W.Nomikos & Patrick Hunnicut – Global Security Hub Presentation

Please join us for a last minute addition to the Global Security Hub Paper Workshop where we will discuss Will Nomikos and Patrick Hunnicut’s paper, “Does UN Peace Enforcement Reduce Violence? Assessing Peacekeeping at the Local Level”.

As always, we will meet in the Orfalea Center Conference Room (Girvetz 2320). We hope to see you there!

“Does UN Peace Enforcement Reduce Violence? Assessing Peacekeeping at the Local Level”

Do United Nations peacekeeping operations reduce levels of violence? Cross-national research has found that UN peacekeepers bring conflicts to an end (Doyle and Sambanis 2006), increase duration of peace (Fortna 2008), and reduce armed group victimization (Hultman et al. 2013). Yet case study evidence has cast doubt upon this claim (Autesserre 2010, 2015; Costalli 2013). Which perspective is correct? We suggest that disagreements in existing scholarship can be attributed to an empirical levels-of-analysis problem. Although peace agreements are signed at the national level, they are ultimately implemented and enforced by UN personnel deployed to areas around a post-conflict country. Because UN peacekeeping enforcement works at the level of deployment, micro-level data is best suited evaluate whether UN peacekeeping enforcement reduces levels of violence.  Cross-national studies, which compile peacekeeping deployments at the state-level, risk aggregating across violent events with different types of motivations (Kalyvas 2006), providing biased estimates of the effectiveness ofUN peacekeepers. The few sub-national studies that do exists offer a limited sample of cases of UN deployments, a lack of granularity that prevents the testing of theoretical mechanisms, or both. We use new data to assess whether UN peacekeeping operations reduce the onset of of violence.

Page Editor

CY Xu
CY Xu
Graduate Student Researcher at the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies
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