Evaluating Multilateral Interventions in Civil Wars: A Comparison of UN and Non-UN Peace Operations

Legitimacy, impartiality, and technical expertise and are often thought to be key components of United Nations peace operations, ones that enable the UN to “get the job done” and that non-UN interventions lack. Based on an ecological model of peacebuilding, however, we expect there to be no inherent difference between the effectiveness of UN and non-UN operations. Using a comprehensive dataset on peacebuilding, we establish a robust empirical result: non-UN peace operations have no statistically significant effect on successful peacebuilding while UN operations have a large positive effect. We find some evidence that non-UN peace operations complement UN operations in peacebuilding efforts and that non-UN operations undertaken by militarily “advanced” countries may be more successful at preventing the recurrence of war. We discuss candidate explanations of these results in light of the ecological model and propose an agenda for further research on the design of peacekeeping operations. Prepared for inclusion in Dimitris Bourantonis, Kostas Ifantis and Panayotis Tsakonas, eds., Multilateralism and Security Institutions in the Era of Globalization (Routledge, 2006).