Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Dynamics of peacekeeper entry and exit on violence against civilians

Peacekeeping operations (PKOs) have consistently been shown to reduce violent conflict. However, more recent work has begun to disaggregate these impacts. How do the entrance and exit of peacekeepers affect rebel and government violence against civilians? We argue that PKOs have divergent impacts on rebel and government violence based on their ability to diminish operational and organizational capacity. This paper uses fine-grained geolocated data on PKO deployment across all of Africa from 2000 to 2017 to examine the impact of PKOs on rebel and government violence. By leveraging a difference-in-differences approach with 2.3 million observations, we account for unobserved confounders and more closely approximate the effect of PKOs on violence. We find that peacekeepers increase local state violence and displace it, while likely diminishing rebel capacity and rebel violence against civilians. Taken together, our results suggest that scholars and policymakers should carefully consider how and when PKOs can effectively protect civilians.