When International Missions Enforce Peace Agreements

• In Event: Promoting Peace? The Past, Present, and Future of International Interventions

Abstract

Under what conditions do international missions enforce peace agreements? Third-party enforcement of peace agreements is crucial to bringing about a durable end to armed conflict, yet missions vary considerably across time and space in the agreements they are mandated to enforce, in general, and the type and amount of constitutive agreement provisions, in particular, that they are mandated to enforce. I develop in this paper an original theory that draws attention to patterns of cooperation, coordination, and sequentialization among international missions to explain variation in the timing and proportion of agreements that missions are mandated to enforce. Leveraging insights from the Peace Agreement Enforcement Dataset, an original dataset of the peace agreement enforcement practices of all post-Cold War UN and regional organizations’ missions (1989 - 2020), I find that the concurrent, sequential, and extended deployment of international missions is positively associated with their collective enforcement of a higher proportion of the provisions within peace agreements and that this relationship is especially strong when UN and regional organizations’ missions are deployed alongside or consecutively of one another. I also find that activity specialization within regional organizations dictates, to a degree, the type of agreement provisions that their missions are mandated to enforce. These results demonstrate the need to disaggregate peace agreements and the agreement enforcement process into their constitutive provisions and individual processes, and they draw attention to the ways in which the UN and regional organizations increasingly work together to develop a holistic approach to internationally backed peacebuilding processes.

Author

• Cameron Mailhot, University of Arizona