BOOKS
1. Local Peace, International Builders: How UN Peacekeeping Builds Peace from the Bottom Up
(under review)
Communal disputes over local issues such as land use, cattle herding, and access to scarce resources are a leading cause of conflict around the world. Over the coming decades, climate change, forced migration, and violent extremism will exacerbate such disputes in places that are ill equipped to handle them. UN peacekeeping operations are the international community’s primary tool for managing conflict. Despite abundant evidence that peacekeepers limit large-scale fighting between armed groups, we know little about their ability to prevent more localized forms of violence. Local Peace, International Builders explains the conditions under which UN peacekeeping operations promote peaceful interactions between civilian communities in fragile settings. Its central theoretical insight is that civilian perceptions of peacekeepers’ impartiality shape their ability to manage local disputes. To support this claim, I collected georeferenced data on the deployment of more than 100,000 peacekeepers to localities across Africa from 1999–2019. I also gathered data from extensive field research in Mali, a West African country with widespread violence managed by peacekeepers: nearly 50interviews with local political, religious, and traditional leaders, behavioral games with more than 500 Malians from 14 ethnicities, and surveys of 1,400 civilians. The book highlights a critical pathway through which UN peacekeeping may successfully maintain order in the international system. The findings have clear implications for how we think about international interventions—and how they can be better designed in the future to prevent violence in conflict and post-conflict settings.
2. Patrolling the Commons: Peacekeeping and Conflict in a Climate-Changed World
(in preparation, with Patrick Hunnicutt)
Climate change poses an existential threat to the human well-being around the world. This is especially true for populations residing in fragile and conflict-affected settings. Nations emerging from or actively experiencing violent conflict make up one-third of the world’s most climate-sensitive countries and – because violent conflict frequently erodes the economic, political, and social institutions required for effective governance – one-half of the countries least prepared to engage in climate adaptation. Recent academic research has documented the effects of climate change on peace and development cross-nationally, as has emerging anecdotal evidence from in the African Sahel, East Africa, and the Middle East. For example, recent climate change-driven flooding in South Sudan has inhibited humanitarians’ access to millions of displaced persons and risks exacerbating violence related to land-use conflicts along transhumance routes. Despite the focus of much scholarly debate on the security-related effects of climate change (see Barnett and Adger (2007), Burke, Hsiang, and Miguel (2015) and Koubi (2019), and Busby (2022) for extensive reviews), concrete strategies to mitigate the destabilizing potential of climate change in fragile settings remain elusive. Although such strategies are urgently needed, they are difficult to conceptualize, measure, and evaluate systematically. Patrolling the Commons: Peacekeeping and Conflict in a Climate-Changed World offers a new analytical framework, novel data from multiple fragile settings, and a multi-method research design to investigate the role of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations, an oft-proposed tool for mitigate climate-driven conflict (Busby, Smith, and Krishnan 2014, Mach et al. 2019).
(under review)
Communal disputes over local issues such as land use, cattle herding, and access to scarce resources are a leading cause of conflict around the world. Over the coming decades, climate change, forced migration, and violent extremism will exacerbate such disputes in places that are ill equipped to handle them. UN peacekeeping operations are the international community’s primary tool for managing conflict. Despite abundant evidence that peacekeepers limit large-scale fighting between armed groups, we know little about their ability to prevent more localized forms of violence. Local Peace, International Builders explains the conditions under which UN peacekeeping operations promote peaceful interactions between civilian communities in fragile settings. Its central theoretical insight is that civilian perceptions of peacekeepers’ impartiality shape their ability to manage local disputes. To support this claim, I collected georeferenced data on the deployment of more than 100,000 peacekeepers to localities across Africa from 1999–2019. I also gathered data from extensive field research in Mali, a West African country with widespread violence managed by peacekeepers: nearly 50interviews with local political, religious, and traditional leaders, behavioral games with more than 500 Malians from 14 ethnicities, and surveys of 1,400 civilians. The book highlights a critical pathway through which UN peacekeeping may successfully maintain order in the international system. The findings have clear implications for how we think about international interventions—and how they can be better designed in the future to prevent violence in conflict and post-conflict settings.
2. Patrolling the Commons: Peacekeeping and Conflict in a Climate-Changed World
(in preparation, with Patrick Hunnicutt)
Climate change poses an existential threat to the human well-being around the world. This is especially true for populations residing in fragile and conflict-affected settings. Nations emerging from or actively experiencing violent conflict make up one-third of the world’s most climate-sensitive countries and – because violent conflict frequently erodes the economic, political, and social institutions required for effective governance – one-half of the countries least prepared to engage in climate adaptation. Recent academic research has documented the effects of climate change on peace and development cross-nationally, as has emerging anecdotal evidence from in the African Sahel, East Africa, and the Middle East. For example, recent climate change-driven flooding in South Sudan has inhibited humanitarians’ access to millions of displaced persons and risks exacerbating violence related to land-use conflicts along transhumance routes. Despite the focus of much scholarly debate on the security-related effects of climate change (see Barnett and Adger (2007), Burke, Hsiang, and Miguel (2015) and Koubi (2019), and Busby (2022) for extensive reviews), concrete strategies to mitigate the destabilizing potential of climate change in fragile settings remain elusive. Although such strategies are urgently needed, they are difficult to conceptualize, measure, and evaluate systematically. Patrolling the Commons: Peacekeeping and Conflict in a Climate-Changed World offers a new analytical framework, novel data from multiple fragile settings, and a multi-method research design to investigate the role of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations, an oft-proposed tool for mitigate climate-driven conflict (Busby, Smith, and Krishnan 2014, Mach et al. 2019).