UN Peacekeeping and Protection from Sexual Violence

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increased emphasis on both protection of civilians and the problem of sexual violence. We explore the impact of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping on the occurrence of wartime sexual violence. Acknowledging the difficulty in reducing sexual violence, we propose two conditions under which peacekeepers are more likely to be successful: when the mission has a protection mandate and when the conflict actors exercise a high level of control over their forces. We find that the ability of peacekeepers to reduce sexual violence in general is weak. Only police within protection missions reduces the risk of sexual violence by rebels. However, when the actors exercise control, the number of peacekeepers is associated with a lower risk of sexual violence by both governments and rebels. We conclude that dealing with sexual violence by weak and fragmented actors is a challenging task beyond the current capacity of UN peacekeeping.

Shifting targets: the effect of peacekeeping on postwar violence

“…The findings on the positive impact of UN police on collective postwar violence – and other recent findings on a violence-mitigating effect of police peacekeepers (Di Salvatore, 2019; Johansson and Hultman, 2019) – come at a time when the current capacity of UN police to contribute to long-term peace has been questioned. Deployed police often lack training in specialized tasks, or come from countries that have themselves no tradition of human-rights-based policing (Greener, 2011).…”

“…UN troops appear to be generally less effective for violence that is further away – in nature, actors or location – from the frontlines, or violence that is not perpetrated by the warring parties, though the evidence base here is more limited. Two studies on combatant-perpetrated sexual violence during war come to diverging conclusions on whether UN troops reduce this nonlethal form of violence (Kirschner and Miller, 2019) or not (Johansson and Hultman, 2019). 4 Finally, troops may even have a counterproductive effect on violence by actors other than the combatants.…”

“…Importantly, however, recent research shows that UN police can be comparatively more effective for the types of violence that military troops have difficulty containing. Both Kirschner and Miller (2019) and Johansson and Hultman (2019) find that UN police reduce conflict-related sexual violence, and Di Salvatore (2019) finds that only UN police can reduce criminal violence.…”

“…While it is rare that UN police have an executive mandate to enforce the law, they still provide direct operational support to host-state police in the protection of civilians, the planning and conducting of operations, investigations of incidents, patrolling or community-oriented policing (UN DPKO/DFS, 2014). Johansson and Hultman (2019) for instance attribute the success of UN police in lowering sexual violence to the close interaction with government in activities such as joint patrolling. By working together, UN police are able to monitor the behaviour of government in response to challenges to their authority, thus perhaps lowering the risk of abuses.…”

“…The second is to ensure the security of the rest of the population. While much research on peacekeeping effectiveness has focused on the former, this study contributes to recent research showing that police are particularly effective in addressing this latter challenge (Di Salvatore, 2019;Johansson and Hultman, 2019).…”