How the UN Keeps Peace Among Neighbors, with William G. Nomikos

Today on Scope Conditions, what’s the secret to successful peacekeeping?

We often think of civil conflict as being driven by organized, armed groups – like rebel militias and state armies. But as our guest today reminds us, a leading cause of conflict around the world is communal violence – fights that break out between civilians over land, cattle, water, and other scarce resources.  When the United Nations sends peacekeepers in to manage a conflict, one of their most important jobs is defusing tensions among neighbors – preventing local disputes from spiraling into widespread violence and derailing a larger peace process. 

Dr. William Nomikos is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Santa Barbara. In his forthcoming book, Local Peace, International Builders: How the UN Builds Peace from the Bottom Up, Will asks why peacekeepers sometimes manage, but other times fail, to keep a lid on communal violence. As he explains to us, the key to successful peacekeeping is being perceived by local populations as an impartial mediator among contending groups. 

But the thing is, a reputation for impartiality isn’t something that a peacekeeping force can manufacture overnight. Whether or not peacekeepers are seen as unbiased in a communal dispute is often shaped by experiences that long predate the contemporary conflict, such as the legacies of colonialism. It turns out that deployments by former colonizers – like French peacekeepers sent to Mali – have a pretty hard time tamping down local conflicts.

Will walks us through the micro-level logic of his theory of impartial peacekeeping, grounded in the psychology of group conflict. We then discuss his multi-pronged empirical strategy for testing the theory – using a novel, highly granular dataset on peacekeeping deployments; in-depth interviews with communal leaders; and lab-in-the-field experiments in Mali. 

And we talk about the policy implications of his findings: is the UN uniquely capable of generating perceptions of fairness and managing communal violence, or can NGOs or regional bodies also get the job done? 

How do revelations of abusive and exploitative behavior by some UN peacekeepers complicate the impartiality picture? 

And if the presence of neutral arbiters is crucial for keeping a lid on violence, then what’s the peacekeeper’s exit strategy?

Works cited in this episode:

Baldwin, Kate. The paradox of traditional chiefs in democratic Africa. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Blair, Robert A., Sabrina M. Karim, and Benjamin S. Morse. "Establishing the rule of law in weak and war-torn states: Evidence from a field experiment with the Liberian National Police." American Political Science Review 113, no. 3 (2019): 641-657.

Hunnicutt, Patrick and William G. Nomikos. 2020. “Nationality, Gender, and Deployments at the Local Level: Introducing the RADPKO Dataset.” International Peacekeeping 27(4):645–672

Russell, Kevin, and Nicholas Sambanis. "Stopping the violence but blocking the peace: dilemmas of foreign-imposed nation building after ethnic war." International Organization 76, no. 1 (2022): 126-163.