United Nations peacekeeping is an important instrument for maintaining international peace, but the mandates that peacekeeping operations are expected to implement are increasingly complex. This trend has consequences. We argue that certain member states are incentivized by the benefits of partaking in complex missions. These include ‘process’ benefits such as reimbursement payments, training, and reputation building. Specifically, non-democratic states are more likely to make greater contributions to missions with complex mandates than democratic states. In a global analysis of UN member peacekeeping contributions from 1990 to 2022, we show that as mandate complexity increases, non-democracies make larger contributions relative to democracies. While democracies do not shy away from supporting peacekeeping, they resist substantial contributions to the ambitiously mandated missions that they have often themselves promoted. These findings contribute to ongoing academic discussions about the challenge of recruiting sufficient resources to pursue peacekeeping while insisting on a liberal global order.

How does the deployment and withdrawal of UN peacekeepers affect local economic development in civil war countries? This study provides a large-N subnational analysis across UN peacekeeping operations that assesses their impact on the local economy both during deployment and after their withdrawal. We expect a positive association between UN peacekeeping and economic development. Besides providing a sizeable cash injection into the economy, peacekeepers can safeguard both the resumption of everyday economic exchanges at the grassroots level and the influx of aid and development projects. To test this, we combine subnational data on peacekeeping deployments with high-resolution data on nightlight emissions. Results from two-way fixed effects models, using matching, show that a more sizable peacekeeping presence can help boost economic activity in their area of operation. Importantly, we identify a slow but positive economic development in areas of deployment after peacekeepers withdraw, which is confirmed in a DiD estimation approach.

Are UN peacekeepers effective in protecting civilians from violence? Existing studies examine this issue at the country level, thereby making it difficult to isolate the effect of peacekeepers and to assess the actual mechanism at work. We provide the first comprehensive evaluation of UN peacekeeping success in protecting civilians at the subnational level. We argue that peacekeepers through their sizable local presence can increase the political and military costs for warring actors to engage in civilian targeting. Since peacekeepers’ access to civilian populations rests on government consent, peacekeepers will primarily be effective in imposing these costs on rebel groups, but less so for government actors. To test these conjectures we combine new monthly data on the location of peacekeepers with data on the location and timing of civilian killings in Africa. Our findings suggest that local peacekeeping presence enhances the effectiveness of civilian protection against rebel abuse, but that UN peacekeeping struggles to protect civilians from government forces.

While United Nations peacekeeping missions were created to keep peace and perform post-conflict activities, since the end of the Cold War peacekeepers are more often deployed to active conflicts. Yet, we know little about their ability to manage ongoing violence. This article provides the first broad empirical examination of UN peacekeeping effectiveness in reducing battlefield violence in civil wars. We analyze how the number of UN peacekeeping personnel deployed influences the amount of battlefield deaths in all civil wars in Africa from 1992 to 2011. The analyses show that increasing numbers of armed military troops are associated with reduced battlefield deaths, while police and observers are not. Considering that the UN is often criticized for ineffectiveness, these results have important implications: if appropriately composed, UN peacekeeping missions reduce violent conflict.