What explains the success of United Nations peacekeeping operations? An analysis of the conditions of peacekeeping success in civil conflicts

What determines peacekeeping success in civil conflicts? This is an important and practical issue to the UN decision-making community as well as academia. Peacekeeping can provide one mechanism for the manipulation of the costs and benefits of fighting. I argue peacekeeping can help overcome the obstacles to sustaining peace by increasing the costs of war, decreasing the costs of peace, and increasing the parties' capabilities for both war and peace.; I articulate two sets of hypotheses based on a rational choice model of peacekeeping success and test them using a newly constructed UN peacekeeping dataset. The descriptive evidence gives the following: (1) the end of the Cold War makes a clear change in the frequency of peacekeeping while it does not have any impact on peacekeeping success; and (2) peacekeeping success does not linearly correlate to mission intensity yet it is clearly tied to mission type. The probit analysis shows peacekeeping success is associated with both the environmental and management factors. The findings recommend the following to bring about successful peacekeeping: (1) the UN should coherently designs its mission not to mix or muddle fundamentally incompatible tasks; (2) as the findings indicate the presence of a peace agreement is positively correlated to peacekeeping success, the UN must utilize its peacemaking activities for success; (3) the UN should select an appropriate mission type considering both the environment of conflicts and the degree of international concern. The findings show UN-controlled coercive peacekeeping missions are most risky.; I also examine the endogenous nature of the UN's response to conflicts. Interestingly, when controlling for its endogenous nature, the findings are different from those of the probit analysis. The findings generate two important implications: (1) peacekeeping success and the degree of the UN's efforts are determined jointly. This implies the UN intelligently chooses the degree of its efforts in connection with the prospect of success. Second, the findings show the major powers' involvement does not directly and independently affect peacekeeping success but indirectly does so through strengthening peacekeeping forces. This gives important implications concerning the role of major powers in the effectiveness of UN peacekeeping.