No abstract
Previous research has suggested that leaders of democratic regimes are particularly willing to contribute troops to United Nations peacekeeping operations because backing ‘liberal’ peacekeeping allows them to support the diffusion of liberal institutions. However, evidence used to sustain this argument is based on contribution patterns during the decade of peacekeeping that followed the Cold War. In this article, we argue that there has been a reversal in the relative willingness of democratic and non-democratic governments to provide the United Nations with peacekeepers since then. Specifically, we propose that the introduction of more ‘robust’ forms of peacekeeping during the 1990s has rendered democratic governments reluctant to contribute large numbers of peacekeepers to United Nations operations because elected leaders are now concerned that voters may object to the deployment of national troops to high-risk humanitarian missions in which there is no clear national interest. By contrast, non-democratic leaders partly discount public opinion because they are less reliant on popular support to retain power. Thus, when non-democrats see that contributing troops to United Nations peacekeeping will bring them reputational and/or resource benefits, they are willing to contribute peacekeepers — and on a large scale. We test our claims quantitatively. We find that since the 1990s, democratic governments have remained more likely than non-democrats to contribute some troops to United Nations peacekeeping operations, but non-democratic governments have been more likely to make large-scale contributions. We also find that governments have been especially reluctant to make sizeable contributions to peacekeeping when elections have been on the horizon.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Canadian Anthropology Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Anthropologica. Abstract:From the vantage point of the bleak social landscapes of the "divided cities" of Latin America, the meaningfulness of the focus on deepening the rights of citizenship that accompanied the shift to more democratic political regimes is far from obvious, despite some apparently positive developments accompanying the transition to neo liberalism. This paper examines the reasons for the resilience of neo-liberalism despite the popular protests that neo-liberal economic policies have provoked in many countries, arguing that the logic of neo-liberal rule systems has now permeated even the most "socially progressive" political parties and feeds off the diffuse effects of social transformation.
Scholars in the field of "peace and conflict studies" have long worried that their discipline is divided --between studies of war and warmaking, and studies of peace and peacemaking. However, empirical research into the existence, extent, and nature of such a division is scarce. We remedy this, by addressing two questions: 1) How is work in the field of peace and conflict studies distributed between its two nominal pillars: "peace" and (violent) "conflict"? 2) To what extent is there communication and exchange between the two sets of studies? Making use of a unique combination of methods, we find that studies of violence hold a dominant position in the field, although there is also a sizable body of work that explores topics of peace, understood as conflict prevention and/or response. That said, we find limited evidence of intellectual exchange between studies of war/making and peace/making. We also find evidence of gendered, regional, and methodological divides. We argue that such schisms may be preventing scholars of peace and conflict from collectively realizing the founding ontological goal of their discipline, which was to understand the causes of war in order to contribute to an understanding of how conflict can be managed peacefully.
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