Trade Potential and UN Peacekeeping Participation

Abstract

The determinants of a country's UN peacekeeping troop contribution have been persistently studied. Trade, as a crucial self-interest motivation, is one of the important explanatory variables in the extant literature. However, the existing literature presents mixed results on the influence of trade on peacekeeping troop contributions. To capture the effect of trade on contributions precisely, we need to model expectations about future trade volume in a better way. Countries are pressured by the economic and political risks caused by the trade disruption and lobby groups to send peacekeeping troops to enable future trade or secure future investments. Therefore, trade potential, rather than realized trade, drives peacekeeping troop contributions. A gravity model is used to measure the trade potential between the UN peacekeeping mission countries and contributors, and test its relationship with the UN peacekeeping participation. Based on this measurement and a dyadic troop contribution dataset covering the period from 1990 to 2012, this article demonstrates that the counter-factual predictive trade volume is a relevant predictor of UN peacekeeping troop contributions.

Female rebels and United Nations peacekeeping deployments

“…In a similar vein, Uzonyi (2015) argues that countries base their deployment decision on whether they experience negative externalities from an ongoing conflict, showing that higher refugee inflows increase the probability and level of troop contributions. Finally, some studies highlight the positive effects of existing or potential trade ties on peacekeeping deployment (Binder and Golub, 2020; Stojek and Tir, 2015; Zhang, 2021).…”