Only as fast as its troop contributors: Incentives, capabilities, and constraints in the UN’s peacekeeping response

Abstract

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.

Politics or Performance? Leadership Accountability in UN Peacekeeping

“…Given our interest in measuring the time to leader exit, we employ an event history framework (Cox and Oakes 1984; Freedman 2008). Event history analysis is conventionally used in International Relations to study the time it takes for an event to occur, such as the duration of a peace agreement or how fast the UN can generate sufficient troops for its peacekeeping missions (Lundgren, Oksamytna, and Coleman 2020). In our case, we study the duration of leaders’ tenures.…”

Politics or Performance? Leadership Accountability in UN Peacekeeping

“…Given our interest in measuring the time to leader exit, we employ an event history framework (Cox & Oakes, 1984;Freedman, 2008). Event history analysis is conventionally used in International Relations to study the time it takes for an event to occur, such as the duration of a peace agreement or how fast the UN can generate sufficient troops for its peacekeeping missions (Lundgren et al 2020). In our case, we study the duration of leaders' tenures.…”

How Does International Intervention Work to Secure Peace Settlements After Civil Conflicts?

“…The UN also coordinates the provision of resources to states that receive peacekeeping missions, both by distributing foreign assistance through its agencies directly and by working with “Groups of Friends” of the Secretary-General—which are especially interested donor governments and international organizations (for example, the European Union)—to shape a country's receipt of aid and other benefits, such as membership in certain organizations (see, for example, Whitfield 2007). Most peacekeeping missions do eventually receive personnel, though partners do not send as many individuals as quickly as the UN prefers (see, for example, Lundgren, Oksamytna, and Coleman 2020; Passmore, Shannon, and Hart 2018). Likewise, most of the contexts to which missions are sent garner substantial foreign assistance, as countries recovering from conflict tend to receive more aid than similar, non-conflict-affected countries (Collier and Hoeffler 2004, 1136).…”

“…While multilateral coordination is not the central focus of this article, we argue that UN peacekeeping missions rely on this coordination to mobilize personnel and resources, making it a critical feature of these missions regardless of what instruments they use to incentivize compliance. Others have examined the challenges of coordination in peacekeeping, including specifically in mobilizing troops (for example, Lundgren, Oksamytna, and Coleman 2020; Passmore, Shannon, and Hart 2018). However, generally, the UN plays a pivotal role not only in monitoring the behavior of combatants, but also in leveraging its ties to member states and other organizations to develop, deploy, and ensure support for peacekeeping missions.…”