Peacekeeping During Times of Terror: Terrorism and UN Peacekeeping Operations in African Civil Wars

ISBN-10
ISBN-13
9798641791210
Category
Civil war
Pages
183
Language
English
Published
2020
Author
Thomas William Bentley

Description

Since the end of the Cold War, the frequency of intrastate conflict increased dramatically. Unsurprisingly, the rise of intrastate conflict has been met with an increase in third-party interventions such as those carried out by the United Nations. United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations have become a common tool the international community employs to manage the devastating consequences of civil war and as a means to facilitate conflict resolution in the midst of armed violence. Despite the substantial increase in UN deployments and the propensity to use peacekeeping as a tool for conflict resolution, evidence remains mixed as to whether or not the UN's is effective in reducing hostilities and ending active armed conflict.Extant studies have found that peacekeeping reduces battlefield violence and civilian victimization during active civil war. These studies suggest that as the number of UN troops increases in size at the monthly level, there is an associated decrease in violence. However, peacekeepers are increasingly put on the frontlines against rebel groups that frequently use terrorism as a tactic. This dissertation provides the first empirical examination of UN peacekeeping and terrorism during civil war. I analyze how the number of UN peacekeeping personnel deployed to civil war influences the use of terrorism in all civil wars in Africa from 1992 to 2011. The results find an associated increase in terrorism when UN military peacekeepers deploy. This relationship is robust even when examining across different units of analysis and under various modeling specifications and techniques. Given this finding, this dissertation also examines in greater depth the target preferences of rebel groups and the tactical diversity in which rebel groups pursue given the presence of 'blue helmets.' I broadly find that attacks against hard and soft targets increase as the number of UN troops increase in African civil wars. However, I find that rebel groups are less likely to focus on these targets as the number of UN police increases during civil war - perhaps a silver lining to UN missions. Moreover, rebel groups respond to peacekeeping operations by diversifying their tactics in response to increase pressures incurred by UN military troop deployments. The more comprehensive array of tactics enables armed actors to undercut peacekeeping operations since UN peacekeeping operations are primarily defensive in nature, and thus limited in ways in which the mission can successfully defend areas and respond to increasing and diverse threats. While the majority of this dissertation examines peacekeeping at the macro-level of analysis, the final chapter examines at the sub-national level the relationship between UN peacekeeping operations and terrorism. The results substantiate the main finding in the previous chapters that increases in UN peacekeeping forces leads to an increase in terror attacks. However, sheds greater light to the notion that rebel groups exhibit variation in their target preferences as the number of UN peacekeepers increase in size. Optimistically, when considering the consolidated effect of local peacekeeping, that is the number of neighboring troops in proximity to a given location, there is a reduction in the frequency of attacks against 'soft targets.' However, when examining the number of UN troops in a given space-time, non-state actors increase attacks against 'hard targets.' Collectively, these findings provide greater understanding to ways in which the UN can improve current and future missions and equally underscores an important policy implication that has been met with friction - is counterterrorism a bridge to far for UN peacekeeping operations.

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