Cultivating cooperation with local populations is necessary for peacekeeping operations to effectively prevent and reduce violence. To accomplish their missions in complex foreign theaters of operation, peacekeepers must solicit information about local political actors, social networks, and violence. Under what conditions do local populations cooperate with United Nations peacekeepers? How does exposure to peacekeeping security activities, relief activities, or abuse – three of the primary ways that local communities experience peacekeepers – affect the likelihood that individuals cooperate with peacekeepers by providing information to them? Using an original survey of a random sample of residents of metropolitan Port-au-Prince, Haiti, we show that people who are exposed to security and relief activities by the United Nations peacekeeping operation, MINUSTAH, have more positive opinions of how effective they are, and are more willing to cooperate with peacekeepers by providing them with information. On the other hand, exposure to abuse dramatically undermines civilian opinions of how effective, benevolent, and abusive peacekeepers are but has a smaller effect on cooperation. These findings present an opportunity and challenge for peacekeepers: if public opinion and cooperation are responsive to peacekeeper policy, then peacekeepers must deliver services and prevent abuse in order to solicit the cooperation that is necessary for mission success.
With more individuals forcibly displaced than any time since the Second World War, forced displacement has emerged as one of the defining political and humanitarian issues of the twenty-first century. In response to the changing nature of displacement, shortcomings of the humanitarian sector, and several ideological shifts that have taken place over the past 20 years, innovation has been embraced as a method to generate new breakthrough solutions for forced displacement. This article takes stock of innovation in forced displacement and charts a path forward for innovation in the sector. We articulate a vision for what forced displacement response should look like in 20 years, detailing an innovation agenda at the individual level, country level, and sector level. Grounded in our lessons learned from leading innovation at the International Rescue Committee, a large humanitarian non-governmental organization (NGO), we outline a set of strategies the sector should adopt to increase the quantity and quality of new innovations, improve the mechanisms to identify cost-effective innovations, and enhance the paths to scale for these innovations.
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