Blue Helmets, Red Flags: Institutional, Societal, and Military Determinants of Peacekeeping Abuses

Abstract

United Nations peacekeeping soldiers commit atrocities while deployed despite their mandate to protect civilians from harm. Yet, there is tremendous variation across missions in reported human rights abuses. Why are some missions more susceptible to misconduct than others? To answer this puzzle, we identify three broad sources of influence on peacekeeper behavior: institutions, society, and military culture. Using newly collected data, we find that host-country and contributing-country institutions, particularly press freedoms and rule of law, dramatically decrease violations. Compliance with international humanitarian law also decreases violations, though to a lesser degree than institutions. Societal influences, such as gender norms and income inequality, have virtually no impact on abuses. We illustrate the utility of these findings by generating out-of-sample predictions for hypothetical peacekeeping missions in countries with recent political turmoil.

‘They Were Going to the Beach, Acting like Tourists, Drinking, Chasing Girls’: A Mixed-Methods Study on Community Perceptions of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by UN Peacekeepers in Haiti

“…Since the first reports of the early 1990s, almost all PSO have been associated with sexual misconduct to some degree of magnitude and severity (Lee 2017). Different missions have raised different concerns, and recent academic scholarship has led to some understanding of the factors underlying SEA within the context stability of peacekeeping economies around bases (Jennings and Bøås 2015;Jennings 2015;Rodriguez and Kinne 2019) including the economic power differentials between members of the local population and PSO personnel (Bell, Flynn, and Machain 2018).…”

Analysis of the Russian Governance

“…Marisella Rodriguez, Brandon J Kinne has found that to a significant extent the freedom of press and the reign of law dramatically reduce the number of offenses [3]. I.V.…”