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Discussions about the utility of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping has been ongoing since its emergence in the late 1940s, and scholars have studied different peacekeeping missions from various perspectives. However, there is a gap in the research when it comes to evaluating the state of peace in countries that have experienced successful UN peacekeeping missions a few years after the mission is finished. The UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia (UNMIL) was deemed a success when it was finished. For that reason, this study investigates the state of peace in Liberia five years after the UN peacekeeping mission handed overall security-related responsibilities to the Liberian government in 2016. The state of peace in Liberia today will be analyzed using Johan Galtung’s definition of peace and violence. This study has been conducted as a qualitative desk and case study and has followed abductive reasoning. The data used in this study have been analyzed through text analysis. Findings show that the UN indeed succeeded in reaching their goals for the mission. But, when applying Galtung’s definition of peace and violence it is clear that the goals set by the UN can be categorized as negative peace, which means the absence of direct violence. Positive peace however, which means the absence of direct, structural and cultural violence, has not yet been achieved since there is still high levels of corruption and discrimination in the country. The conclusion includes a discussion about whether or not the UN can and/or shall aim for positive peace, or if negative peace is a realistic goal and then hand the process of achieving higher levels of positive peace to the host country, in this case Liberia.

United Nations (UN) peacekeeping principles affect all peacekeeping, thus it is important to under-stand their development. Many important changes in peacekeeping concern robustness and human security. This paper investigates developments in these two areas and their interrelation by means of a literature review, document analysis and case studies of two contemporary UN peacekeeping mis-sions. It identifies three generations in UN peacekeeping marked by changes in human security and robustness and relates these changes to the concept of sovereignty. Further, it identifies human secu-rity as the main motivation behind increasingly robust UN peacekeeping and finds that robust peacekeeping can, but does not necessarily, lead to greater human security.

The current scale and scope of peacekeeping missions is unprecedented and with this increasing reliance on peacekeeping as a tool to manage threats to peace and security come questions about who should keep the peace. Is it, as many assume, the United Nations? Is it a regional organization, such as the African Union? Or is it an individual state? Each of these different types of peacekeeping operations have different strengths and weaknesses associated with them in terms of legitimacy, institutional capacity, local and regional awareness, resources, and military effectiveness. This dissertation analyzes types of peacekeeping operations to determine which is the most effective in restoring peace and stability and why. I use a structured, focused comparative case study methodology to examine eight cases of peacekeeping, across two countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone, each of which has been subject to all three types of peacekeeping operations. This approach allows me to hold a number of control variables constant, providing a clear test of the impact of the type of intervention. I found that the type of PKO makes a difference to the success or failure of that mission. PKOs run by lead states are more likely to be successful because they are more willing to use force and they are more likely to have the resources and capabilities necessary to implement that force. Further, I found that two types of PKOs working together can use their strengths to compensate for each other’s weaknesses. I also present a quantitative study with a larger sample size that both substantiates my findings and allows me to generalize them to a wider universe of cases. / Political Science

United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations are regularly evaluated and critiqued by both scholars and policy-makers, however this scrutiny is commonly restricted to program- and project-level effects. This neglects the unique impacts that emerge from the individuals who populate interventions and those they encounter in conflict-affected communities. The objective of this research is to place these individuals, and their actions and relationships, at the centre of analysis and investigate their impacts independent of, or distinct from, program-level effects. Through the case study of south Lebanon and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), this dissertation explores the social and physical spaces that connect peacekeepers and Lebanese individuals in the course of their everyday lives and actions. Through the theoretical lenses of cultural peacebuilding and hybridity, I conceptualize the meaning of these relationships to the individuals involved, to the UNIFIL mission, and to peace at a broader level. This political ethnography undertakes a complex, relational approach to understanding intervention impacts and effectiveness, thereby 'peopling' a UN peacekeeping operation. Based on original empirical data consisting of 82 ethno-biographical interviews with Lebanese individuals and UNIFIL veterans, alongside 14 months of participant and field observation, I argue that Lebanese people agentially transform superficial, formal encounters with peacekeepers into substantial, impactful relationships through the Lebanese culture of hospitality. In informal, private and local spaces and contexts, 'thick' identities are enacted and cultural exchange occurs, which transforms and hybridizes the knowledges and identities of both peacekeepers and Lebanese people. Through this process of hybridization, interlocutors emerge who facilitate the connections of others in their social networks and function as bridges across the international-local divide. This hybridization augments UNIFIL's access to local knowledge, which improves local support and operational effectiveness. Further, the relationships and connections between peacekeepers and Lebanese people contribute to the restoration or amelioration of Lebanese human identity needs, which are threatened by the conflict with Israel and the ways in which it intersects with intrastate tensions. This constitutes incremental change productive to complex pathways toward peace in south Lebanon.

