Search

Can civilian personnel deployments in UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs) help protect civilians in conflict-affected countries? Existing studies on local peacekeeping effectiveness in protecting civilians are limited by their focus on military personnel deployments. This manuscript shifts the focus to civilian personnel deployments in PKOs. We know that civil war parties coerce civilians into providing support for them or to achieve private political and material aims. While civilians are the victims of these strategies, they are not without agencies and can sometimes protect themselves from attack. Building on these insights, the manuscript proposes three avenues through which civilian personnel may help protect civilians from violence. First, civilian peacekeepers may help deter violent coercion against non-combatants by buttresses UN military operations, e.g., though their close ties to local partners and information gathering. Second, civilian personnel in PKOs may help manage the political conflict underpinning strategies of targeting non-combatants, e.g., through mediation support. Third and finally, civilian personnel may help foster and facilitate non-violent resistance by civilians against armed groups and violent escalation through, e.g., early warning systems, inter-community meetings, reconciliation events, and normative messaging. Using original data on local deployments of civilian personnel in 12 peacekeeping operations in 10 Sub-Saharan African countries (1998-2021), spatial models provide evidence for this argument. Instrumental variable analyses support a causal interpretation of the relationship between civilian personnel deployments and the reduction in civilian killings by identity militias.

Supplemental Material for Peacekeepers Without Helmets: How Violence Shapes Local Peacebuilding by Civilian Peacekeepers Allard Duursma, Hannah Smidt in Comparative Political Studies.

sj-pdf-1-jcr-10.1177_00220027211068897 Introducing the Peacekeeping Mandates (PEMA) Dataset by Jessica Di Salvatore, Magnus Lundgren, Kseniya Oksamytna, and Hannah M. Smidt in Journal of Conflict Resolution

Democracy assistance, including the promotion of electoral security, is often a central component of contemporary peacekeeping operations. Preventing violence during post-conflict elections is critical for the war-to-democracy transition. Yet little is known about the role of peacekeepers in this effort. To fill this gap, this study provides the first comprehensive sub-national study of peacekeeping effectiveness in reducing the risk of electoral violence. It combines geo-referenced data on peacekeeping deployment across all multidimensional peacekeeping missions in Africa over the past two decades with fine-grained data on electoral violence. The analysis finds a negative association between peacekeeping presence and the risk of electoral violence. The relationship is of a similar magnitude in the pre- and post-election periods. However, the association is more strongly negative for violence perpetrated by non-state actors compared to violence perpetrated by government-affiliated actors. Analyses using two-way fixed-effects models and matching mitigate potential selection biases.

International ‘naming and shaming’ campaigns rely on domestic civil society organizations for information on local human rights conditions. To stop this flow of information, some governments restrict civil society organizations, for example by limiting their access to funding. Do restrictions reduce international ‘naming and shaming’ campaigns that rely on information by domestic civil society organizations? We argue that on the one hand, restrictions may reduce civil society organizations’ ability and motives to monitor local abuses. On the other hand, these organizations may mobilize against restrictions and find new ways of delivering information on human rights violations to international publics. Using a cross-national dataset and in-depth evidence from Egypt, we find that low numbers of restrictions trigger shaming by international non-governmental organizations. Yet, once governments impose multiple types of restrictions, it becomes harder for civil society organizations to adapt, resulting in fewer international shaming campaigns.

Supplemental material, Appendix_RR1 for Keeping electoral peace? Activities of United Nations peacekeeping operations and their effects on election-related violence by Hannah Smidt in Conflict Management and Peace Science

United Nations peacekeeping operations (UN PKOs) increasingly engage with local communities to support peace processes in war-torn countries. Yet, while existing research tends to focus on the coercive and state-building functions of UN PKOs, their concrete local activities with community leaders and populations remain, empirically and theoretically, understudied. Thus, this study investigates how peacekeepers' community-based intergroup dialogue activities influence communal violence. It argues that facilitating dialogue between different communal identity-based groups locally can revive intergroup coordination and diminish negative biases against other groups, thereby reducing the risk of communal conflict escalation. This argument is tested using a novel data set of intergroup dialogue activities organized by the UN PKO in Côte d'Ivoire across 107 departments from October 2011 to May 2016. Bivariate probit and matching address the nonrandom assignment of these interventions. The analyses provide robust evidence that the UN PKO mitigated communal violence by organizing intergroup dialogues.

