Buying blue helmets: The role of foreign aid in the construction of UN peacekeeping missions
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343319865929 |
| Author | Vito D’Orazio,Andrew Boutton |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Research Articles |
Buying blue helmets: The role of foreign
aid in the construction of UN
peacekeeping missions
Andrew Boutton
School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs, University of Central Florida
Vito D’Orazio
School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas
Abstract
While the evolving nature and proliferation of UN peacekeeping operations in the post-Cold War period is
well documented, we know less about how personnel are recruited for these missions. Furthermore, recent
developments have rendered existing supply-side explanations for troop contributions less convincing. The
increasing demand for personnel, along with stagnant UN reimbursement rates and the rising costs of partic-
ipation that began during the 1990s, mean that it is less attractive than ever for developing countries to offer
their own troops to what have become increasingly ambitious operations. Yet, we see a large pool of developing
countries continuing to do so. To address this puzzle, we argue that UN member states with strong preferences
for establishing peacekeeping missions have begun using foreign aid as an inducement to help potential
contributors overcome the collective action problem inherent in multilateral peacekeeping operations. We
uncover strong empirical evidence that these ‘pivotal states’ strategically allocate foreign aid to persuade
contributing states to boost their contributions, and also to ensure that these missions continue to be staffed
and maintained as costs rise, particularly during the post-1999 period. We also find that states are responsive
to these financial inducements: foreign aid increases both the likelihood of contributing personnel and the size
of a state’s contribution. Theoretically, this article advances the scholarly understanding of international
organizations and cooperation by illuminating an informal, extra-organizational strategy by which IOs can
facilitate cooperation.
Keywords
collective action, foreign policy, international organizations, UN peacekeeping, United Nations
Introduction
One of the most recent UN peacekeeping missions, the
United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) was
organized to bring stability to the newly independent but
war-torn country. As of March 2018, the mission con-
sisted of 12,432 troops, provided voluntarily by UN
member states. Of these, 359 – just 2.9% – came from
OECD
1
member states. The remainder were drawn
from a range of low- and middle-income countries, most
of whom had little at stake in the conflict.
This pattern holds for other post-Cold War UN
peacekeeping missions as well. As missions have
increased dramatically in number, scope, and ambition
since the 1990s, the division of labor between industria-
lized and developing countries has become more pro-
nounced (see Figure 1). But while this discrepancy has
Corresponding author:
andrew.boutton@ucf.edu
1
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Journal of Peace Research
2020, Vol. 57(2) 312–328
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343319865929
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been well documented by peacekeeping scholars, we
know little about the process through which these mis-
sions are assembled and maintained.
2
Although personnel recruitment nominally falls under
the purview of the UN Department of Peacekeeping
Operations, the methods used by the UN to recruit and
assemble peacekeeping forces have been poorly under-
stood until recently. According to the UN, once the
mission is authorized by the Security Council, ‘the
Secretary-General chooses a Force Commander and asks
Member States to contribute troops, civilian police, or
other personnel’ (Bellamy, Williams & Griffin, 2004:
50). Participation is voluntary and governments are
reimbursed for their pers onnel deployment costs, but
considering the magnitude of these costs, and the lack
of punishment for non-participation, it seems unlikely
that there is nothing more to the UN peacekeeping
recruitment process than a request from the Secretary-
General and a reimbursement.
Much of the extant peacekeeping motivations litera-
ture has assumed that states are driven by various private
benefits, particularly the profits from troop cost reim-
bursements paid to participating governments. Recent
research (e.g. Coleman & Nyblade, 2018; Passmore,
Shannon & Hart, 2018) casts doubt on this assumption,
showing that the escalating costs to contributors and the
high demand for peacekeeping personnel render profit-
based explanations problematic. Despite this, we see
many states participating in UN operations with gusto.
If profit-based explanations are no longer convincing,
what accounts for such high levels of UNPKO partici-
pation? We offer an answer to this question.
Drawing on public goods and burden-sharing argu-
ments, we build upon recent findings and argue that the
escalating costs of peacekeeping and the demand for
manpower have given contributing states leverage. They
use this leverage to demand foreign aid concessions from
UN member states with strong preferences for assem-
bling peacekeeping missions, in exchange for promises to
contribute to the mission. We argue that these aid trans-
actions between major powers and contributing states
play a key role in generating and maintaining peacekeep-
ing forces. Using a sample of developing countries from
1971 to 2015, we present three new findings. First, we
find that certain UN member states – those with inter-
ests in establishing a particular mission – target both low-
level and major contributors with foreign aid in an effort
to persuade them to increase and maintain their contri-
butions. Second, contributors that suffer casualties in
UN missions are found to receive increased aid from
pivotal states as compensation to prevent them from
defecting from missions to which they have committed.
Finally, we show that aid from pivotal states is a strong
predictor of the size of recipient states’ combat person-
nel contribution. Moreover, these effects are only pres-
ent in the post-1989 period – when demand for
manpower became most acute – lending further sup-
port to our argument.
0
20000
40000
60000
80000
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Year
Troop contributions
DAC
Non−DAC
Figure 1. UN peacekeeping troop contributions
2
Recent efforts by Henke (2016, 2017) on UN coalition building
are an exception.
Boutton & D’Orazio 313
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