Negotiating peacekeeping consent: Information and peace outcomes
| Author | Amy Yuen |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0022343319861424 |
| Subject Matter | Research Articles |
Negotiating peacekeeping consent:
Information and peace outcomes
Amy Yuen
Department of Political Science, Middlebury College
Abstract
The mixed record on civil war termination shows that it is a difficult task, one fraught with uncertainty and risk.
Gaining consent for peacekeeping is one strategy policymakers and scholars forward to reduce these concerns. Formal
and informal work argues that allowing peacekeeping serves as a costly signal of peaceful intentions; however, these
models treat peacekeeping costs as exogenous. I argue that peacekeeping costs have an endogenous element and use
consent for peacekeeping missions as a proxy measure. Three conclusions are evident. It is difficult to determine
whether belligerents are insincere actors in a peace process or merely distrustful, but consent can tell us whether a
ceasefire is precarious and therefore more likely to fail; peacekeeping is difficult but meaningful under some
conditions, and reliable information can be taken from negotiating, not just war-fighting. These results qualify the
extent to which peacekeeping, with its changing emphasis on consent, can improve its outcomes.
Keywords
civil war termination, consent, endogeneity, peacekeeping
Hailed as a necessary component for mission success,
consent is a fundamental principle of peacekeeping for
institutions like the United Nations (UN). In fact,
Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali wrote in a sup-
plement to An Agenda for Peace (1992):
The United Nations can be proud of the speed with
which peace-keeping has evolved [ ...], but [ ...]
respect for certain basic principles of peace-keeping are
essential to its success. Three particularly important
principles are the consent of the parties, impartiality and
the non-use of force except in self-defence. United
Nations Secretary-General (1995: 9, emphasis added)
The literature treats consent for peacekeeping as ‘permis-
sion’, and formal analysis shows that consent can be a
costly signal of peaceful intentions as long as the costs
imposed by the mission are large enough to prevent
bluffing but small enough that a belligerent is willing
to bear them to gain the benefits of peace (Diehl,
1994; Fortna & Martin, 2009; Walter, 2002). An
important assumption in these models is that the costs
of peacekeeping are exogenous, meaning belligerents do
not influence them; they merely accept or reject them.
Real peacekeeping negotiations show that this is not how
the process happens.
1
Often belligerents have a great deal of influence on the
‘costliness’ of the peacekeeping mission – specifically,
they can set limits on peacekeeping. I argue that this is
important because the belligerents leverage consent to
influence what a mission looks like and therefore how
effective the mission is if sent. They do this in anticipa-
tion of what they think the peace process will be like.
The statistical analysis supports this logic and provides
several implications. First, consent is informative only in
that it reveals when one or more belligerents may be less
committed to the peace process – it does not reliably
reveal sincere types as previously suggested. Second, the
Corresponding author:
ayuen@middlebury.edu
1
Institutions negotiate the terms of their involvement and require
belligerents to sign agreements acknowledging cooperative
responsibilities towards peacekeepers (e.g. disarmament,
demobilization and reintegr ation (DDR) agreements (UN DPKO,
2010)).
Journal of Peace Research
2020, Vol. 57(2) 297–311
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343319861424
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