Supplemental Material, SupplementaryMaterial_2019-6-4_(002) for United Nations Peacekeeping Locally: Enabling Conflict Resolution, Reducing Communal Violence by Hannah M. Smidt in Journal of Conflict Resolution

Immer mehr Regierungen in Subsahara-Afrika kontrollieren zivilgesellschaftliche Gruppen, die sich für Menschenrechte einsetzen. Damit engen sie nicht nur den Raum für zivilgesellschaftliche Aktivitäten ein, sie zerstören auch das Rückgrat der Demokratie und Entwicklungsmöglichkeiten. Seit den frühen 2000er-Jahren schrumpfen zivilgesellschaftliche Freiräume in vielen Ländern Subsahara-Afrikas und in anderen Weltregionen. Unter anderem schüchtern Regierungen Aktivisten ein, erlassen restriktive Gesetze oder erschweren die offizielle Registrierung von zivilgesellschaftlichen Organisationen. Zivilgesellschaftliche Organisationen beobachten Menschenrechtsverletzungen und machen diese öffentlich. Wenn Regierungen schwere Verstöße gegen Menschenrechte begehen, ergibt sich daraus ein Anreiz, kritische Organisationen mundtot zu machen. Dieser Anreiz ist stärker und die Zivilgesellschaft ist in größerer Gefahr, wenn Regierungen internationalem Druck ausgesetzt sind, Menschenrechtsabkommen einzuhalten. Vereinzelte Restriktionen bringen die Zivilgesellschaft nicht zum Schweigen. Stattdessen protestieren Aktivisten gegen diese Restriktionen und finden kreative Wege, Menschenrechtsverletzungen bekannt zu machen, z.B. über soziale Medien. Es gibt jedoch einen besorgniserregenden Rückgang öffentlicher Kritik, wenn Regierungen systematisch durch verschiedene Restriktionen zivilgesellschaftliche Freiräume einschränken. Der schwindende Raum für zivilgesellschaftliche Aktivitäten macht auf unbeabsichtigte Folgen von internationalem Engagement für die Einhaltung der Menschenrechte aufmerksam. Dennoch sollten sich Europa und Deutschland nicht von den Verteidigern der Menschenrechte in Subsahara-Afrika abwenden - auch nicht im Zuge der politischen Förderungen von privatwirtschaftlichen Investitionen in afrikanischen Ländern im Rahmen des "Compact with Africa" der führenden Wirtschaftsnationen (G20). Nur eine unabhängige und aktive Zivilgesellschaft kann die Demokratie vertiefen und eine gerechte und nachhaltige wirtschaftliche Entwicklung in Subsahara-Afrika und anderswo gewährleisten.

A growing number of governments in sub-Saharan Africa are now cracking down on civil society organisations addressing human rights issues. Governments are not only shrinking the space for civic activism, but also des­troying the backbone of democracy and inclusive development. In many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, civic space has been shrinking since the early 2000s - mirroring a global trend of restrictions being imposed on civil society organisations. Governments intimidate and arrest activists, and publicly criticise their advocacy work. They also promulgate restrictive policies, such as laws that curtail the foreign funding of domestic civil society groups, and resort to subtle ways of restricting civil society's operating space - for instance, via cumbersome registration processes for civil society organisations. Civil society organisations monitor and publicly expose human rights abuses. If governments commit severe abuses, they therefore have an incentive to impose restrictions on civil society activists and to silence their criticism. This incentive is stronger and civil society in greater danger when governments face pressure to live up to international human rights norms - for instance, if they have previously committed to human rights treaties or fear investigation by the International Criminal Court. Isolated and sporadic government restrictions do not silence civil society. Instead, activists protest such restrictions and find creative ways of making human rights violations known - for example, via social media. However there has been a worrying decline in publicly voiced criticism recently as governments impose a large number of different restrictions, ones that render it difficult and indeed dangerous to expose government misbehaviour. The shrinking of civic space calls attention to the unintended consequences of promoting human rights abroad. International pressure to live up to human rights norms has led governments to impose restrictions on domestic civil society activists to silence their criticism. Nevertheless, the current policy shift towards mobilising private investment in selected African countries (per the G20 Compact with Africa) should not deflect international attention from the precarious situation of human rights defenders. Only an independent and active civil society can deepen democracy and guarantee equitable and sustainable economic development in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.