When Peacekeeping Missions Collide: Balancing Multiple Roles in Peace Operations

The contemporary world is beset with a wide variety of conflicts, all of which have features without historical precedent. While most accounts of peacekeeping focus on attempts to limit violent conflict, this traditional view hardly captures the variety of challenges that today's peacekeepers face. Peacekeepers are now thrust into the unconventional roles of monitoring elections, facilitating transitions to the rule of law, distributing humanitarian aid, and resolving conflicts in civil societies that are undergoing transformation. This is the context for understanding the activities of modern-day peacekeepers. In When Peacekeeping Missions Collide, Paul F. Diehl, Daniel Druckman, and Grace B. Mueller provide an original and comprehensive assessment on how different peacekeeping missions intersect with one another in contemporary conflicts. They begin by documenting the patterns of peacekeeping missions in 70 UN operations, noting the dramatic increase in number and diversity of operations since the end of the Cold War as well as the shift to conflicts with a substantial internal conflict component. They then turn to the overarching question of the book: how do individual peacekeeping missions impact the outcomes of other missions within the same operations? To answer this, the authors have developed a novel dataset of UN peace operations from 1946-2016 to assess mission compatibility. Moreover, the authors utilize five detailed case studies of UN peacekeeping operations featuring mission interdependence and then measure the results against their theoretical expectations. Ultimately, the model they have developed for analyzing the effectiveness of the far more complex peace operations of today--relative to the simpler operations of the past--is essential reading for scholars of peacekeeping and conflict management.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements List of Tables List of Figures Chapter 1: The Puzzle of Multiple Missions Chapter 2: Patterns in Multi-Mission Peace Operations and Theoretical Expectations Chapter 3: Research Plan Chapter 4: Limited Mission Cases: ONUC and UNPROFOR Chapter 5: Complex Mission Cases: UNTAET and MONUC Chapter 6: The United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) Chapter 7: Conclusions and Implications References Index

About the Author :
Paul F. Diehl is an independent scholar of international relations. He is also Henning Larsen Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Ashbel Smith Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Texas-Dallas, where he was Associate Provost and Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. He is former President of the Peace Science Society and former President of the International Studies Association. His areas of expertise include the causes of war, UN peacekeeping, and international law. Daniel Druckman is Professor Emeritus at George Mason's Schar School of Policy and Government. He is also an Honorary Professor at Macqaurie University (Sydney) and the University of Queensland (Brisbane). He is the author of Negotiation, Identity, and Justice: Pathways to Agreement, which is a depiction of his more than five-decade career as a social scientist. He has received five Lifetime Achievement awards. Grace B. Mueller is a Lecturer of Political Science in the Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences at Southern Methodist University. Mueller was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the Army Cyber Institute at West Point. Her current research explores how cyber conflict affects various aspects of International Relations.

Review :
This important new book, written by renowned experts, takes a look under the bonnet of UN peacekeeping to examine how the different tasks peacekeepers are given interact with one another and influence the overall effectiveness of UN operations. Combining detailed case studies with rigorous social scientific analysis, this book takes a giant leap in thought and understanding. The results are so compelling that readers—academics, students, and practitioners alike—won't look at peacekeeping in the same way again. Not always, but on average, peacekeeping works. This insightful book asks how and why peacekeeping is asked to work in ever more complex ways, with 'Christmas trees' of ambitions. Then it develops evidence-based principles for priority setting. 'Security first' is not a surprising finding. When a peace operation fails to stem the bloodshed and rape, subsequent goals, like moving on to a post-conflict election, likely will have limited success. A surprise, on the other hand, is that accomplishing 'democracy' with peace operation support is mostly not a gateway to further mission accomplishments. This is thoughtful, helpful research by greats of peacekeeping research on matters of importance. Diehl, Druckman and Mueller add a valuable perspective on our understanding of peace operations success (and failure) by focusing on a neglected factor: missions' interdependencies. The book offers novel insights on how to define and assess compatibility between simultaneous or sequential missions, and implications for success. The conceptualization and operationalization of compatibility is followed by a clear set of empirical expectations tested across five in-depth case studies, which include some of the most prominent peacekeeping missions...Academic rigor and policy relevance makes the book a must-read for those interested in the study and practice of peace operations. Peacekeeping operations are tasked with many 'missions,' some of which overlap, are contradictory, or have varying effects on one another. The authors build a novel quantitative dataset, while employing qualitative cases studies, in order to evaluate the extent to which one mission, say, promoting democratic elections, might reinforce or undermine other missions like providing security. In this way, the authors fill an important 'middle-level' theoretical and empirical gap in the literature. A must-read for peacekeeping scholars, students, and practitioners. This book provides an excellent guide to understanding the complexity of UN peacekeeping. Diehl, Druckman, and Mueller advance the field by conceptualizing and categorizing the overall goals of UN peacekeeping operations. Their rich empirical analysis generates new insights into the highly policy-relevant question of how to sequence and combine different missions that the UN seeks to accomplish. When Peacekeeping Missions Collide will enrich both scholarship and policy discussions on the future of peacekeeping. The complexity of peacekeeping missions and their effectiveness has outpaced our understanding of them. In this nuanced book, Diehl, Druckman, and Mueller offer a clear framework for understanding the different missions involved in peace operations, the ways in which they interact, and the effects of these dynamics on success. This is the much-needed advancement we have been waiting for.