Can institutions cause peace? Peacekeeping in the Middle East as an international regime

This dissertation investigates the research question: Can an international institution alter state behavior and thereby contribute to the peaceful resolution of a conflict? It focuses on the series of interrelated peacekeeping efforts undertaken to help resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict from 1948--1994. By employing qualitative regime analysis to analyze these sequential operations over a forty-six year period, this study provides evidence as to the relative importance of institutions in a state-centric international system. This dissertation offers an alternative approach to the analysis of international peacekeeping by evaluating the long-term effects of peacekeeping on state behavior, and concomitantly, the effects of varying state behavior on an international regime. The findings of this study offer new perspectives on the relative importance of regimes and the utility of regime analysis in explaining the importance of international institutions.; The thesis of this dissertation is that the individual peacekeeping missions conducted in the Middle East in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict can be conceptualized as components of a broader Middle East peacekeeping regime, which in turn is a subset of, and operates within the policy spaces defined by an international peacekeeping regime. Evidence presented on the evolution of the peacekeeping regime in the Middle East indicates that institutions do matter. The progression from cease-fire through armistice to peacekeeping to a peace treaty and permanent security arrangements in the case of Egypt-Israel would not have been possible without the involvement of the United Nations and the various peacekeeping organizations. However, the role of a hegemon was crucial in advancing the conflict resolution progress, and along with other interested state actors, influenced the evolution of the regime, indicating the presence of a feedback loop. Rather than independently altering state behavior, the peacekeeping regime facilitated incremental agreements to modify state actors' behavior due to their common aversion to accidental war. In turn, the peacekeeping regime adapted its rules and decision-making procedures in response to variance in state behavior. Evidence from this study supports the contention that international institutions are intervening variables between causal factors in international politics.