UN PEACEKEEPING: MAIN DIRECTIONS OF EVOLUTION Lyamzin Andrei; Elantseva Natal’ya; Nikolaev Yurii
Электронное приложение к Российскому юридическому журналу,
04/2019
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The paper analyzes UN peacekeeping operations – peacekeeping missions and identifies problems and contradictions in the peacekeeping activities of the largest international political institution for ...the 70-year period.
This research note extends the Bara and Hultman (2020) study on the effectiveness of non-UN peacekeeping missions in terms of curbing one-sided violence (OSV) against civilians. In particular, we ...employ two novel instruments to address the two-way causality between the number of non-UN peacekeepers and OSV measures. For each panel year, our instruments involve the interaction between the sum of various designated peacekeepers contributed and the inverse distance between the capitals of contributor and conflict countries. As required, the instrument satisfies the necessary inclusion and exclusion (exogeneity) requirements. The instrument-based results establish a robust reduction in government OSV stemming from the number of non-UN peacekeepers deployed. That reduction also holds for propensity-score matching and the inclusion of UN peacekeepers in the same regression. Non-UN peacekeepers did not have a robust influence on rebel OSV.
While a great deal of scholarship has been devoted to peacekeeping operations (PKOs), relatively few works have examined their economic effects. Toward better understanding this area of inquiry, we ...examine the impact of PKOs on the growth of the shadow economies of host countries. We posit that the conflict cessation brought about by peacekeeping missions, as well as their stimulative economic effects, will reduce the growth of the shadow sector. However, these impacts may not be sustainable after the conclusion of the mission. Testing these linkages across 145 countries for over 40 years, we find significant support for these dynamics.
Following the return to democracy in Argentina, the definition of new roles and missions for the armed forces became imperative in order to establish civilian authority over the military and ...contribute to the consolidation of the democratic regime. After seven years of military dictatorship (1976–1983), the transformation of repressive and war-prone armed forces into law-abiding and peaceful ones was needed to achieve three key political goals: To strengthen the newly restored yet weak rule of law, to rebuild the country’s battered international image, and to help professionalise an ill-reputed military. This article argues that since the return to democracy in 1983, successive governments have pursued these goals by linking issues traditionally falling within the military and security realm to the country’s external agenda. Building upon the defence diplomacy literature – that is, the use of defence and military cooperation as a diplomatic tool – the article develops a conceptual framework to apply to the Argentine case, focussing on how defence diplomacy is developed in three stages which we conceptualise as inward-looking, outward-looking, and symmetrical military-to-military relations. Overall, we contend that defence diplomacy – though still a recent and weakly systematised concept in the field – is a useful tool which should be taken into account when analysing the democratic transitions and the pursued civilian control over the armed forces in Global South countries like Argentina.
Abstract
UN peacekeeping became a flagship activity of the liberal international order (LIO) in the post-Cold War era, characterized by globalization, liberal norms and western leadership. Western ...states' diminished support for LIO UN peacekeeping has left it increasingly open to challenge, but significant changes are only likely if a strong group of states coalesces around an alternative model of UN peacekeeping. This article highlights African actors and China as well positioned to play pivotal roles in such a coalition. African states, who host the preponderance of UN missions and furnish almost half of the UN's uniformed peacekeepers, support globalized UN peacekeeping, show relatively weak support for the most liberal peacebuilding principles and assert the need for African-led solutions to continental crises. China's influence reflects its P5 status, financial and personnel contributions to UN peacekeeping and engagement with regional actors, notably in Africa. Aspiring to global leadership and a ‘new world order’, China endorses globalized UN peacekeeping but proposes a non-liberal (and non-western led) notion of ‘developmental peace’ to guide it. The complementarities between African and Chinese priorities raise the possibility of a profound challenge to LIO peacekeeping. Rather than heralding deglobalization, however, this challenge illustrates that post-LIO international institutions may instead be characterized by deliberalization and dewesternization.
This study examines the role of personalities in Nigeria’s contributions to PKOs in Africa and beyond. The paper argued that the successes achieved by Nigeria in PKOs would not have been possible ...without such personalities at the helm of affairs. The study established that the actions of characters involved in PKOs have both positive and negative consequences. The accumulation of experiences through its PKOs has helped develop the country’s security and economy and built sufficient institutions. In contrast, the country’s PKO policies had, at the same time, strengthened and enabled institutionalise corruption and indiscipline within the military and the general society at large, with mediocracy being the order of the day and compromises in almost all government businesses. The study recommends strengthening institutions – such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Defence and other relevant agencies rather than individuals.
While United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations are increasingly deployed during ongoing violent conflict, they are also increasingly staffed with civilian personnel tasked with peacebuilding at ...the local level. How does violent conflict affect civilian peacekeepers’ peacebuilding efforts locally? Shifting the research focus from military to civilian peacekeepers, we argue that the latter have various incentives and the capacity to concentrate their local-level peacebuilding efforts in violence-affected areas. We test our argument using novel, georeferenced data on peacebuilding by “Civil Affairs” personnel of the peacekeeping operation in the Central African Republic. Consistent with our expectation, violence positively correlates with civilian peacekeepers’ peacebuilding interventions both within and across localities. Furthermore, mediation analyses suggest that this correlation is not merely due to greater UN military deployments in violence-affected areas. Instrumental variable regression supports a causal interpretation: violence leads to more efforts by civilian peacekeepers. These findings inform expectations and assessments of peacekeeping effectiveness.