Mission (im)possible? UN military peacekeeping operations in civil wars

Darya Pushkina; Markus B. Siewert; Stefan Wolff

doi:10.1177/13540661211046602

Mission (im)possible? UN military peacekeeping operations in civil wars

Darya Pushkina, Markus B. Siewert, Stefan Wolff^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Political Science and International Studies

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

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Abstract

Under what conditions can UN military peacekeeping operations (PKOs) succeed in contexts of civil war? This is an important question given the prevalence and cost of civil wars and the high, yet not always fulfilled, expectations of very costly military PKOs as responses to them by the international community. Yet, the academic and policy debates on this question are as long-standing as they are unresolved. Our article contributes to existing scholarship in several ways. First, adopting a nuanced and multi-dimensional definition of success that considers violence, displacement, and contagion as its 3 essential components, we identified 19 cases of full or partial successes, and 13 full or partial failures, covering all 32 UN military PKOs deployed to civil war settings. Second, we develop an original dataset and analytical framework that identifies a wide range of plausible factors related to the dynamics of both the intervention and the underlying conflict it is meant to address. Third, applying qualitative comparative analysis to our dataset of these 32 military PKOs, our key finding is that what matters most and consistently across all of these missions is the presence or absence of domestic consent to, and cooperation with, deployed PKOs.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	158-186
Number of pages	29
Journal	European Journal of International Relations
Volume	28
Issue number	1
Early online date	21 Sept 2021
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661211046602
Publication status	Published - 1 Mar 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Darya Pushkina and Markus Siewert received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Stefan Wolff acknowledges that his contribution to this article was partially funded by the United States Institute of Peace (under the project “Learning from failure: tackling war recurrence in protracted peace processes”, grant number: 1804-18431) and by the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (under the project “Understanding and Managing Intra-State Territorial Contestation”, grant number: ES/M009211/1).

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2021.

Keywords

civil wars
conflict management
international intervention
peace processes
qualitative comparative analysis
UN peacekeeping operations

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Sociology and Political Science
Political Science and International Relations

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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10.1177/13540661211046602Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution (CC BY)

PushkinaD2021MissionFinal published version, 276 KBLicence: Creative Commons: Attribution (CC BY)

Learning from failure: tackling war recurrence in protracted peace processes
Wolff, S. (Principal Investigator) & Fontana, G. (Co-Investigator)
UNITED STATES INSTITUTE OF PEACE
1/04/19 → 30/09/22
Project: Research
Understanding and Managing Intra-State Territorial Contestation: Iraq's disputed Territories in Comparitive Perspective (ES/M009211/1)
Wolff, S. (Principal Investigator)
Economic & Social Research Council
1/06/15 → 28/02/19
Project: Research Councils

Cite this

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abstract = "Under what conditions can UN military peacekeeping operations (PKOs) succeed in contexts of civil war? This is an important question given the prevalence and cost of civil wars and the high, yet not always fulfilled, expectations of very costly military PKOs as responses to them by the international community. Yet, the academic and policy debates on this question are as long-standing as they are unresolved. Our article contributes to existing scholarship in several ways. First, adopting a nuanced and multi-dimensional definition of success that considers violence, displacement, and contagion as its 3 essential components, we identified 19 cases of full or partial successes, and 13 full or partial failures, covering all 32 UN military PKOs deployed to civil war settings. Second, we develop an original dataset and analytical framework that identifies a wide range of plausible factors related to the dynamics of both the intervention and the underlying conflict it is meant to address. Third, applying qualitative comparative analysis to our dataset of these 32 military PKOs, our key finding is that what matters most and consistently across all of these missions is the presence or absence of domestic consent to, and cooperation with, deployed PKOs.",

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Mission (im)possible? UN military peacekeeping operations in civil wars

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

UN SDGs

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Projects

Learning from failure: tackling war recurrence in protracted peace processes

Understanding and Managing Intra-State Territorial Contestation: Iraq's disputed Territories in Comparitive Perspective (ES/M009211/1)

Cite this