Small and Far Between: Peacekeeping Economies in South Sudan

Abstract

The massive expenditure on UN peacekeeping missions combined with a significant commitment of personnel and infrastructure creates 'peacekeeping economies' within host societies. We need to understand when and how peacekeeping economies are created and the kinds of factors that mitigate their occurrence, size and impact. Previous research indicates an overall tendency of UN missions to minimize involvement in host communities' economies, and considerable variation in the level of economic impact. Especially in insecure environments, the modalities of UN peacekeeping limit the level of economic interaction with host societies. South Sudan is a case in point. Annually about 10,000 people are employed and $1 billion on average spent on peacekeeping in South Sudan. However, at both the macro and micro levels the economic impact of peacekeeping has been overshadowed by the concurrent influx of oil revenue. Oil money has created a boom in the larger towns that dwarfs the impact of peacekeeping activities. The lack of domestic markets and skilled labour reduces opportunities for the missions, and their foreign personnel, to engage in economic transactions with South Sudanese.

UN Peacekeeping and Households' Well‐Being in Civil Wars

“…Notably, however, the impact of the mission's spending in our case study is limited. UNMISS is a “bunkerized” and “self‐sufficient” mission, and even the limited amount of money spent by UNMISS in the country bypasses the population and the economy, as it largely involves foreign businesses (Rolandsen 2015, p. 367). Furthermore, the direct channel (B) is also limited geographically (i.e., few nationals are hired and transactions occur in a limited radius where UN personnel moves, see Jennings and Bøås 2015) and temporally.…”

Water Service Provision and Peacebuilding in East Timor: Exploring the Socioecological Determinants for Sustaining Peace

“…In essence, service provisionif balanced with how much a state extracts from communities (Holsti 1996)helps to mobilize people behind the state. Indeed, together with increased urbanization and literacy, infrastructure provision was a key policy of the initial postwar socialist statebuilding project in Yugoslavia (Sekulic, Massey, and Hodson 1994), across sub-Saharan Africa throughout the 1960s and 1970s (Chazan et al 1992), and again today in new states such as South Sudan, although more in word than in action (Rolandsen 2015). We therefore expect that post-conflict naturalresource management through state actors should have a positive effect on the state-society relationship, and thus on the peace.…”

“…For instance, the Environment Strategy of the UN Department of Field Support (DFS) published in April 2017 states that UN peace operations should aim 'to seek a positive long-term legacy through the development of specific environment-related projects that may benefit societies and ecosystems over the long term' (UN DFS 2017). Such long-term legacies with regard to infrastructure development contribute to the consolidation of the postconflict state's legitimacy (OECD 2008) because such legacies aid society's perception of the state as the right provider for their immediate needs (Krasner and Risse 2014;Rolandsen 2015).…”

The economic cost of conflict: Evidence from South Sudan

“…The analysis presented in this paper does not aim to quantify the economic cost of peacekeeping (see, e.g., Rolandsen, 2015b) or the delivery of life‐saving humanitarian goods and services (see, e.g., Ramachandran & Walz, 2015). Nor do we attempt to quantify the economic cost due to destruction of lives, property, environmental goods, and costs to the wider region (see, e.g., Edwards, 2010).…”