Examining an ‘escalatory trajectory’, the authors analyze the United Nations Peace Initiatives data, a new dataset providing information on all different types of UN engagements. “Our main contributions are that we provide insights into how the different types of missions relate to one another and conceptual clarity about what the different types of missions are.”
Increasingly detailed data and sophisticated analyses have provided a better understanding of the determinants of peacekeeping. However, much less attention has been paid to political missions, the authors write in ‘Sequencing United Nations peacemaking: Political initiatives and peacekeeping operations’. The risk is that peacekeeping is compared with a broad and relatively poorly understood reference category of “no peacekeeping.”
“Here, our main contribution is to add to unpacking of the baseline by considering political missions as distinct instruments of UN peacemaking. Analyzing the UNPI dataset on political missions, we find strong support for treating them as separate from peacekeeping missions as well as “non-interventions.”
Peacekeeping missions are not always a feasible, or even the most appropriate, response to situations that may threaten international peace and security. Over time, the UN has developed and extended different options enabling it to engage with a variety of conflictive situations.
Arguably, different types of political missions impose distinct costs on the UN system as well as on countries contributing to supplying or hosting missions. Whether it is appropriate to accept these costs depends on the potential benefits of a mission relative to contextual needs. Not intervening at all may well turn out to be the costliest option. That said, after considering the costs of authorization, funding and supply, and belligerent consent, peacekeeping stands out in being more expensive than political initiatives.
“Given budgetary and political constraints, we expect the UN and hosting states to minimize intervention costs. Put simply, peacekeepers will only be deployed when such costly intervention are required.”
The authors empirically assessed the impact of different conflict characteristics on the onset of different mission types and found that political missions are more likely to occur than peacekeeping missions when a conflict has not (yet) escalated and more time has passed since the last fighting. Their results further suggest the UN is more likely to opt for a peacekeeping mission in conflicts that are ‘new’. It is plausible that such conflicts indeed present a larger risk to international peace and security and need to be addressed urgently.
Political missions are not only generally less costly than peacekeeping missions, but there is also variation in the likely costs of diplomatic, technocratic, and political-development missions. Considering the relative costs of different political missions, political-development missions are more costly than technocratic and diplomatic missions, respectively. Political-development missions are usually field missions, while diplomatic and technocratic missions face lower barriers for authorization. “Our analyses do not necessarily support such conjectures. The impact of key conflict characteristics does not vary much on various political missions.”
Control variables, such as population size and wealth, affect the choice for political mission differently, but not in a way that seems related to their relative costs. At the same time, the authors find evidence for the escalatory logic underlying political missions. Less costly missions tend to set the framework and requirements for costlier efforts in the future.
Future work might then seek to explore the wider range of factors that lead to the adoption of one form of political mission over another, the authors suggest.
Dorussen H, Böhmelt T, Clayton G. Sequencing United Nations peacemaking: Political initiatives and peacekeeping operations. Conflict Management and Peace Science. April 2021. doi:10.1177/07388942211000678
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