Repression in Conflict-Affected States: The Role of United Nations Peace Operations

Abstract

Since the inception of the United Nations, peace operations have been employed to respond to wars, political violence, and fragile political contexts. For the first 42 years, from 1948 to 1990, these consisted of enforcement peacekeeping operations and small-footprint individual representatives of United Nations components, or Good Offices Engagements. Since 1990, special political missions have filled a gap between these intervention options. These missions consist of international and domestic personnel in the field, tasked with mandates ranging from human rights monitoring to election observation to security sector reform. As the United Nations moves away from peacekeeping, political missions are increasingly replacing engagements around the world. However, the literature on peace operations has lagged behind. In this dissertation, I addresses the gap by engaging with recent work on political missions and identifying how longstanding peacekeeping literature applies to political missions. Further, we know little about the impact of these political missions on important outcomes, like violent state repression. In Chapter 3, I find that political missions and peacekeeping are determined especially by domestic factors, and this is particularly true for sequencing between mission types -- replacement of peacekeeping with political missions is significantly driven by the length of United Nations engagement in host countries. In Chapter 4, I find tentative evidence that political missions can reduce the severity and incidence of government-perpetrated killings, like peacekeeping. Political missions seem to operate in somewhat different environments from peacekeeping, which then impacts their ability to constrain state use of violence against civilians. In Chapter 5, I build on some existing work to define nonviolent repression and locate it within the concept of positive peace in conflict-affected states; I identify how peacekeeping operations and political missions differently affect the severity of this repression, finding that peacekeeping is effective at improving conditions for civil society but political missions have unclear effects. These chapters especially contribute to the literature on United Nations peace operations by applying lessons from the existing literature on peacekeeping to political missions; these chapters add to work on repression by discussing nonviolent repressive tactics and developing a principal-agent framework around constraints on repressive agents. The findings about similar violent repression reducing effects of political missions as peacekeeping is a positive, but the minimal effect on nonviolent repression highlights an area that the UN and academics should consider more closely moving forward.