Drafts by Jessica Di Salvatore
Scholars often use United Nations documents to study peacekeeping operations (PKOs). Researchers ... more Scholars often use United Nations documents to study peacekeeping operations (PKOs). Researchers have coded information from UN Secretary General's reports on PKOs, but manually extracting information is costly and time-consuming. Furthermore , these reports contain much more information on the politics of peacekeeping. By providing a machine-readable collection of the UN Secretary General's Reports on PKOs (1994-2019), the Peacekeeping Operation Corpus (PKOC) offers highly structured and multiformat text data that connects the peace and conflict research community to recent advancements in text-as-data techniques. Besides paving the way for the first quantitative content analyses on PKOs, PKOC speeds up and expands the range of data that can be extracted and allows researchers to query documents in a quicker, systematic and reproducible way. In this article, we discuss PKOC's core characteristics. As illustration of the innovative potential of PKOC, we show how text-as-data approaches provide more nuanced understanding on PKOs evolution toward multidimensionality, both over time and within missions. While last generation PKOs are assumed to be multidimensional, we show how they vary in multidimensionality and how their complexity also changes throughout their life-cycle.
While United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (UN PKOs) have moved away from traditional, security... more While United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (UN PKOs) have moved away from traditional, security-focused mandates in the last generation of peacekeeping, most research on the effectiveness of peace missions continues to evaluate success based on security outcomes — such as levels of violence on the battlefield, civilian victimization, duration of ceasefires and violence containment.Few studies adopt broader and longer-term criteria for evaluation. Pioneers of this change, Doyle and Sambanis reframed the terms of peacekeeping from a focus on military strategies to a focus on peacebuilding. But while they showed that
multidimensional missions can foster democratization and participatory peace in post-conflict societies, there is still debate among scholars and policy-makers about the use of peace missions as effective tools for state-building. Most of the discussion, especially among scholars, pays little attention to whether peacekeeping creates stable polities and institutions
that endure when the international presence eventually leaves. In other words, if peace missions are beneficial for state capacity, is their legacy strong enough to avoid the possible pitfalls associated with PKO withdrawal?
Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2018
Why do fraudulent elections encourage protesting? Scholars suggest that information about fraud s... more Why do fraudulent elections encourage protesting? Scholars suggest that information about fraud shapes individuals' beliefs and propensity to protest. Yet these accounts neglect the complexity of opinion formation and have not been tested at the individual level. We distinguish between the mobilizing effects of actual incidents of election fraud and individuals' subjective perceptions of fraud. While rational updating models would imply that both measures similarly affect mobilization, we argue that subjective fraud perceptions are more consistent predictors of protesting, also being shaped by attitudes, information, and community networks. Our empirical analysis uses geo-referenced individual-level data on fraud events, fraud perception, and protesting from the 2007 Nigerian elections. Our analysis yields two main findings: proximity to reported fraud has no effect on protesting and citizens perceiving elections as fraudulent are consistently more likely to protest, and more so if embedded in community networks.
What do we know about effectiveness of peacekeeping operation? What are the main empirical findin... more What do we know about effectiveness of peacekeeping operation? What are the main empirical findings of the recently flourishing quantitative literature? The main goals of this chapter are a) to discuss how “effectiveness” in empirical studies on peacekeeping has been conceptualized and operationalized; b) to review and summarize the major theoretical contributions and research designs that address the effectiveness of peacekeeping missions; c) to summarize the empirical findings and cumulative knowledge on peacekeeping operations; and d) to elaborate necessary and future empirical challenges for the study of effectiveness of peacekeeping operations.
