Better peacekeepers, better protection? Troop quality of United Nations peace operations and violence against civilians

Abstract

Why do similarly sized peacekeeping missions vary in their effectiveness to protect civilians in conflicts? We argue that peace operations with a large share of troops from countries with high-quality militaries are better able to deter violence from state and non-state actors and create buffer zones within conflict areas, can better reach remote locations, and have superior capabilities – including diplomatic pressure by troop contributing countries – to monitor the implementation of peace agreements. These operational advantages enable them to better protect civilians. Combining data from military expenditures of troop contributing countries together with monthly data on the composition of peace operations, we create a proxy indicator for the average troop quality of UN PKOs. Statistical evidence from an extended sample of conflicts in Africa and Asia between 1991 and 2010 supports our argument.

Does quality matter? An evaluation of the relationship between United Nations peacekeepers and civil war violence

“…The only study that looks explicitly at the relationship between peacekeeper quality and violence is a recent article written by Felix Haass and Nadine Ansorg (2018). The main argument in this study is that peacekeeping operations with higher quality troops should be more effective at reducing the severity of one-sided violence against civilians than operations with lower quality troops.…”

“…However, there is a lack of literature regarding the relationship, if any, between the relative quality of UN peacekeepers and their ability to manage on-going violence. To date, only a single study has evaluated this relationship explicitly (Haass and Ansorg 2018), which means that most knowledge on this topic is anecdotal in nature. As a result, there is currently a lack of consensus regarding whether peacekeeper quality contributes to operational effectiveness and, if so, why and how much.…”

“…In Chapter Four, I use a cross-national dataset of all intrastate conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa from 1991-2017 to determine if variation in average operational quality has an effect on the severity of on-going violence at the state-level. This step is designed to replicate the results of the sole previous study on the relationship between peacekeeper quality and violence (Haass and Ansorg 2018), with the intention of either supporting or refuting their conclusion that an increase in average operational quality leads to a decrease in overall levels of violence. It begins by providing a brief overview of the UN's force generation system, which is the primary cause of qualitative variation from one peacekeeping operation to the next.…”

“…However, due to the lack of research on this topic, it is not clear what the term 'quality' actually means in a peacekeeping context. The single study by Haass and Ansorg (2018) develops a definition of quality that focuses primarily on the military skills and technological capabilities possessed by the troops in question, in addition to the political pressure exerted by their home governments. But the rationale provided for their chosen definition is relatively thin and they neglect to consider other potential elements of quality, such as the willingness to take action when faced with violence.…”

“…Some operations have, collectively, performed to a high standard, whereas others have not. 18 A recent study has also demonstrated that the relative capabilities of peacekeepers matter when they are assessed at the operational-level (Haass and Ansorg 2018), which suggests that they are not evenly distributed across all operational contexts. Before I test the argument laid out above, therefore, it is worth taking a brief moment to explain why the average quality of UN peacekeeping personnel typically varies from one operation to the next.…”