An abundance of evidence demonstrates that United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations (PKOs) enhance the prospects for peace in conflict and post-conflict settings. Yet existing work also suggests that peacekeeping succeeds at some tasks while failing at others—often within the same mission. We argue that UN peacekeepers cannot eliminate all forms of violence because actions that reduce one type of violence create conditions that contribute to an increase in another type—a phenomenon we call the peacekeeping dilemma. Two countervailing mechanisms generate this dilemma: a deterrence mechanism, through which peacekeepers raise the costs of violence for non-state actors, and a collaboration mechanism, through which the UN's reliance on host-government consent facilitates government violence against civilians. We test this framework using a geographic regression discontinuity design around the border of Mali and Burkina Faso, where the UN mission MINUSMA operated from 2013 until its forced withdrawal in 2023. We find that UN peacekeeping reduces conflict between non-state rebel groups and communal violence between civilians, but not violence between governments and rebels. More troubling, we find evidence that UN peacekeeping increases government violence against civilians.
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Nomikos et al. (2021) studied this question.