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UN Peacekeeping and the Rule of Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 September 2020

ROBERT A. BLAIR Open the ORCID record for ROBERT A. BLAIR [Opens in a new window]
ROBERT A. BLAIR*
Affiliation:
Brown University
*
Robert A. Blair, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, robert_blair@brown.edu.
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Abstract

The UN is intimately involved in efforts to restore the rule of law in conflict and postconflict settings. Yet despite the importance of the rule of law for peace, good governance, and economic growth, evidence on the impact of these efforts is scant. I develop a theory to explain when UN rule-of-law reform is likely to succeed, then test the theory using original datasets capturing the number of civilian personnel deployed to each UN mission in Africa, the number of personnel assigned specifically to rule-of-law-related tasks, and the extent and nature of actual rule-of-law-related activities in the field. The correlation between UN presence and the rule of law is weak while conflict is ongoing, but robustly positive during periods of peace. The relationship is stronger for civilian than uniformed personnel, and is strongest when UN missions engage host states in the process of reform.

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Type
Research Article
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American Political Science Review , Volume 115 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 51 - 68
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

This research was supported by the Folke Bernadotte Academy. For valuable comments I thank Kyle Beardsley, Jeff Colgan, Lise Morjé Howard, Aila Matanock, participants at the joint Folke Bernadotte Academy and UNIGE conference State of the Art? The Future of Peacekeeping Data, and three anonymous reviewers. I also thank Hannah Smidt, my collaborator on the Peacekeeping Activities Dataset (PACT). Samuel Berube, Victor Brechenmacher, Erin Brennan-Burke, Alexa Clark, Paul Cumberland, Rachel Danner, Mara Dolan, Dylan Elliott-Hart, Lucas Fried, Ugochi Ihenatu, Julia Kirschenbaum, Ian Lefond, Divya Mehta, Ruth Miller, Remington Pontes, Lucy Walke, and Yijie Zhu provided excellent research assistance. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NRRVJ3.

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