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The adoption of UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1540 in 2004 reflects an emerging consensus that more should be done by the international community to address the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. UNSCR 1540 articulates a universal, legally binding obligation for all states to confront proliferation by adopting effective export control systems. To date, however, there have been no attempts to systematically analyze compliance with this new obligation, making it impossible to assess the success of this measure and the underlying causes of any shortcomings. This study addresses this by conducting a systematic empirical analysis of state compliance with UNSCR 1540. Drawing upon theories of compliance with international law, we investigate two distinct explanations for variation in the degree to which states adopt nonproliferation export controls: one based on state interests and enforcement and the other based on state capacity. Our statistical tests of these theories use a new, cross-national data set detailing the nonproliferation policies of 30 states. The empirical results indicate that compliance with international nonproliferation obligations is influenced most by a state's economic and governmental capacities and has little to do with interest-based factors. These findings suggest that capacity-building programs are the best option for improving the implementation of UNSCR 1540 and of nonproliferation efforts in general.

While United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations (PKOs) are generally considered to reduce the likelihood of civil war recurrence, attention in recent years has shifted to understanding the dynamics unique to post‐Cold War peacekeeping, including the changing makeup and mandate of PKOs, and associated patterns of peacekeeper misconduct. While several studies of misconduct emphasize peacekeepers’ implication in sexual exploitation and abuse of host country citizens, this study goes the next step by assessing peacekeeping’s relationship to human trafficking more broadly—a perennial concern in post‐conflict states. Though UN PKOs are not always directly responsible for increases in human trafficking in mission host countries, this paper considers how the attributes of UN peacekeeping missions may create the conditions where trafficking is likely to flourish or flounder.

Recent research has begun to examine patterns of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) perpetrated by peacekeepers deployed in United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations (PKOs). Yet, SEA makes up only a fraction of credible allegations of misconduct by peacekeepers. In this article we explore the contours of misconduct in UN PKOs beyond SEA allegations. We argue that the behavior of military forces in their own countries should easily predict their behavior when deployed as part of UN PKOs, which are typically set in fragile, postconflict countries where civilians have minimal protections or legal recourse. Using an original dataset of misconduct in PKOs from 2009 to 2016, we find the behavior of PKO contributor states toward their own populations strongly and consistently predicts the behavior of these states’ military forces in UN PKOs. These findings have implications for the vetting, supervision, and composition of PKOs.

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