8 - International Peace
Cross-national Tests of Impartiality
from Part III - Implications for Academics and Policymakers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2025
Summary
This chapter examines local-level peacekeeping operations in a cross-national context. The analysis draws on a dataset of nearly 400,000 georeferenced troop deployments in sub-Saharan Africa from 1999 to 2019. Consistent with the theory’s predictions, it demonstrates that increases in the number of peacekeeping troops deployed to local communities are strongly positively associated with decreases in the onset of communal violence. Since cross-national data of this sort cannot directly measure local perceptions of peacekeepers cross-nationally, the study tallies the number of peacekeepers from former colonial powers and neighboring countries deployed to each area as a proxy for perceptions of bias. The patterns further vary in ways that support the logic of localized peace enforcement theory. Specifically, the evidence shows that there is no relationship between the deployment of these two types of peacekeepers and levels of communal violence. The analyses presented in the chapter also detect a strong negative association between all other types of peacekeepers, likely to be perceived as impartial, and the onset of communal violence.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Local Peace, International BuildersHow UN Peacekeeping Builds Peace from the Bottom Up, pp. 169 - 176Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
- Creative Commons
- This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/cclicenses/