Introducing the Peacekeeping Mandates (PEMA) Dataset
Channel: War Studies KCL
Date: 2021-02-11

Chair: Dr Kseniya Oksamytna, Department of War Studies, King’s College London

Speakers:
Dr Jessica Di Salvatore, University of Warwick
Dr Magnus Lundgren, University of Gothenburg
Dr Hannah Smidt, University of Zurich

UN peacekeeping has become a central instrument of international conflict resolution. Contemporary peacekeeping operations are asked to undertake a wide variety of different tasks, such as supervising elections, reforming security institutions, monitoring human rights, mainstreaming gender, assisting with the management of natural resources, and reconciling communities. The UN Security Council sets out these tasks in its resolutions when it authorises and extends peacekeeping missions. During the Cold War, mandates were just a paragraph or two, yet nowadays they are often longer than ten pages. 

To understand the complexity of peacekeeping mandates, we have coded resolutions on 27 UN peacekeeping operations in Africa in the 1991-2017 period, including initial and revised mandates. We record 39 distinct tasks and further distinguish between three modalities of engagement (monitoring, assisting, and securing) and whether the task is requested or merely encouraged. You can find the data paper here.

In this talk, we will discuss our motivation behind data collection, the process of dataset construction, interesting patterns in the data, and the ways in which the data help us assess the UN’s effectiveness in protecting civilians.