Papers by Jessica Di Salvatore
British Journal of Political Science, 2018
Under what conditions does peacekeeping reduce one-sided violence in civil wars? This article arg... more Under what conditions does peacekeeping reduce one-sided violence in civil wars? This article argues that local sources of violence, particularly ethnic geography, affect peacekeeping effectiveness. Existing studies focus on the features of individual missions, yet curbing one-sided violence also depends on peacekeepers' capacity to reduce the opportunities and incentives for violence. Moving from the idea that territorial control is a function of ethnic polarization, the article posits that peacekeepers are less effective against one-sided violence where power asymmetries are large (low polarization) because they (1) create incentives for escalation against civilians and (2) are less effective at separating/monitoring combatants. The UN mission in Sierra Leone from 1997 to 2001 is examined to show that UN troops reduce one-sided violence, but their effectiveness decreases as power asymmetries grow. Do local ethnic configurations affect peacekeepers' ability to protect civilians? If so, under what conditions are peacekeepers more effective at saving civilian lives? Existing studies show that variations in the distribution of ethnic groups shape the dynamics of civil conflict and explain who are the targets of violence. In particular, local-level differences in armed groups' number and size result in specific dynamics of conflict because each configuration corresponds to distinct capacities and incentives to use violence. Given that conflict dynamics are very sensitive to variations in the balance of power between ethnic groups, peacekeepers' capacity to reduce violence should be conditional on local ethno-demographic factors. However, existing studies on peacekeeping neglect these factors and point toward a seemingly homogenous curbing effect of peacekeeping on civilian killings. But how do peacekeeping interventions interact with ethnicity, and which deployment strategies are more likely to be successful at protecting civilians? This article bridges theories on the role of ethnicity and territorial control for the production of violence in civil war with the literature on peacekeeping effectiveness. Both strands of literature focus on factors that are usually studied separately but that clearly interact and produce joint effects on the ground. Peacekeepers are successful at containing violence against civilians; however, they may also inadvertently create incentives for escalation by signalling insufficient commitment and changing the balance of power between fighting parties. This signalling argument finds empirical support when commitment is measured in terms of mission size; larger and nationally heterogeneous missions have been found to be more effective at protecting civilians (Bove and Ruggeri 2015; Hultman, Kathman and Shannon 2013). However, it is unclear how peacekeeping itself changes the balance of power and, in turn, shapes armed groups' preferences of one type of violence over another. My argument is that the capacity of
American Journal of Political Science, 2019
Research shows that peacekeepers reduce conflict intensity; however, effects of deployment on non... more Research shows that peacekeepers reduce conflict intensity; however, effects of deployment on nonpolitical violence are unknown. This article focuses on criminal violence and proposes a twofold mechanism to explain why peacekeeping missions, even when effectively reducing conflict, can inadvertently increase criminal violence. First, less conflict opens up economic opportunities (so-called peacekeeping economies) and provides operational security for organized crime, thus increasing violent competition among criminal groups. Second, demobilized combatants are vulnerable to turn to crime because of limited legal livelihood opportunities and their training in warfare. While UN troops may exacerbate these dynamics, UN police's peculiar role is likely to successfully contain criminal violence. Cross-national and subnational empirical analyses show that large UN military deployments result in higher homicide rates, whereas UN police, overall, moderate this collateral effect.
Published Work by Jessica Di Salvatore
International Peacekeeping, 2020
While United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (UN PKOs) have moved away from traditional, security... more While United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (UN PKOs) have moved away from traditional, security-focused mandates in the last generation of peacekeeping, most research on the effectiveness of peace missions continues to evaluate success based on security outcomes — such as levels of violence on the battlefield, civilian victimization, duration of ceasefires and violence containment. Few studies adopt broader and longer-term criteria for evaluation. Pioneers of this change, Doyle and Sambanis reframed the terms of peacekeeping from a focus on military strategies to a focus on peacebuilding. But while they showed that
multidimensional missions can foster democratization and participatory peace in post-conflict societies, there is still debate among scholars and policy-makers about the use of peace missions as effective tools for state-building. Most of the discussion, especially among scholars, pays little attention to whether peacekeeping creates stable polities and institutions
that endure when the international presence eventually leaves. In other words, if peace missions are beneficial for state capacity, is their legacy strong enough to avoid the possible pitfalls associated with PKO withdrawal?
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Drafts by Jessica Di Salvatore
multidimensional missions can foster democratization and participatory peace in post-conflict societies, there is still debate among scholars and policy-makers about the use of peace missions as effective tools for state-building. Most of the discussion, especially among scholars, pays little attention to whether peacekeeping creates stable polities and institutions
that endure when the international presence eventually leaves. In other words, if peace missions are beneficial for state capacity, is their legacy strong enough to avoid the possible pitfalls associated with PKO withdrawal?
Papers by Jessica Di Salvatore
Published Work by Jessica Di Salvatore
multidimensional missions can foster democratization and participatory peace in post-conflict societies, there is still debate among scholars and policy-makers about the use of peace missions as effective tools for state-building. Most of the discussion, especially among scholars, pays little attention to whether peacekeeping creates stable polities and institutions
that endure when the international presence eventually leaves. In other words, if peace missions are beneficial for state capacity, is their legacy strong enough to avoid the possible pitfalls associated with PKO withdrawal?
multidimensional missions can foster democratization and participatory peace in post-conflict societies, there is still debate among scholars and policy-makers about the use of peace missions as effective tools for state-building. Most of the discussion, especially among scholars, pays little attention to whether peacekeeping creates stable polities and institutions
that endure when the international presence eventually leaves. In other words, if peace missions are beneficial for state capacity, is their legacy strong enough to avoid the possible pitfalls associated with PKO withdrawal?
multidimensional missions can foster democratization and participatory peace in post-conflict societies, there is still debate among scholars and policy-makers about the use of peace missions as effective tools for state-building. Most of the discussion, especially among scholars, pays little attention to whether peacekeeping creates stable polities and institutions
that endure when the international presence eventually leaves. In other words, if peace missions are beneficial for state capacity, is their legacy strong enough to avoid the possible pitfalls associated with PKO withdrawal?