DARYA PUSHKINA, MARKUS B. SIEWERT and STEFAN WOLFF raise this critical question amid the prevalence and cost of civil wars and the high, yet not always fulfilled, expectations of very costly military PKOs as responses to them by the international community.
“[T]he academic and policy debates on this question are as long-standing as they are unresolved. Our article contributes to existing scholarship in several ways,” the authors state in their research article published in the European Journal of International Relations.
First, adopting a nuanced and multi-dimensional definition of success that considers violence, displacement, and contagion as its three essential components, they have identified 19 cases of full or partial successes, and 13 full or partial failures, covering all 32 UN military PKOs deployed to civil war settings.
Second, they develop an original dataset and analytical framework that identifies a wide range of plausible factors related to the dynamics of both the intervention and the underlying conflict it is meant to address.
Third, applying qualitative comparative analysis to their dataset of these 32 military PKOs, their key finding is that what matters most and consistently across all of these missions is the presence or absence of domestic consent to, and cooperation with, deployed PKOs.
“We found that domestic consent to and cooperation with a military PKO turns out as the single most important factor in both its absence and presence,” the authors state in the article, titled ‘Mission (im)possible? UN military peacekeeping operations in civil wars’.
The absence of external belligerent support is part of all pathways to PKO success. “Both findings are confirmed in our robustness tests, which underscores the high internal validity of their findings.
“We are thus confident that we have generated important new hypotheses about PKOs in general that can be further tested in future research on PKOs, including outside the UN context. While this may suggest limited external validity, we note that our findings concern an important and large subset of UN PKOs (32 of all 71 PKOs to date and 6 out of 12 of current PKOs).”
Thus, from a policy perspective, PUSHKINA, SIEWERT and WOLFF state, military PKOs should not be implemented in the absence of (prior) domestic consent and cooperation or in the presence of external belligerent support.
“As we know from other research, the drivers behind UN Security Council decisions on the deployment of military PKOs do not factor in these issues that we found to be crucial for their ultimate success. This raises the question whether and how such consent can be obtained and sustained, and whether and how belligerents can be cut off from external support.”
Answering this question would be one important avenue for further research, which also connects with existing studies that emphasize the importance of organizational learning for PKO success.
“Combining insights from micro-level studies and our own and other research into macro-level factors could be used to guide more in-depth case studies to establish the causal mechanisms that link the factors that we have identified to the outcomes we observe,” the authors state.
For example, process tracing in a smaller number of cases could be used to reconstruct how the core ingredients of success and failure that we have identified work, and whether a causal logic of sequencing exists, for example, deriving from the absence or presence of a major power lead that creates subsequent path dependencies.
Pushkina, D., Siewert, M. B., & Wolff, S. (2021). Mission (im)possible? UN military peacekeeping operations in civil wars. European Journal of International Relations. https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661211046602
