Megan Shannon on UN Peacekeeping in the Midst of War

Tuesday, February 27, at 1:00 to 2:30 in our usual Boulder Creek Room of the Boulder Public Library. The discussion was led by Megan Shannon, associate professor in the department of political science at CU Boulder. Megan’s presentation was titled “UN Peacekeeping in the Midst of War” which is also the subject of her recent book.

We were fortunate to have an expert on UN peacekeeping missions present to us on this very timely subject. Her research explores how international institutions influence human and interstate security. Her 2019 book with Lisa Hultman and Jacob Kathman reveals the effectiveness of UN peacekeepers in mitigating violence. Her ongoing research explores why countries support United Nations peacekeeping. She recently completed a Fulbright fellowship at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo.

Here is a further description of her talk and the book on which it is based. Civil wars have caused tremendous human suffering in the last century, and the United Nations is often asked to send peacekeepers to stop ongoing violence. Yet despite being the most visible tool of international intervention, policymakers and scholars have little systematic knowledge about how well peacekeeping works. This presentation and associated book, Peacekeeping in the Midst of War, offers the most comprehensive analyses of peacekeeping on civil war violence to date. With unique data on different types of violence in civil wars around the world, this research offers a rigorous understanding of UN intervention by analyzing wars with and without UN peacekeeping efforts. It also directly measures the strength of UN missions in personnel capacity and constitution. Using large-n quantitative analyses and two case illustrations, the research finds that UN peacekeeping missions with appropriately constituted force capacities mitigate violence in civil wars.