Venue — the institutional setting in which actors interact — is a critical but neglected factor in international norm creation. This article brings together constructivist and rationalist insights to explain both why and how venue affects norm creation and how norm leaders choose among different venues. First, it highlights the importance of negotiation alongside persuasion in norm emergence — the first stage of Finnemore and Sikkink’s (1998) norm life cycle — thus opening space for a full consideration of venues within the constructivist paradigm. Second, it details how venue membership, mandate, output status, rules of procedure/operating procedures and legitimacy affect both the content and the level of international support of an emerging norm. Third, it offers a conceptual framework for understanding how norm leaders choose venues. Finally, it illustrates the impact of venue on norm creation and the dynamics of strategic venue choice by examining venue changes during the movement to ban anti-personnel landmines and the effort to promote international consensus on humanitarian intervention.

Developing states furnish the vast majority of UN peacekeeping troops, a fact academics and policymakers often attribute (at least partly) to developing states’ supposed ability to derive a profit from UN peacekeeping reimbursements. In this article, we argue that this ‘peacekeeping for profit’ narrative has been vastly overstated. The conditions for significantly profiting from UN peacekeeping are in fact highly restrictive, even for developing states. We begin by highlighting two potent reasons for re-examining the peacekeeping for profit narrative: developing states emerged as the UN’s principal troop contributors in a period of stagnant reimbursement rates when UN peacekeeping was becoming less financially attractive; and the quantitative evidence scholars have presented as supporting the peacekeeping for profit narrative is flawed. We then identify the scope conditions within which peacekeeping for profit provides a plausible explanation for a developing state’s UN troop contributions. First, the deployment and its attendant reimbursements must be significant not only in absolute and per-soldier terms but also in relation to the state’s total armed forces and military expenditure. Second, the state must have an exceptional ability, compared with other troop contributors, to benefit from UN reimbursements. The scope for generalized profit-making from either equipment or personnel contributions is limited by intense political pressure against reimbursement rate increases. Individual states can nevertheless make a profit if they (1) invest in inexpensive and old but functional equipment, especially if deployed with usage restrictions, and/or (2) limit the deployment allowances (rather than salaries) they pay their peacekeepers. We establish that only a limited subset of developing states meets the plausibility conditions for the peacekeeping for profit narrative – and many top UN troop contributors do not.

Peace operations are a highly resilient international institution for managing armed conflict. Their resilience derives from what constructivists in International Relations theory call collective intentionality and the malleable constitutive rules that define and structure such missions. Despite a range of current constraints, challenges, and crises, peace operations are unlikely to become extinct unless a critical mass of states consistently withdraw material support for them and explicitly denigrate the concept of peace operations itself. We see little evidence that both these things are likely to occur. However, the constitutive rules guiding peace operations are likely to continue to evolve due to ideational and material changes. While the proliferation of actors and mission types makes precise predictions impossible, we expect an evolution both in how various actors define their own peace operations and how these actors relate to each other. KEYWORDS Peacekeeping; peace operations; United Nations; constructivism Peace operations involve the expeditionary use of military personnel to: help prevent armed conflict by supporting a peace process; observe or assist in the implementation of ceasefires or peace agreements; and/or enforce ceasefires, peace agreements or the will of the United Nations (UN) Security Council in order to build stable peace (Williams & Bellamy, 2021, p. 1). Since the late 1940s, peace operations have been authorized by various international organizations-most frequently the UN-and states, usually in response to war or the threat of war. They have been deployed right across the conflict cycle, including in the midst of active armed conflicts, after ceasefires, following peace agreements, and, rarely, before the outbreak of war. Peacekeepers have been variously mandated to prevent war, observe ceasefires and demilitarized zones, assist in implementing peace agreements, protect civilians, as well as stabilize and even administer war-torn territories. Occasionally, they

What distinguishes a peace enforcement operation from an invasion? This question has been asked with particular vehemence since the US intervention in Iraq, but it faces all military operations seeking to impose peace in countries torn by civil war. This book highlights the critical role of international organisations (IOs) as gatekeepers to international legitimacy for modern peace enforcement operations. The author analyses five operations launched through four IOs: the ECOWAS intervention in Liberia, the SADC operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Lesotho, the NATO Kosovo campaign and the UN intervention in East Timor. In all these campaigns, lead states sought IO mandates primarily to establish the international legitimacy of their interventions. The evidence suggests that international relations are structured by commonly accepted rules, that both democratic and authoritarian states care about the international legitimacy of their actions, and that IOs have a key function in world politics.

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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 civiliansinternational and national staff, UN Volunteers and contractorsmake 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 intermission mobility due to the contraction of UN peacekeeping overall exacerbates this effect. KEYWORDS United Nations; downsizing; civilian peacekeepers; national staff After a decade of remarkable growth in the early 2000s, UN peacekeeping has entered a period of sharp contraction, caused by the closure of longstanding missions in Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire and Haiti, UN member states' demands for disengagement and cost reductions in several ongoing operations, and the Security Council's failure to approve any major new missions since 2014. 1 Between 2015 and 2019, authorized UN peacekeeping expenditures decreased by 21%, uniformed UN peacekeeper deployments by 20.5%, and civilian UN peacekeeping posts by over 24%. 2 Figure 1 illustrates this historic trend.

Three critical trends in the evolving practice of regional peacekeeping in sub-Saharan Africa have undermined the usefulness of the common conceptual dichotomy between regional peacekeeping and UN/global peacekeeping. First, sub-Saharan African states have distanced themselves from long-term autonomous regional peacekeeping, and currently favour explicitly interim missions that are a prelude rather than an alternative to UN peacekeeping. Second, the analytically clear line between regional peacekeeping and the separate sub-Saharan African tradition of solidarity deployments (i.e. military support of embattled governments) has in practice become blurred, and the regional vs global peacekeeping dichotomy not only fails to acknowledge this trend but helps to obscure it. Finally, sub-Saharan African states are increasingly addressing regional conflicts by participating in UN operations deployed in the region. UN peacekeeping has thus emerged as a preferred form of regional peacekeeping in sub-Saharan Africa.

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.