Since the 1990s, United Nations (UN) peacekeepers have been engaged in multidimensional activities in conflict-affected countries. The existing literature, however, focuses predominantly on the effectiveness of military and police peacekeepers involving the threat of force, and does not shed light on the effectiveness of civilian peacekeepers despite the latter's crucial role in rebuilding local livelihoods and restoring state institutions. Civilian participation in peacekeeping increases both the benefits of peaceful life and the costs of combat. Further, civilian activities, by strengthening the rule of law and political accountability mechanism, contribute to encouraging both the rebels and government to disengage from further violence. Using the original dataset of financial resources for UN peacekeeping operations in the world, from 1988 to 2019, I test hypotheses regarding the impact of civilian expenditures on battle-related deaths. Regression analysis shows that spending on the civilian component in UN peacekeeping reduces battle-related deaths on the government side inflicted by insurgents.

The voting record of states of the global South at the United Nations General Assembly indicates they are dissatisfied with the US-led liberal international order. Against existing interpretations, this article challenges the notion that states belonging to the Group of 77 (G77) express discontent because they are illiberal and undemocratic. Instead, the article argues that the G77 is composed of a diverse group of states influenced by a common South–South ideology. This foreign policy ideology has a distinct intellectual history and conceptual morphology, grounded in common experience of colonial domination and international peripheralisation. These arguments are tested using a series of multiple regression models, controlling for illiberal characteristics of states and examining the reciprocal influence between G77 membership and voting stance at the United Nations. Disaggregation of General Assembly resolutions and analysis of the text of General Debate speeches corroborates the argument that a coherent set of shared ideas shape how global issues are conceptualised and framed by members of the G77. The results are consistent with the argument that states of the G77 have socialised one another into a shared South–South ideology and that domestic illiberalism is insufficient to explain why they express dissatisfaction with the US-led international order. Ideologies of foreign policy originating in the global South, therefore, should not be overlooked as an influence on world politics.

This study examined the mediating role of civic skill-acts and direct associations of group identity on intentions to engage in peaceful or radical protest actions (i.e., activism or radicalism intentions respectively). A sample of 526 university students in Hong Kong was surveyed. The findings suggested that political identity complementarily mediated the relationship between joining political activities and radicalism intentions. Religious identity and ethnic/racial identity each have an indirect-only mediation to activism as well as radicalism intentions when mediated by community activities and responding activities respectively. Finally, political identity and economic identity each have direct-only mediations to activism intentions respectively. These results suggest that although group identity and civic skill-acts uniquely contribute to protest intentions, the inter-relationship is complicated by the type of group identity, civic skill-act, and protest activity studied. Recommendations for future studies are discussed in light of the findings.

This study examines the relationship between ideology and resistance to the government's apology to Asian victims of Japan's colonial rule policy, which varies according to political knowledge. Based on existing research, because only a limited percentage of voters consider politics to be ideology based, it is expected that the association between ideology and resistance to intergroup apologies by one's own government differs according to their level of political knowledge. We selected three issues of political apologies: colonial rule in Asian countries, comfort women, and the massacre of Korean people based on false rumors at the time of the 1923 Kanto Earthquake; thereafter, we conducted an online survey of a panel selected by Nikkei Research Inc. The results suggest that the relationship between ideology and resistance among voters to political apologies varies with the level of political knowledge, as expected. On the contrary, social dominance orientations (SDO) were associated with resistance to apology, regardless of their level of political knowledge. We then tested the reproducibility of this finding by conducting a follow-up test on registered users of a crowdsourcing service after conducting a preregistration. In addition, we also measured general attitudes toward personal apologies and neighboring countries victimized by Japan's colonialist policies as factors that might predict resistance to apologies even among the politically uninformed. The association between ideology, SDO, and resistance to governmental apologies was generally replicated in this study.