one or another side in the conflict.
Why do warring parties turn to United Nations peacekeeping and peacemaking even when they think it will fail? Dayal asks why UN peacekeeping survived its early catastrophes in Somalia, Rwanda, and the Balkans, and how this survival should make us reconsider how peacekeeping works. She makes two key arguments: first, she argues the UN's central role in peacemaking and peacekeeping worldwide means UN interventions have structural consequences – what the UN does in one conflict can shift the strategies, outcomes, and options available to negotiating parties in other conflicts. Second, drawing on interviews, archival research, and process-traced peace negotiations in Rwanda and Guatemala, Dayal argues warring parties turn to the UN even when they have little faith in peacekeepers' ability to uphold peace agreements – and even little actual interest in peace – because its involvement in negotiation processes provides vital, unique tactical, symbolic, and post-conflict reconstruction benefits only the UN can offer.
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