Multilateral interventions for regime change are not new, but their mutation has been congruent with an aggressive attempt to introduce liberal values into peacekeeping and related operations discernible from the 1990s. While recognizing non-coercive, needs-based elements of interventions for peace, this article contends that regime change wars have harmonized with the UN's facilitation of aggressive peace missions and coercive peacebuilding. In the 1990s the perceived failures of, and demands on, the UN, led to a general policy of permissiveness for Western states to pursue regime change, accompanied by reconstruction and development opportunities to promote neoliberal ideas of political economy in war-torn societies. This article focuses on two aspects of international operations fostered through or by the UN: the militarization of peace missions and peacebuilding through neoliberal political economy. It commends further research into the networks of power and resistance that have populated aggressive peace.

Why do local populations regard peacekeepers from certain countries as friendly, and from others not? This study delves into the cultural proximity and cultural awareness of peacekeepers, suggesting it as one factor that influences public perceptions on the peacekeepers and the mission as a whole. I argue that a closer cultural proximity of peacekeepers to the mission country correlates positively with a more favorable public perception on the mission. The working mechanism behind the relationship is based on the theory of winning hearts and minds. Aiming for empirical validation, this hypothesis undergoes examination by using a structured focused comparison between the Malian cities of Gao and Timbuktu. In addition, I complement the study with the method of process tracing, using own data collected through expert interviews with 10 individuals who gained field experience in MINUSMA. The results of the structured focused comparison yield unexpected results: The evidence does not align with the hypothesis due to a lack of variation in the peacekeepers‘ cultural proximity between the cases. However, the tracing of the causal mechanism proves invaluable. It finds support for certain parts of the theorized mechanism while inviting for further exploration on additional intervening factors that reshape or complement the causal chain.

<p dir="ltr">What are the local effects of UN PKOs? Prior research examines the violence reducing effects of peacekeepers at a national and yearly level, but that obscures the real-world effects of peacekeepers who operate at a local level. This dissertation theorizes how UN peacekeepers prevent, displace, and sometimes increase violence against civilians by state and rebel actors. "Who Keeps the Peace?" examines the gendered effects of UN peacekeepers, showing that women increase the operational effectiveness of PKOs. "Does Peace Remain After the Peacekeepers Leave?" explores the durability of subnational peace and theorizes how violence may displace upon peacekeeper arrival. "All About That Base... No Troubl" provides the first analysis of peacekeeping bases by theorizing the gravity of peacekeeping bases over time and space. Each chapter utilizes advanced causal inference methods to understand how peacekeeping impacts violence, from logistic regressions, instrumental variables, and difference-in-differences designs. I conclude by tying together each chapter and exploring what the results mean for the UN, policymakers, and future researchers.</p>

Why do some international actors who intervene militarily in civil wars continue their military engagement after the war has ended, while other actors end their intervention and withdraw all military forces at the conclusion of the war? What explains the continuation of outside military intervention from wartime to peacetime, and why might this dimension of military intervention vary across conflicts? In analyzing this puzzle, this study introduces a new theoretical concept: persistent intervention. Defined as the continuation of an external state’s military intervention in a civil war after the war ends, the concept of persistent intervention sheds light on the connections between wartime and peacetime, or the post-conflict period. Drawing on a new dataset on post-war interventions across the globe in countries experiencing civil wars that ended between 1957-2020, as well as detailed comparative case studies of four interventions from the Middle East and Africa, this dissertation finds the availability and access to political and economic gains of the intervention as the main driver of the decision to keep troops in peacetime. The domestic elites' desire to protect these predatory gains from the intervention leaves some interveners entangled in the civil war country, where leaving too soon might devalue and destabilize the investments. The primary factor undermining persistent interventions is found to be intervener domestic instability that disrupts this extractive mechanism. Findings also have implications for external involvement in peace agreements and peacekeeping operations. / Political Science

This dissertation examines the role of third parties in civil war mediation and peacekeeping efforts. The dissertation makes two primary contributions to the literature. First, it builds upon existing literature by applying state-level arguments of third party involvement in mediation and peacekeeping efforts to the United Nations Security Council and regional IGOs. Second, it investigates the role of communication and coordination between third parties in their conflict management efforts.