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Violence reduction or relocation?

Effects of United Nations troops presence on local levels of violence

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Abstract

The article contributes to the research on local effects of United Nations peacekeeping operations (UNPKOs) on conflict dynamics. Focusing on spatial effects we distinguish between effects of peacekeeping presence on conflict intensity in a given area (violence reduction) and effects on the levels of violence in surrounding locations (violence relocation). We expect that the effects of peacekeeping presence differ with force projection capabilities of troop deployments. Our analyses are based on data covering the two most recent UNPKOs and violent events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 2000 to 2014, allowing for a geographically and temporally disaggregated approach. The results show that PKOs reduce the local level of violence where they are stationed, particularly when better equipped. However, we find that PKO presence can also lead to shifts in the areas affected by conflict.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, we apply a broad definition of peacekeeping including diverse types of UN missions such as peacebuilding and enforcement missions.

  2. In the following section, we focus on quantitative, large-N studies on UN peacekeeping effectiveness.

  3. Here our argument differs from that of Beardsley and Gleditsch (2015), who expect PKOs to be conducive to conflict containment, but claim this for PKOs taking up defensive positions.

  4. Yet, results were insensitive to the exclusion of these two provinces.

  5. See Figure A‑1 in the online appendix for a comparison of EDACS and UCDP-GED data illustrating this point.

  6. We define as fighting “armed interaction between two or more organized groups” (Chojnacki et al. 2012a, p. 4), hence including fighting between non-state armed actors as well as fighting between these and government forces.

  7. Please consult the online appendix for descriptive statistics on DVs and IVs.

  8. To match deployment maps with the temporal units of calendar quarters in cases of irregular release dates, we took the mean of variables over the months of a given quarter.

  9. Despite some having warned against the practice of row-standardized contiguity matrices (Elhorst 2014, p. 12–13; for a contrary view, see LeSage and Pace (2014a)), this approach is theoretically plausible in our case: The effect of peacekeeping presence and violent events in neighboring grid cells can be assumed to be stronger in border areas, where there are only few neighboring cells, since peacekeepers and rebel groups have less options of movement here than in central areas.

  10. Statistical modeling is implemented via Quasi-Maximum Likelihood Estimation using Stata’s xsmle command (Belotti et al. 2017).

  11. See online appendix for results of robustness checks.

  12. The DE for infantry is “only” statistically significant on the 10% level in the model on fatalities.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the German Research Foundation for its financial support, our colleagues Lisa Pech and Paul Zeidler for their valuable support in geo-coding the data, and our reviewers and editors for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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Correspondence to Laura Peitz.

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Peitz, L., Reisch, G. Violence reduction or relocation?. Z Friedens und Konflforsch 8, 161–181 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42597-019-00009-w

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