Examining UN PKO contributions at multiple levels

• Author: Min Ye,Quan Li
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00220027221114863
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution

2023, Vol. 67(2-3) 349–374

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00220027221114863

journals.sagepub.com/home/jcr

Examining UN PKO

contributions at multiple

levels

Min Ye

1

and Quan Li

2



Abstract

Most empirical studies on states’personnel contributions to UN peacekeeping op-

erations (PKOs) use a state’s annual contributions as the unit of analysis. A critical

problem of the state-level analysis is that it ignores the fact that states have to decide

how to distribute these peacekeepers among more than a dozen peacekeeping mis-

sions. Ignoring the mission-level decision misses a signif‌icant part of states’UN PKO

contributions and could bias our empirical analysis. We propose a two-level model that

sees a state’s UN PKO contributions as the interactions between the state-level and

mission-level factors. This model is employed to revisit the heatedly debated “re-

imbursement hypothesis”. Our analysis of the empirical data between 1990 and

2018 shows a mixed relationship between states’economic development and their UN

PKO contributions. We also f‌ind that middle-income rather than low-income

countries are the most critical providers of UN PKOs since the end of the cold war.

Keywords

UN PKOs, personnel contributions, level of analysis, foreign policy

“Peacekeeping is not a job for soldiers, but only a soldier can do it.”

—Dag Hammarskold

1

Political Science, Coastal Carolina University, Conway, SC, USA

2

Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

Corresponding Author:

Min Ye, Political Science, Coastal Carolina University, Conway, SC 29526, USA.

Email: mye@coastal.edu

“Securing the required resources and troops [for UN peacekeeping] has con-

sumed much of my energy. I have been begging leaders to make resources

available to us.”

—Ban Ki-Moon

Introduction

The remarkable growth of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations (PKOs) has

become a critical feature of the post-cold war world. Because the UN does not have its

own armed forces, peacekeepers must be contributed by its member states. Never-

theless, states’decision to contribute their troops to UN PKOs is much more com-

plicated than we usually thought. A state has to decide not only the total number of

troops but also how these troops are distributed among all the available UN PKOs

across the world. Conceptually, this means a state’s voluntary UN PKO personnel

contributions involve decisions at two distinct levels. At the level of states, a state has to

f‌igure out the total number of peacekeepers it is willing to or capable of sending; at the

level of individual peacekeeping missions, the decision relates to specifying how many

peacekeepers have to be dispatched to each of the more than a dozen available PKOs.

Although these two levels are closely connected—the state-level decision can be seen

as both the constraints and the aggregate of the mission-level decisions, they have very

different theoretical foundations as well as empirical implications. Theoretically, the

state-level decision ref‌lects the supply side of UN PKO personnel contributions and is

mainly determined by features of the providing state such as its economic development,

political system, international status, etc. By contrast, the mission-level decision is

more sensitive to the characteristics of the demand side: the state where the peace-

keepers are deployed including its location, economic ties with the sending states, level

of risk, and the like. Empirically, because UN PKO personnel contributions involve

data from both the macro- (i.e. state) and micro- (i.e. mission) level, the selection of the

level of analysis has critical impacts upon the appropriate methods for statistical

analysis. Some hypotheses are more f‌it for a certain level of analysis, while others can

never be tested at a specif‌ic level. More important, employing a single-level statistical

model to analyze multi-level data may cause serious errors—i.e., ecological fallacies

(Snijders and Bosker 2012).

Unfortunately, in the rapidly growing body of literature on UN PKO personal

contributions, the multi-level structure of states’voluntary contributions is routinely

ignored.

1

Existing studies rarely distinguish their inquiries on the supply side from

those on the demand side. As a consequence, variables from different levels are usually

lumped together into a model and the selection of an appropriate level is either random

or determined by data availability. An inappropriate level of analysis can be costly in

our empirical exploration. As we specify shortly, the consequences range from the

inability to explore particular research questions, inaccurate outcomes, to totally er-

roneous conclusions.

350 Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution 67(2-3)