Just Different Hats? Comparing UN and Non-UN Peacekeeping

In the past two decades, regional organizations and coalitions of states have deployed more peace operations than the United Nations. Yet most quantitative studies of peacekeeping effectiveness focus on UN peacekeeping exclusively, a decision owed to data availability more than to theories about the differential impact of UN and non-UN missions. As a result, we know little about the effectiveness of non-UN peacekeeping in mitigating violence.
CORINNE BARA and LISA HULTMAN introduce and analyze monthly data on the approximate number of troops, police, and observers in both UN and non-UN peacekeeping operations between 1993 and 2016.
“Using these data, we show that when accounting for mission size and composition, UN and regional peacekeeping operations are equally effective in mitigating violence against civilians by governments, but only UN troops and police curb civilian targeting by non-state actors,” the authors state in ‘Just Different Hats? Comparing UN and Non-UN Peacekeeping’, published in the journal International Peacekeeping.
“We offer some theoretical reflections on these findings, but the main contribution of the article is the novel dataset on non-UN peacekeeping strength and personnel composition to overcome the near-exclusive focus on UN missions in the scholarship on peacekeeping effectiveness.”
The authors have explored the similarities and differences between UN and non-UN peacekeeping. By providing comparable data on the approximate monthly number of peacekeepers for both UN and non-UN missions, they are able to examine issues relating to their different strengths, compositions, and effects. “One question we ask is whether UN and non-UN missions deploy to different contexts. Our descriptive statistics shows some evidence for this.”
On average, the UN deploys to more violent conflicts than non-UN actors, BARA and HULTMAN state. However, in situations in which the UN and non-UN actors intervene into the same conflict, the non-UN actor is most often the first responder. “This article could not explore these differences and temporal dynamics in more detail, but the question of how the effectiveness of earlier missions influences the effectiveness of missions that take over later deserves more research.”
The effects of these missions also vary. “If we take the size of missions into consideration, is there a difference in the effect between UN and non-UN missions? Our findings suggest that there is, at least when it comes to reducing one-sided violence by rebel groups,” the authors state.
This example is a reminder that the category of non-UN peacekeeping is admittedly a rough mix of different types of missions and that the heterogeneity of non-UN missions ought to be further explored. Moreover, whether missions are deployed by the UN or another organization is perhaps not their most distinguishing feature. Certain UN and non-UN missions may be more comparable to each other than missions within these two organizational categories.
“The data we present here offers the possibility to explore differences between and among UN and non-UN missions further, and hopefully an impetus to overcome the step-motherly treatment of non-UN peacekeeping at least in the quantitative study of peacekeeping effectiveness.”