United Nations Peacekeeping Locally: Enabling Conflict Resolution, Reducing Communal Violence

• Date: 01 February 2020
• Author: Hannah M. Smidt
• DOI: 10.1177/0022002719859631
• Published date: 01 February 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

United Nations

Peacekeeping Locally:

Enabling Conflict

Resolution, Reducing

Communal Violence

Hannah M. Smidt

1

Abstract

United Nations peacekeeping operations (UN PKOs) increasingly engage with local

communities to support peace processes in war-torn countries. Yet, while existing

research tends to focus on the coercive and state-building functions of UN PKOs,

their concrete local activities with community leaders and populations remain,

empirically and theoretically, understudied. Thus, this study investigates how

peacekeepers’ community-based intergroup dialogue activities influence communal

violence. It argues that facilitating dialogue between different communal identity-

based groups locally can revive intergroup coordination and diminish negative biases

against other groups, thereby reducing the risk of communal conflict escalation. This

argument is tested using a novel data set of intergroup dialogue activities organized

by the UN PKO in Co

ˆte d’Ivoire across 107 departments from October 2011 to

May 2016. Bivariate probit and matching address the nonrandom assignment of

these interventions. The analyses provide robust evidence that the UN PKO miti-

gated communal violence by organizing intergroup dialogues.

Keywords

conflict resolution, international peacekeeping, United Nations, intercommunal

violence, peacebuilding

1

GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Institute of African Affairs, Hamburg, Germany

Corresponding Author:

Hannah M. Smidt, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Institute of African Affairs, Neuer

Jungfernstieg 21, Hamburg, 20354, Germany.

Email: hannah.smidt@giga-hamburg.de

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2020, Vol. 64(2-3) 344-372

ªThe Author(s) 2019

DOI: 10.1177/0022002719859631

journals.sagepub.com/home/jcr

In countries emerging from war, state capacity is often weak. State-building efforts

can take decades to bear fruit. In contrast, local community leaders may retain high

levels of legitimacy (Baldwin and Mvukiyehe 2015) and local conflict resolution

mechanisms tend to appear remarkably resilient (De Juan 2017). This begs the

question: can international actors advance postwar peacebuilding by engaging with

local communities and their conflict resolution mechanisms?

1

Contemporary UN peacekeeping operations (UN PKOs) are often mandated to

engage in conflict management at the local level, as in Coˆte d’Ivoire, the Central

African Republic, or Sudan. Intergroup dialogues represent one of the most promi-

nent tools for doing so. They are organized by the civilian components in UN PKOs

and involve community leaders and ordina ry citizens of different ethnic groups

(United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations [UN DPKO] 2012, 167-

73). Yet, despite the importance of changes in local norms and behavior for sustain-

able peacebuilding (Stedman 2002, 20) and the centrality of local conflict resolution

capacity for peaceful political development (e.g., Tajima 2013; Wig and Kromrey

2018), research has neglected these activities with community leaders and popula-

tions locally. Do UN peacekeepers’ local intergroup dialogues help reduce violence

after war?

This study suggests that UN PKOs’ local intergroup dialogue activities help

decrease communal violence. First, intergroup dialogue activities offer an opportu-

nity for community leaders of different groups to meet and discuss local conflict

issues, sometimes with the help of direct mediation by civilian peacekeepers. In so

doing, these activities facilitate intergroup information sharing and coordination on

intergroup agreements to maintain social order locally. Second, intergroup dialogue

activities may reduce negative feelings and biases toward “out-groups” by providing

opportunities for positive contact between members of different groups living in the

same locality and by promoting norms of peaceful intergroup relations. Overall,

intergroup dialogue may thus mitigate violent communal conflict.

2

I test this observable implication with novel spatially and temporally disaggre-

gated data on intergroup dialogu e activities organized by the UN PKO in Coˆte

d’Ivoire. The data set was created based on thousands of UN press releases published

between October 2011 and May 2016. In this period, the United Nations Peace-

keeping Operation in Coˆte d’Ivoire (UNOCI) carried out 777 intergroup activities in

different towns and villages. Peacekeepers organized these activities in response to

or in anticipation of violent conflict. To address the nonrandom selection of the

locations and timing of intergroup dialogues, the research design uses matching and

bivariate probit models.

Postwar Coˆte d’Ivoire is an ideal case for studying how intergroup dialogues

affect communal violence. First, violence in Coˆte d’Ivoire is often motivated by

community-level cleavages and aided or abetted by civilians (Balcells 2017). There-

fore, a substantive proportion of the violence in this country is the type that can be

addressed by local-level intergroup dialogue. Second, disputes over resources, and

particularly over land, are an important root cause of communal violence in Coˆte

Smidt 345