This chapter describes the data collection strategy and multimethod research design employed to test the theory in the subsequent chapters of the book. The structure of the empirical analysis mirrors the book’s primary argument: to show how peacekeeping works from the bottom up, from the individual to the community to the country. Given that UN peacekeepers deploy to the most violent areas, the design needed to account for selection bias as well as other confounding variables in order to make causal inference possible. Using data from individual- and subnational/community-level data from Mali as well as cross-national data from the universe of multidimensional PKOs deployed in Africa, the book employs a three-part strategy to test the hypotheses in the next few chapters. First, the book considers the micro-level behavioral implications of the theory using a lab-in-the-field experiment and a survey experiment, both implemented in Mali. Second, it test whether UN peacekeepers’ ability to increase individual willingness to cooperate aggregates upward to prevent communal violence in Mali. Third, the book considers whether these findings extend to other countries.

This chapter focuses on the global decarbonisation policy gap and the need to account for measurable policies for carbon neutrality, specifically in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. One strategy to raise accountability is policy tracking, a technique that has gained traction in empirical policy analysis. The chapter introduces this technique and provides an example of a methodologically rigorous tracking of climate policies in the GCC countries in response to pledges and obligations under the Paris Agreement. This includes government policies, laws, and measures toward the mitigation goals of the Paris Agreement and carbon neutrality targets. We situate our tracker in the wider landscape of policy metrics and indexes, discuss its features, and present results on mitigation and energy policy responses to the climate crisis in the Gulf. Key conclusions are that stringency, intensity, effectiveness, and sustainability of measures vary widely across the sample and over time. Necessary macroeconomic, fiscal, technological, and social policy measures also vary greatly in terms of their intensity and the public investments made. In some GCC countries, policy measures appear to be disproportionate to the challenges linked to both reaching the goals of the Paris Agreement and the Gulf countries’ very own nationally determined contributions (NDCs), to varying degrees.

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.